Technological Prowess and Entrenched Poverty

The first event, the flawless launch (view the photo gallery) of the indigenously-developed Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and the subsequent deployment of five satellites into orbit, literally signify the country’s upward technological trajectory.  One of the satellites, called Cartosat-2B, is a remote sensing satellite that has an imagining resolution of less than a meter and will reportedly be used for mapping and infrastructure planning.

The launch is the latest success for one of the world’s most advanced space programs.  The October 2008 launch of India’s first unmanned lunar mission, designed to create a sophisticated atlas of the Moon’s mineral resources, propelled the country into the very exclusive fraternity of space-faring nations.  Both the National Aeronautics & Space Administration and the European Space Agency approached India to collaborate on the mission, adding an important measure of foreign validation.  To Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the success “demonstrated the nation’s growing technological potential.”  From the perspective of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, the mission was a wakeup call that the U.S. was in danger of losing its scientific edge. The newspaper even went so far as to fret that India may be “going to the moon just as the U.S. is headed into the sunset.” 

Coming in the wake of the country’s successful delivery of 10 satellites into orbit on a single rocket in April 2008, the lunar mission underscored India’s emergence as a major competitor in the lucrative satellite-launch market and in the global satellite manufacturing industry.  On the heels of the lunar mission, a European satellite operator launched a state-of-the-art satellite built by the Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organization, the first time that ISRO constructed a satellite for a foreign customer.  Immediately following this week’s launch, ISRO picked up orders to launch eight additional foreign satellites.

ISRO has also launched a web-based satellite imagery and mapping service.  Dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), the project is advertised as providing higher-resolution and more frequently updated satellite images than offered by Google Earth.  ISRO promises that the service will eventually offer real-time satellite images.  In 2013, the agency plans to launch a second unmanned lunar mission that will deploy a small rover on the Moon’s surface, and in 2016 it will send astronauts into low-earth orbit.

Beneath the heavens, however, a second event earlier this week – the release of a study by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative – highlights just how far short India remains of its soaring ambitions.  The study finds that the combined number of people living in poverty in just eight of India’s 28 states (421 million) exceeds the aggregate number of poor people in all of sub-Saharan Africa (410 million).  The Indian states the study focused on are Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.  The study’s methodology and findings will be incorporated into the 2010 Human Development Report that the United Nations Development Program will issue in late October.

Late last year, an expert group created by the Indian Planning Commission concluded that more than a third of the Indian populace lives in poverty and that the Indian government had previously underestimated the number of impoverished people by more than 100 million.  This assessment also underscored the marked disparity between the country’s high growth rates over the past two decades and the actual achievements in poverty reduction.  In 1993-94, at the start of the reform era, 45.3 percent of Indians were impoverished; 50.1 percent of people living in rural areas and 31.8 percent of urban residents lived below the poverty line.  Nearly 20 years later, 37.2 percent of Indians remain mired in poverty, while 41.8 percent of rural people and 25.7 percent of urban residents are impoverished.

And according to Indian government data, 46 percent of children under three years of age were malnourished in 2005-06, virtually the same level (47 percent) as in 1998-99.  Indeed, the rate of child malnourishment in India is nearly twice as high as in sub-Saharan Africa.

The events of a few days ago encapsulate the paradox of modern India: a country literally reaching for the stars and yet still constrained by the age-old scourge of poverty.