Appreciating diversity in India.

As mentioned before I beleive India is thriving on almost every aspect, and many of us want to gauge the measure of this development. To quench that thirst we have all sorts of quotients, main one being GDP (9% GDP growth rate for successively 5th or 6th year, can you imagine!?). But for few people, they want more; and so we come up with different statistical figures of total educated woemen, Child labour etc etc.

But are we really understanding these figures? Indian society strata is REAL diverse. There are people who make it into the Forbes world's rich list and still India's face known to many people abroad is the face of old poor street-hosted family looking for some food! And thats REAL! (if you dont beleive it, visit Mumbai.. the facts are there on the streets.) It's not out of the world for any nation to have such a diverse society stratas, but by far India hosts one of the most healthiest of them.

Accepting this, does it really make any sense to come up with one figure representing any damn thing across nation? Well may be coming up is fine for some purpose, but to beleive it and be proud of it or be ashamed of it does not make any sense. Few years back when Mani shankar Iyar was Minister of Commerce & Industry, he mentioned this exact point. He said (and I paraphrase), "Dont just say that GDP is 9%, concentrate that its 9% just because of one [IT] sector. May be we need GDP's per sector."