Degree of urbanization, or the relative proportion of a community living in urban areas is the third important globally accepted human development indicator. According to Census 2001, barely 26 percent Hindus live in urban areas (i.e., only 21,63,15,573 out of a total of 82,75,78,868 population), while the Muslim percentage of urban population is much higher at 36 percent (i.e., 4,93,93,496 urban dwellers out of a population of 13,81,88,240) which comes to a whopping advantage of 10 percent for Muslims. This most important human development indicators was deliberately downplayed by the Committee even though its Member Secretary, Dr. Abu Saleh Sharrif, happened to be the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research. As emphasized by Goldman Sachs, a professionally acclaimed group of economists, according to economic theory urbanization is not only an important barometer of prosperity, but the vital key to speedy economic development. In their Global Economics Paper No. 152 (India’s Rising Growth Potential) Goldman Sachs have pointed out that “the movement of surplus labour from low-productivity agriculture to high productivity industry and services contributes about 1 percentage point to annual GDP growth” because in India “productivity in industry and services is more than 4 times that in agriculture which employs nearly 60% of the labour force”. Emphasizing the strong correlation between urbanization and economic prosperity, the report highlights the fact that South Korea has a high urban population of 81%, Malaasia 67%, China 43 percent while India has only 29 percent population living in urban areas. Clearly there is a very powerful link between degree of urbanization and economic prosperity of a community, or country. The Goldman Sachs Report proclaims on page 18 that “the 21st century is set to become India’s ‘urban century’, with more people living in cities and towns than in the countryside for the first time in history”. It estimates that another “140 million rural dwellers will move to urban aeas by 2020, while a massive 700 million people will urbanise by 2050”. It is a simple matter of using commonsense to assess which community, the Muslims or the Hindus, is better placed economically and well set on the future road to greater prosperity. Surely with the Member Secretary of Sachar Committee, Dr. Abu Saleh Sharrif being the Chief Economist of National Council of Applied Economic Research, could not have missed out, unless the intention was to deliberately shut out the inconvenient truth from public discourse. We submit that the member Secretary and Chairperson were fully aware that urbanization is the biggest driver of economic development and prosperity. But they chose to suppress this important human development indicators favouring Muslims, for reasons best known to them. Kindly note that the Muslim percentage of urbanization is 36%, barely 7 percentage points behind China, while the Hindu percentage or urbanization languishing at 26% is not only 10% short of the Muslims, but is lagging behind China by a huge margin of 17%. What better proof is required to prove that the Hindus are far more disadvantaged than the Muslims. No wonder they have much higher incidence of Infant and Child Mortality than Muslims.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 02:08:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015