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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JPR who wrote (9445)	11/7/1999 10:12:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12475

Honk for a cause JPR: I don't know how much the Indian government can do with the relatively limited resources. Dishing out 'quotas' without providing adequate minimum facilities in the rural areas may not even do much good. Here is the deal, the GDP of the country is between $400-$500 billion dollars, the underground economy is probably a few times bigger than that, surprisingly the NRIs' annual income even surpasses the GDP amount. Only 3% or less of the eligible taxpayers pay taxes. There is enormous demand on government revenues from all quarters, a good portion of the the very little money the government allocates for education,basic health care etc for the various states is terribly misused, wasted or not used at all for the purpose. There are vested interests in certain pockets of the country who want the lower segment of the society to remain where they are, look around in Bihar, UP, Orissisa etc you will see what I mean. As for me I have been to the hinterlands of UP (spent about 5 to 6 months with both landlords and 'Gavwallahs' between my undergraduate and Graduate School) and have seen what is going on there, the place is still quite feudal in its makeup with the local landlord calling every shot of the 'Gavwallahs', in the meantime the landlords kids are at Cambridge,Oxford and Harvard or whatever while a lot of these 'proletariats' and 'landless gentries' have no facilities to send their kids to school nearby nor do they have any other facilities, I don't even know whether they have the means to send the kids to school even if they wanted and had schools nearby since the kids probably need to work to help out the family and make ends meet; probably these guys (the Gavwallahs) are indebted to the landlord for generations anyway for some stupid loan or something they once took from him. You have heard about the Ranbir Sena in Bihar haven't you? We had the same or similar situation many moons ago in Kerala but that all changed a while ago with the 'land reform act' and other radical measures. Now the state have schools,primary health care facilities, electricity (forgive the power cut for the time being),roads (no 4 lane highway but still) etc throughout the breadth and length of the state including remote areas. Also now there is no chance of the 'lower castes' prostrating before the 'upper- guys' whenever they run into each other like they used to and unlike some other places even now. There has to be a concerted effort from all quarters to tackle the problems, here is one guy doing his bit and he is not even an IITian or a billionaire,go figure!!!! ================= Philanthropy: A New York taxi-driver runs a girls' school in a UP village (By Jayant Mammen Mathew/New York & Priya Solomon/Dhoobar ) Driving a yellow cab in New York City, 65-year-old Om Dutt Sharma often thinks of a small primary school in a dusty Indian village full of noisy cattle. It is a school he founded at Dhoobar in Uttar Pradesh with his earnings as a taxi- driver. Taxi-driver as a philanthropist? It sounds strange, but then Sharma has been an uncommon man in many other ways. As he drives the yellow cab, Shakespeare and Keats may well be reclining in the back seat of his memory. Sharma, who grew up in a farming family at Dhoobar in Saharanpur district, was among the few in his village who could enter the portals of a college. His father, though uneducated, sent him to school and later to J.V. Jain College quite far away from his village where even today the schools offer only classes up to the eighth standard. "After my BA a friend of mine helped me get a job as a clerk in the income tax department in Delhi," said Sharma. "It was a good job but I wanted a professional degree." He enrolled in MMS College and commuted from Delhi to Ghaziabad. After taking an MA in English Literature with an LLB, Sharma became an officer in the income tax department. But he got bored and quit the job in 1969 to start his law practice. Soon, he moved on again. S.K. Jain, a client of his, asked him to join his garment export business and sent him to America to solicit orders in 1972.....<continued..> the-week.com