In the Maldives' English language newspaper "The Edition", on 26 January 2024, Shishu Ranjan, the Vice President of Barclays Bank, and Ajit Jha, the Assistant Professor of Institute of Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), New Delhi, wrote that "the year 2022 witnessed the Indian economy replacing the UK as the world's fifth largest economy" and that "the year 2023 saw India achieving a major milestone when its stock market valuation joined the ranks of stock market superpowers".
"It stood just behind the US, China, Japan, and Hong Kong in the stock market valuation; a great feat that marked Nifty and Sensex - India’s two stock market exchanges, touching new highs. While Nifty saw a growth of 18.5% in 2023, Sensex registered a growth of 17.3% this year.
"As such, overall market values of listed companies in the Indian stock exchanges crossed the $4 trillion mark. It indicates the state of the country’s economy in the face of ongoing conflicts with global economic impact and high inflationary trend observed across the world economy."
Read the full article from "The Edition".
The interesting question is, has India's economic advances in modern times translated into a better social justice system for India's poverty-stricken masses?
Let's see what India's award-winning writer and political activist Arundhati Roy opines in her book, "Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy":
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Meanwhile, economists cheering from the pages of corporate newspapers inform us that the GDP rate is phenomenal, unprecedented. Shops are overflowing with consumer goods, government storehouses are overflowing with foodgrain. Outside this circle of light, farmers steeped in debt are committing suicide in the hundreds. Reports of starvation and malnutrition come in across the country. Yet the government allowed sixty-three million tons of grain to rot in its granaries. Twelve million tons were exported and sold at a subsidized price the Indian government was not willing to offer the Indian poor. Utsa Patnaik, the well-known agricultural economist, has calculated foodgrain availability and foodgrain absorption in India for nearly a century, based on official statistics. She calculates that in the period between the early 1990s and 2001, foodgrain absorption has dropped to levels lower than during the World War II years, including during the Bengal Famine, in which three million people died of starvation. As we know from the work of Professor Amartya Sen, democracies don't take kindly to starvation deaths. They attract too much adverse publicity from the 'free press'.
So, dangerous levels of malnutrition and permanent hunger are the preferred model these days. Forty-seven percent of India's children below three suffer from malnutrition, 46 per cent are stunted. Utsa Patnaik's study reveals that about 40 per cent of the rural population in India has the same foodgrain absorption levels as sub-Saharan Africa. Today, an average rural family eats about one hundred kilograms less food in a year than it did in the early 1990s.
But in urban India, wherever you go - shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports, gymnasiums, hospitals - you have TV monitors in which election promises have already come true. India's Shining, Feeling Good. You only have to close your ears to the sickening crunch of the policeman's boot on someone's ribs, you only have to raise your eyes from the squalor, the slums, the ragged, broken people on the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor and you will be in that other beautiful world. The singing-dancing world of Bollywood's permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, permanently happy Indians waving the tricolour flag and Feeling Good. It's becoming harder and harder to tell which one's the real world and which one's virtual. Laws like POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) are like buttons on a TV. You can use it to switch off the poor, the troublesome, the unwanted.
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