 Hello and welcome to Dispatches from India, where we bring you stories from across the country and the developments that impact the present and future. Last week, the Financial Express in media in general exploded with joy after news came that India had become the fifth largest economy in the world. On the 75th year of independence, the joy was all the more as India had overtaken its former coloniser the UK to reach the spot. The designation was made by the IMF based on quarterly GDP numbers for the period ending in December 2021 and the trend continued in the period ending in March. The government too celebrated the development with Prime Minister Modi calling it no ordinary achievement. However, in the following days, a number of economists expressed caution about these numbers. They pointed out that GDP numbers also concealed a lot of realities and called for a greater focus on issues faced by the people. We have with us economist Surajit Mazumdar to address this issue. From the point of view of the world economy, yes, the fact that you are the fifth largest economy in the world, you account for a certain percentage of the world's GDP, you therefore account for a certain size of the certain proportion of the world's market means that as far as the international economy is concerned and international business is a concern, international capital is concerned, you are given in that sense a little bit more importance than several other economies, which may be much smaller in size because of the smaller populations. But from the point of view of the people within the country, because you have a larger population, even if you have a larger GDP in per capita terms, it doesn't necessarily make it a very large kick to be shared amongst such a large number of people. So if you look at India in terms of per capita income, it counts as still amongst the poorest countries in the world. There are the majority of the world's countries are above India. India is classed today as a low middle income economy. Even within that low middle income economy group, there are several countries which are above India and there are therefore very small proportion of the world's countries are below India in the list. So in terms of average income, India still lags very, very far behind most of the world, the rest of the world. At the same time, you have for a large majority of Indians who are caught on the wrong side of a highly unequal distribution of income, where 56% of the income generated by this economy is cornered by the top 10% of population. So the average doesn't also represent the average. The reality of 90% of Indians is also way below that particular average. So Indians in general would have, if they were to assess their own economic situation, have little to find little in this story to cheer themselves up. Because the conditions that the majority are facing of serious problems of employment and extremely lower earnings from employment, even if they were to get it, these are issues that are not getting resolved but becoming more and more serious. So the journey to the five trillion size, basically because you have such a large population, does not necessarily therefore constitute something that will make the majority of Indians very happy. Student Federation of India's All India Rally, known as Jata, started in various parts of the country on August 1, 2022 to raise awareness and unite students against the national education policy or NEP 2020. According to the critics, the NEP 2020 is an attempt by the central government to privatize education in various ways. These include raising fees in the name of financial autonomy, reintroducing a four-year undergraduate program or FYUP with multiple exit points, reducing master's degrees to only one year and getting rid of the MFIL degree altogether. There is also an effort to take a large part of higher education online which SFI believes is exclusionary and will lead to massive dropout rates. The Jata has already passed through the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Assam and Tripura in the east and Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the south. Recently, it reached the National Capital of Delhi of September 9 with the strength of more than 500 students. The northern and western legs of the Jata are currently underway with college marches taking place across Rajasthan and Maharashtra. The Jata will be concluded on September 19. Education has been one of the most neglected areas by the government in India for a long time. But the mysteries of Indian students and youth has been further worsened in the last one decade ever since the Narendra Modi government has come to power in 2014. Even in India, entering to school has become a challenge for most of the children. India stands at 101 in the global hunger index, which means most of the children are not even able to eat three times in a day in this country. Students are not able to complete the school education. There is a high level of dropout in school itself. Only 27% of Indian students are able to enter higher education. Now, in India, there is a new education policy which was passed without discussion in parliament or enough deliberations with the stakeholders of different stakeholders of education. This new education policy aims to further intensify commercialization along with communalizing and further centralization of education. Hundreds of posts are lying vacant in Indian universities. All these policies are affecting the backward sections, the deprived sections in India in a much higher way. 21 higher education institutions under the central government in India have not admitted even a single tribal student in last year. 12 higher education institutions under the central government have admitted even a single schedule cast student in last academic year. The social and economic inequality has intensified increased in the recent years. The