Humanity’s interest in raising the poor and destitute from the threshold of survival is insignificant. But our interest money, even the virtual money crated by trading opinions in the stockmarket, remains supreme. Whether Boston or Bombay, money, that metaphysical asset, seems to feed our souls.<\/p>\n
It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action when the Sensex fell by several hundred points. But no Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index.<\/p>\n
It all happened around the same time. The day the Sensex crossed 19,000, India clocked in 94th in the Global Hunger Index \u2014 behind Ethiopia. Both stories did make it to the front page (in one daily at least). But, of course, the GHI ranking was mostly buried inside or not carried at all that day. The joy over the stunning rise of the media\u2019s most loved index held on for a bit the next day. The same day, India clocked in as the leading nation in the number of women dying in childbirth. In this list, the second, third and fourth worst countries put together just about matched India\u2019s 1.17 lakh deaths of women in childbirth. This story appeared in single column just beneath the Sensex surge.<\/p>\n
Next came the fall of several hundred points in the Sensex. That is, barely a couple of days later. It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action. Fingers were in every dyke. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram lost no time in reassuring worried investors via the media. Other top officials were all over television, doing the same. \u201cFM soothes the Market\u2019s nerves\u201d ran the ticker. The barrage \u2014 both media and official \u2014 kept up through the day. The panels of experts convened to celebrate the 19K summit were reconvened to explain why they\u2019d tripped off the cliff. They then droned on about the merits of P-Notes, regulation and the future. What stood out, of course, was the swiftness of both government and media response to each twitch in the index.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Continue reading Indexing inhumanity, Indian style<\/em> by P. Sainath here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Humanity’s interest in raising the poor and destitute from the threshold of survival is insignificant. But our interest money, even the virtual money crated by trading opinions in the stockmarket, remains supreme. Whether Boston or Bombay, money, that metaphysical asset, seems to feed our souls. It took minutes for the top guns to swing into …
Continue reading Money wins over humanity, by a wide margin<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[37,22,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-india","category-living","category-markets"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hwcd-73","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}