In 1951, at the time of the first population Census, just 18% of Indians were literate while life expectancy was 32 years. By 2014 in over 60 years, life expectancy had more than doubled to 68. Literacy had grown even faster to reach 72 % by 2015.
A chunk of the country’s 1.2 billion people are still chronically malnourished, many are unemployed. At least 32% of India’s population live below the international poverty line -- spending less than US$1.2 a day -- while about 68% of the population live on less than US$2 a day, a World Bank report said in 2010.
More than a third of Indians aged 15 to 49 are undernourished, according to India’s National Family Health Survey in 2006.
A 2011 Wall Street Journal investigation into India’s government-run healthcare system described public hospitals as “out of date, short-staffed and filthy.”
A memebr of the Gurudwara Prabhandak Committee of Delhi said in a TV programme that gurudwaras across the country must be feeding about a crore of indians daily, free of charge.
A chunk of the country’s 1.2 billion people are still chronically malnourished, many are unemployed. At least 32% of India’s population live below the international poverty line -- spending less than US$1.2 a day -- while about 68% of the population live on less than US$2 a day, a World Bank report said in 2010.
More than a third of Indians aged 15 to 49 are undernourished, according to India’s National Family Health Survey in 2006.
A 2011 Wall Street Journal investigation into India’s government-run healthcare system described public hospitals as “out of date, short-staffed and filthy.”
“Lack of government spending is largely to blame for our ailing healthcare system,” said Pramod Paliwal, the secretary of the Jaipur-based Indian Institute of Rural Development, a non-profit focusing on rural healthcare. India invests only 1% of its gross domestic product in health care, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. India’s healthcare expenditure, the OECD found, was one of the lowest in the world.
A 2013 study by New Delhi-based non-profit Pratham, which surveyed schoolchildren across 500 districts, found that a fifth of 10-year-olds could not read sentences. Around 50% of seven-year-olds surveyed couldn’t read letters and more than 50% of 14-year-olds were unable to divide numbers, the study found. A similar study on higher education last year estimated that fewer than 10% of graduates with masters degrees in business administration, were employable.
The United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report ranked India 132 out of 187 countries on its gender inequality index in 2013. All countries in South Asia, with the exception of Afghanistan, the report said, were a better place for women than India. A memebr of the Gurudwara Prabhandak Committee of Delhi said in a TV programme that gurudwaras across the country must be feeding about a crore of indians daily, free of charge.
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