Critics accuse leaders of profligacy while a third of the population goes hungry, writes RAHUL BEDIin New Delhi
DESPITE ITS crippling poverty, malnourished population and crumbling infrastructure, which triggered power outages last week affecting over 600 million people, India plans on joining yet another elite international club . . . by launching a costly exploratory mission to Mars.
Officials said the lift-off of the orbital probe around Mars to study its climate and geology – approved last week by prime minister Manmohan Singh’s government – was scheduled for November 2013.
Costing around Rs 4.5 billion (€66 million) it would make India the sixth space power to undertake such an esoteric operation.
“When a third of the country’s population of over 1.20 billion goes to bed hungry every night, conducting a mission to Mars merely for prestige is sheer profligacy” former MP and high commissioner to London Kuldip Nayar said.
Such “overreach” by Singh’s administration, he declared, was typical of successive governments, which prided themselves on registering “milestones” rather than providing hundreds of millions of Indians with food, clean water, power, health, education and employment.
Top Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists charged with executing the Mars project, however, said such scientific missions could not be compartmentalised and needed to be looked at “holistically”.
“If we [are] to grow as a country we have to have aspirations; science is one such route to provide this to us, as well as the capability to progress,” former ISRO head Dr PS Goel said, adding that the Rs 4.5 billion earmarked for the Mars mission would not buy India much in the way of development or facilities.
Over decades India has joined many select global ‘clubs’ as it strived to be acknowledged as a global power. however, domestically it has consistently and willfully ignored the myriad terrestrial problems of poverty, governance and lack of development.
“India is a competent event manager capable of undertaking individual projects efficiently but incapable of sustaining any long term developmental endeavours,” political analyst Seema Mustafa said, adding that it was forever looking at labels, believing its imagined international image compensated for its domestic chaos.
The country ranks 67th of 80 developing nations in the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index (GHI), with 21 per cent of its population of over 230 million people classed as malnourished.
A recent report by the Washington-based institute also revealed that nearly 44 per of Indian children under the age of five were underweight. Some 95 per cent of Indian schools do not have drinking water or toilets and there are only 0.9 hospital beds per 1,000 people.
Last year the federal Planning Commission responsible for formulating the country’s economic policies and goals earned nationwide opprobrium when it declared that all those with daily earnings of 44 US cents in rural areas and 28 cents in urban areas were above the official poverty line.
Its reasoning was that these paltry sums ensured the purchase of just enough calories to avert starvation.
“India needs to stop competing in the global arena and concentrate instead on its innumerable deficiencies at home. Otherwise its hopes of becoming a global player in the 21st century will [be] stillborn,” Ms Mustafa warned.