INDIA’S SPACE MADNESS AMID ASTRONOMICAL POVERTY: In a macho violation of common sense and the needs of hundreds of millions of people living in crushing poverty, the RULING ELITE of India (that’s the GOVERNMENT & MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS WHO OWNS INDIA) recently launched a satellite that “after a journey of 300 days and 420 million miles… arrived to orbit around Mars”. The USD74 million “Mars mission” is “cheap by American (or Chinese) standards”, the Economist says, but am...
Continue Reading![INDIA’S SPACE MADNESS AMID ASTRONOMICAL POVERTY: In a macho violation of common sense and the needs of hundreds of millions of people living in crushing poverty, the RULING ELITE of India (that’s the GOVERNMENT & MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS WHO OWNS INDIA) recently launched a satellite that “after a journey of 300 days and 420 million miles… arrived to orbit around Mars”. The USD74 million “Mars mission” is “cheap by American (or Chinese) standards”, the Economist says, but amounts to a fraction of a much more expensive – not to say insane – space programme that drains USD1 billion a year from the national budget. This “is more than spare change, even for a near USD2 trillion economy”. While hundreds of millions in the sub-continent live impoverished, degrading lives, the Indian government is investing the nation’s income in sending a rocket to Mars! The Economist asks the rhetorical question: “How [can] a country that cannot feed all of its people find the money for a Mars mission?” As well as, we should add, shelling out USD32 billion on defence each year, making India the world’s biggest arms importer with the fourth largest air force. A third of the world’s poor – that’s almost 1 billion people – are in India. And despite 20 years of so-called development, the World Bank records that not only has this number not been reduced, but, “the absolute number of poor people in some of India’s poorest states actually increased during the last decade”. These marginalised men, women and children from rural India are driven from their land by the commercialisation of the countryside to the slums of the cities. In Mumbai alone – a city with a population of almost 21 million – two-thirds live in rambling slums. It is estimated by the World Bank that as many as 68 per cent of people (or 885 million) in India are living on less than USD2 (the official World Bank poverty line) a day and that over half of these are persisting on an income of under USD1 a day. The majority of the population – over 50 per cent – do not have the luxury of a toilet, and are forced to defecate in public. In a recent report on worldwide sanitation, the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that, “globally, India continues to be the country with the highest number of people (597 million people) practicing open defecation”. Perhaps some of the 16,000 scientists and engineers working on the space programme could be employed to design and install a nationwide sanitation system. State health care, for example, particularly in rural India, is virtually non-existent, the government spends a mere 1.2 per cent of GDP on public health, which as the Economist says, is “dismally low” (Afghanistan, for example, spends 8.7 per cent, the Democratic Republic of Congo 5.6 per cent, according to World Bank 2012 figures). In fact, I could find no country in the world that spends less. The truth is that the ruling elite care not for those living in abject destitution, they are an embarrassment to the Delhi/Mumbai set, the billionaires (India has 66 of the world’s richest), multi-millionaires and comfortable middle class who are desperate for India to be recognised as a shiny democratic consumer state, albeit a violent unjust nationalistic one… It is the polluted image of a divided nation, ruled by an uncompassionate, materialistically driven Hindu minority that would shame the vision of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi
http://www.redressonline.com/2014/10/indias-space-madness-amid-astronomical-poverty/](https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/v/t1.0-9/p320x320/10653589_10152410338095913_7784455298978224085_n.jpg?oh=0e2350ac8b2deb27fc8f5cdaae0f93c1&oe=5538E1A6&__gda__=1430256157_c2f4c781a7abc45e8cd4b0530f0d7e54)
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