Lingo kid and latent India

India never stops surprising me. Recently came across 'lingo kid', a child on the streets of Mumbai, who doesn't go to school and sells peacock feathers outside Hanging Gardens in more than 6 international languages. Watch him here:



Incidentally the same kid has now grown up, but is still doing the same thing day in day out (see below), and he still doesn't go to school. Although he is an incredible spectacle, is it really worth admiring his skills or the 'wonder of India' if he, and millions other like him, perpetually do the same business for the same rates for years? It's a fact visible in hundreds of teeming towns across India which never seem to have changed every time I visit them. I fear that the continuing disparaties between the progressing India and those left behind may have disastrous consequences.



'Inclusive growth' is the buzzword of the time. Many mega-schemes of the government aimed at this - most recent one being the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme - are a failure. It is fundamentally incorrect to forcefully create jobs where there is no work, rather the rural economy should be stimulated to grow organically which would create jobs by itself. Examples of success in that regard are microfinance schemes. Capitalism wins again.

Healthcare in India

If you follow the Indian media closely, you've heard of the advances made by Indian pharmaceuticals companies globally and and rise of India as a major 'medical tourism' destination, offering world-class medical facilities at a fraction of the price one would pay in the west. Great. But what about the common man?

It is well known that the situation is rural India is bad enough with absent doctors and poor infrastructure. The situation in urban India can only be called slightly better.

The average person living in India comes across fake doctors, fake medicines, genuine doctors giving un-necessary treatment, or 'their own' tablets (given in small paper bags) which are accepted because the common man knows of all of this, and chooses the safety that comes with getting it straight from the doc, be it without any indication of what it is. Then you have centres offering hundreds of alternative therapies, some of which are not therapies at all but more bizarre displays. Of course, all of this is when the person has access to 'healthcare'.

A recent article by the Economist quotes a senior Delhi Medical Council official claiming that fake doctors outnumber genuine doctors in India. They cater mostly to lower income groups (which form a large part of India's population). But with telecom operators, retailers, insurers, builders aiming precisely for such high volume markets, can a business model be worked out to provide them with decent healthcare too in a similar fashion? To me this seems to be the only way out of the vicious circle which is formed between population growth and declining health care availability. [More research needed].