Once I read a quote somewhere that “if one man dies it’s sad, but if many die it’s statistics”...I appreciated its humour and sarcasm but after watching few days live of Loksabha, I can guess that writer must have been a politician to see humour in someone’s death..
Statistics is such a beauty in itself...it was invented to represent facts in efficient and grasping manner but certainly in recent time it has been used as a tool to hide or malign the facts and to disguise or confuse the common man...our “prime minister” and “finance minister” often boast about “growth rate” and “inflation rate” etc.. but the fact is we come from a developing country where 41% of the total population is still living under poverty line and which is far from being called developed and in a traditional country like ours , a common man always connects the “inflation” to the prices of the domestic items and I don’t understand why govt can’t understand this..People dying out of starvation and politicians are saying mobile, computer and laptop prices are decreasing...and it’s not like that they don’t understand the seriousness of the situation, otherwise they didn’t increase their salaries from Rs.40,000 to Rs.1,20,000, which is three fold..but instead of doing something for them politicians always throw some statistical figures about growth rate and india shining to justify those deaths..
Anyone in this country who is earning less than Rs.560 and Rs. 368 per month in urban and rural areas respectively is below poverty line, which I suggest should be called deadline because anyone’s earning less than that will die in present scenario...and in calculating the poverty line govt. only consider the money needed to acquire sufficient calories to survive..according to them a person only need food to survive, no clothes, no house and no money to cure slightest of his illness...no wonder thousands of people die in every season in this country (be it by heat strokes or in winters due to extreme cold) in lack of any shelter over their head and lakhs die every year in lack of medical treatment...we often read about them in newspapers but they just seem statistical figures to us..
Likewise Indian railways have a long history of accidents and instead of doing something about it, our “railway minister” replied that “no. of accidents in this country are still less than many countries in Europe(another statistical representation)...”...and one should ask him that are we in a competition here? and In similar incident after one of many terrorist attacks(now a days as frequent as festivals..!!) in Mumbai, 1 minister responded “these sort of small things are bound to happen in big cities like Mumbai..”..These 2 examples shows that when 1 child “prince” falls in boring hole (I hope you all remember that incident...what a national calamity that was..!!!) whole country pray for him and even politicians went there on site but when it comes to number of people died or about to die in bulk it means nothing more than a statistical figure to most of us..And politicians also do nothing except making excuses and presenting more statistical figure to confuse us.
Be it the case of people dying out of starvation, in railway accidents, in Gujarat riots or in terrorist attacks, our politicians need to understand that these are “people” who are dying not some “statistical figures” and after all “A DEATH IS A DEATH NOTHING LESS”..
