Where is the money?

According to the International Food Policy Research Institute 21% of Indians are undernourished, 44% of children under 5 years are underweight and 7% of them will die before reaching the age of 5 years. TOI, January 16. Infant mortality rate in rural India is 55 per 1000 live births, 1.3 million children die before their first birthday and 1.6 million before reaching 5 years. We have heard all this before and nothing is going to improve unless poor people stop breeding. Is it better to survive childhood only to be sent to work at the age of 7 or 8 at low wages, starved, beaten up, sexually assaulted, living a filthy miserable life until an early death from alcohol addiction or a treatable infectious disease? What is even more shameful is that 55000 women die of childbirth every year in India. Pregnancy can only happen in young women and is not a disease. So these young, otherwise healthy women are dying of a natural physiological event showing a complete lack of healthcare infrastructure. So what is the government going to do about it? The Congress has decided to pass a Food Security Bill aiming to provide cheap food to 70% of the population, some 800 million people. Because Ms Gandhi wants it. There is no discussion about what it will cost, what it will do to the fiscal deficit which is already out of control, the falling rupee and inflation. If monsoons fail will the government buy food grains from abroad? Last year our balance of payment was $150 billion in the red and our foreign reserves are below $300 billion. Politicians keep talking about China but they are willfully blind to the most important lesson to be learnt from that country which is that its economy really exploded when the one-child policy was adopted and majority of Chinese now support that policy. However it is not only the Indian politicians who are blind. The Economist has found that according to its Big Mac index the rupee is undervalued by 61%. The Big Mac costs $4.20 in the US while the Maharaja Mac in India costs Rs 84, just $1.62. The Maharaja Mac is half the size it was 2 years ago. To make its index truly representative The Economist should also take into account its size and the weight of its contents, especially the meat. Is there a conspiracy to fool Indians with false information and induce a sense of complacency to help Congress? Love conspiracies.