same is being reflected in Indian education system. In that way, there is a huge attempt to sabotage the very idea of universities and education. Scientific timber is being replaced by superstitions. History is being replaced by myths and Indian history is being rewritten towards building a religious state in India to encourage and contribute to that process. The city of Bangalore in the southern state of Karnataka has been experiencing massive flooding for the past few weeks. A total of 27 districts in Karnataka have been hit with capital Bangalore having received the most rainfall in 32 years resulting in a complete inundation of a major part of the city. According to the state's chief minister, over 430 homes have been destroyed and over 2188 have been partially hit resulting in thousands of residents being rendered homeless overnight. Bangalore is known as Asia's Silicon Valley, the high-tech hub of India. Environmental activists claim that this disaster was inevitable because for decades, drains, lakes and wetlands have been covered and levelled by real estate giants. They also allege that much of this land grabbing was sanctioned by the Karnataka industrial areas development board and Bangalore development authority. Climate change has just worsened the situation. We spoke with activist Leo Saldana on the various reasons for the disaster and if it could have been avoided. Flooding of many parts of Bangalore has been largely blamed on too much rain. While it is a fact that a lot of rain fell and it's been raining since May. This is not the first time this has happened and it's happened before as well. What we could say is that these rains could be a consequence of climate change but that's something that we'll have to wait to really confirm and if this repeats again and again then I think the extreme weather events which becomes frequent is one of the consequences of climate change will be confirmed. But importantly I think the flooding has happened largely because the city as it has evolved has forgotten that it needs to be shaped by the aspirations of all people and not just some people. Elite driven planning has essentially caused this flooding and I say this because from the 90s the entire attention of the city was driven by how do we service the IT sector? How do we make them happy? How do you keep them happy? And how do we ensure they don't leave? And so all across the eastern part of Bangalore which was particularly wooded and the wetland region was effectively you know turned into brown fields. So the point is that this is also not a new phenomenon in in Bangalore where class plays a major role. The classes always been upper classes and upper cars have always been privileged in the city. About the you know when the 19th century rolled into the 20th century we had a plague and a large number of new neighborhoods came up. But then the newer neighborhoods were allotted with upper class and the local farming community and the Dalits were pushed to the margins and you could see that they were the ones who would always get flooded whereas the ones who got into the new neighborhoods never got affected. What is different about this flood is that it also affected the super-rich and you know it was you know somewhat ironic that attractive was required to evacuate people who have postures and lexuses and beamers and so on. We have gone to court in 2008, we went again in 2019. The Chief Justice Oak was serving the High Court of Karnataka for two years, gave a series of orders and the current bench which is attending to it also as directed that you have to remove the encroachments. Now the encroachments by the poor have to be dealt with differently because they have to be rehabilitated. They did not come there out of choice. They came out of sheer necessity of housing whereas those who encroached because they have the wealth and the influence and used the wealth plus influence to buy their way through the clearances and managed to build massive mansions, massive apartment complexes, massive corporate complexes. I think they should also be penalized while they can also be termed as victims because they are flooded. They should also be held accountable for the fact that they went into the flood places and built and encroached the flood plains and the canals and you know most of the gated communities which were flooded, they built walls that prevent water movement. So I think what we are really seeing is the type of urbanization which is driven by a certain type of class consciousness where you feel that you know you can protect yourself from any eventuality because you have the wealth whereas the poor who have nothing get nothing at all but the real story is how do you get out of this and I think that is an opportunity to actually turn our you know readjustment of the city to the now you know wide consciousness that people have that flooding is likely to happen even when a city is 1000 meters above sea level as Bangalore is. It's a very well-drained city. It need not flood but it floods because we have been stupid enough to actually allow and when you say stupid it's not just that we didn't didn't know what was happening. This is actually systemic corruption which was encouraged through a modification of land use planning laws of land acquisition laws of actually allowing large you know purchase of lands by global majors and national majors and this is a clear risk assessment we have made in the 1980s. We have made it again through the Justice MK Parton Committee report about a decade ago and you know when that that amount of understanding of how water works in these type of riched valleys is not taken note of I think the consequence which is what we have been witnessing and suffering is actually nothing short of being of a criminal act of negligence. For more such stories please visit our website peoplesdispatch.org. We will be back next week. Thank you.