Comment by pavanky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavanky | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

1) Literacy The problem with the 75 % literacy is that many of those uneducated people are old and can not be taught now. The literacy of youth is about 85% which is still bad, but the number is gaining exponentially and should be near American levels in 15 years. That is less than a generation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India

2) Poverty

India has been free for 65 years. This was after 200 years of Britain stripmining India of its resources. Our politicians were at fault to go into a socialistic cocoon for nearly 45 years before liberating India's potential. And look at progress that has been made in the last 20 years. The poverty has fallen by 10 percentage points, while the population has increased by ~ 30 percentage points.

I don't necessarily agree with the writer's views, it looked more like an anecdote than an actual analysis / story.

But to quote numbers without actually analysing them is just plain bad.

I don't think the "resource strip-mining" probably wasn't that big a factor.

The big problem was, they used "divide and conquer". The British were masters at it - find a minority in a region, and give them guns and military assistance. The minorities can now be relied on to keep the rest of the population under control, and they can't rebel against the British for fear of a reprisal from the majority.

The problem is, it leaves a real mess when the Brits leave.

No, resource strip-mining was a HUGE problem, and was compounded by the fact that India missed the Industrial Revolution at least partially because the British willfully sabotaged Indian attempts to gain technology.

(It was in the interests of the British to force India to sell them raw materials at low prices, feed it to industries in Britan, and sell it back to India as a finished product. In those days, gold was money, and India had a lot of gold.)

I take those literacy and poverty numbers with a grain of salt -- they're manufactured by the govt to make itself look good. While literacy and poverty have both been addressed somewhat, it's a far cry from the official numbers. And frankly I'm worried that the population is growing faster than people are falling out of poverty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com