A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India

by Josy Joseph

Child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world (over 42 per cent of children under five years are underweight). The country’s youth population, the world’s largest, has very slim access to quality education. Over 60 per cent of its people do not have bathrooms. Over 330 million Indians do not get safe drinking water. Thousands of its ordinary residents are harassed and humiliated daily by oppressive and misogynistic institutions. Violence is today a mundane reality.

India has become a very rich country of too many poor people. Morality and public good have completely disappeared from the imaginations of key participants: that is the only common strand in all the news that I have reported over the years.

Estimates vary, but India has a shortage of almost half a million teachers and over eight million primary school-age children still do not attend school.

According to estimates, it will take about 320 years to dispose of the over three crore cases pending now in Indian courts.1