Make strong foundation for BRICS

don't waste him

Rahul joins me for a pint of beer on Holi- the Indian festival of colours. He jokes and tells me that his life is not colourful. “ I want to go back to my home town to Darjeeling- I don’t like Delhi.” His friend Prabhakar agrees with him. They both work for Adidas as salesman.

Priya (name changed), a beautiful girl, also from Darjeeling works in a beauty parlour in South Delhi.  She probably has other sources of income, which she doesn’t want to divulge at this stage. She loves clubs and going out at weekends, but life is Delhi is tough.  She says, “ I have to stand the whole day,  and sometimes I am abused by the customers.  I don’t want to live here, but I need to earn. I want to educate my 9-year-old brother. I will do everything for him”.

Every year thousands of young boys and girls make their way to Delhi from the picturesque hills of the Darjeeling and also the north –east of India  hoping to get decent jobs.

Thanks to globalization: India’s booming retail industry and glitzy malls have given employment to many of them. “ We have the looks”, says Sanchita (name changed), who looks extremely smart in her mini-outfits.  “ We might be uneducated, but we know how to carry ourselves. We are easily employable. ” Sanchita’s bother is disabled, father is blind and her mom is often sick. At 22 she has to look for ways to support her family.

Darjeeling is known as the Queen of hills and is the home to one of the world’s most expensive tea, which contributes greatly to India’s exports. But unfortunately, the locals have benefited little from it. The tea is auctioned in Kolkata and drained out of the region much to annoyance of the local population. The locals have been asking for a separate state- Gurkhaland. The political demands have had fallouts- frequent strikes and bandhs have crippled the local economy. Tourism has been hit and the posh Anglo- Indian boarding schools no longer attract students from the rest of the country.

On a wider context, the suffering of the locals and lack of unemployment in some of India’s most scenic regions shows how exclusive India’s economic growth has been.

In many ways, the rising prosperity of India’s cities has given rise to a host of serious social problems- human trafficking is one of them. Hundreds and thousands of girls from India’s troubled north-east are directly or indirectly into prostitution in Delhi alone.

As BRICS leaders cobble up in Durban to discuss the possibilities of setting up a BRICS bank to help sustain infrastructure and human development, we hope that such initiative will be duly accompanied by a vision to economically boost some of the backward regions and communities in each of the BRICS countries.

For India, the priority should be to look at human development issues, creating more economic opportunities across the country and improve its defunct infrastructure. Above all it needs to fight corruption to say the least.