http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... -india-bjp
The BJP candidate may be leading India’s prime ministerial election polls, but his record, while good, doesn’t justify the hype… There are two problems with this argument. First, there are other states that have achieved this, but no one is talking about the Maharashtra or Haryana model of development. Second, Gujarat’s growth rate was higher than the all-India level in the 1980s and 1990s as well… Gujarat’s growth rate in the 1990s was 4.8%, compared to the national average of 3.7%; in the 2000s it was 6.9% compared to the national average of 5.6%. The difference between Gujarat’s growth rate and the national average increased marginally, from 1.1 percentage points to 1.3 percentage points. A good performance? Yes. Justifying the hype? No. … Contrast this with the performance of Bihar, the state that has been in the bottom of the rankings in terms of per capita income throughout: its growth rate was 2.7 percentage points below the national average in the 1990s, but 1.3 percentage points higher in the 2000s. So the prize for the most dramatic turnaround in the 2000s would go to Bihar.
http://time.com/8883/the-modi-model/
Officials reject claims that Muslims, who make up about 9% of the state’s 60 million people, have been neglected. Why separate by religion? says Pratik Doshi, a Modi aide.. ..Adds A.K. Sharma, a close lieutenant of the chief minister; The Muslim population in Gujarat is doing as well as the Hindu community. That’s only partly true, according to the 2006 Sachar Committee Report, a paper commissioned by New Delhi on the status of Muslims in India. It found, for instance, the rate of poverty among rural Muslims in Gujarat was lower than that of Hindus, but in urban areas it was double.
..In Ghoda, a village a few hours’drive from Ahmedabad, a young woman, Shakari Ben, sits under the roof of her red-mud house, its walls scorched black from the cooking fire. Small chickens peck at nothing on the mud floor. Ben produces a stack of five round chapatis and a 10-kg sack of flour. This is all the food we have in the house right now, she says. Sure, there is an electricity line running to her lean-to home, but her two boys, who stick to her side sucking their thumbs, both have bellies that look bloated, a textbook symptom of malnutrition.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghabahree ... s-gujarat/
Adani has, over the years, leased 7,350 hectares “much of which he got from 2005 onwards“ from the government in an area called Mundra in the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat. FORBES ASIA has copies of the agreements that show he got the 30-year, renewable leases for as little as one U.S. cent a square meter (the rate maxed out at 45 cents a square meter). He in turn has sublet this land to other companies, including state-owned Indian Oil Co., for as much as $11 a square meter. Between 2005 and 2007 at least 1,200 hectares of grazing land was taken away from villagers.
For miles at a stretch the chimneys of the two power plants are visible against the horizon. Gajendra Sinh Jadeja, the 28-year-old head of Navinal village, says the Gujarat government took some 930,770 square meters of his village’s grazing land for Adani,s SEZ. Adani got it for 19 cents a square meter…Traversing a couple of nearby barren fields, Jadeja says he had been growing alternately cotton, millet and castor there. Now patches of white salt are easily visible across stretches of the fields and have become a common sight across farms. The saline water ruined the soil, and the poor production now is just not worth it, he says.
The tenor of all the three articles published in a period of just one month is very clear. None of the authors have swallowed the myth of Gujarat Model. In fact, they have questioned the integrity of the Governance noting the huge pieces of land given away to Adanis and the damage to the villagers and environment. Guardian has questioned the very basis of the claim of Gujarat Model being a superior model. When people far far away can see the Truth Of Gujarat, how come our erudite Indian Media cannot discern the truth?
