Travails of democracy
the United Nation Development Programme's (undp) latest Human Development Report (hdr 2002) has reiterated what we have always talked about: that mere democracy is not enough, deepening of democracy through the empowerment of people is the real route to development. And also that democracy and equity are words that the industrialised countries reserve for the rest of the world, but not to be practiced at the global level. There is no "good governance' here that the industrialised world is willing to practice.
If one were to go by the theme of the hdr 2002, India, by virtue of being one of the largest and oldest functioning democracies in the world, should have figured way up on the report's Human Development Index (hdi). What we find instead is that it is ranked at 124 among 173 countries. What makes it worse is that India ranks below countries like China, Cuba and Vietnam, none of them an exemplary of democracy. So what is the hdr 2002, with its theme