Monday, November 05, 2007

Thomas Friedman is apt to miss this from his suite at the Bombay Intercontinental

Indexing Humanity, Indian Style by P. Sainath

"The day the Sensex crossed 19,000, India clocked in 94th in the Global Hunger Index--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's 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's 117,000 deaths of women in childbirth. This story appeared in single column just beneath the Sensex surge.

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... What stood out, of course, was the swiftness of both government and media response to each twitch in the index.

No Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index. That's out of 118 countries."

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