Skip to main content

Children of Cows

 

Source: unsplash.com

Prime Minister Modi declared the cow our mother last week while addressing a rally in Varanasi. I have my own mother and am certainly not interested in a surrogate especially at my age now. If some of my fellow citizens are in need of more mothers, who am I to object? My problem is not about having many mothers but about what Modi ji is doing for the cow’s children. Now that he is completing eight years in power, we need to assess his performance and see whether it is more mothers we need.

Let me tabulate a few indices to summarise Modi ji’s contribution to the nation in the last eight years as PM.

Index

Year & Rank

Year & Rank

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index

2014 - 27

2020 – 53

UNDP Human Development Index

2014 - 130

2020 – 131

IMD World Competitiveness Ranking

2013 - 40

2021 – 43

Freedom House’s Freedom in World Index

2014 - 77

2021 – 67

World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index

2014 - 66

2020 – 69

UN Sustainable Development Solutions World Happiness Report

2015 - 117

2021 – 139

Legatum Institute Prosperity Index

2015 - 99

2020 – 101

World Press Freedom Index

2014 - 140

2021 – 142

Georgetown Institute Women, Peace & Security Index

2017 - 131

2020 - 133

Fraser Institute Global Economic Freedom Index

2015 - 95

2020 – 105

Cato Human Freedom Index

2015 - 75

2020 – 111

World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index

2014 - 114

2021 – 140

World Bank Women, Business and Law Index

2014 - 111

2021 – 123

World Index of Moral Freedom

2016 - 41

2020 – 70

International Intellectual Property Index

2014 - 25

2021 – 40

Global Innovation Index

2014 - 76

2020 – 48

World Economic Forum Global Economic Competitiveness

2017 - 40

2020 – 68

Internet Shutdown Tracker [shutdowns by govts]

2014 - 6

2020 – 109

WB International Logistics Performance Index

2014 - 54

2018 – 44

Numbeo Quality of Life Index

2014 - 48

2021 – 65

Fund for Peace Fragile States Index

2014 -81

2021 – 66

Global RTI Rating

2013 - 2

2021 – 6

Global Hunger Index

2014 - 55

2020 – 94

WB Doing Business Report

2014 - 142

2020 – 63

Knight Frank Global House Price Index

2015 - 17

2021 – 55

Quality of Nationality Index

2014 - 88

2018 – 95

WEF Human Capital Index

2013 - 78

2017 – 103

Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index

2015 - 103

2019 – 120

AT Kearney FDI Confidence Index

2014 - 7

2021 – no rank

Yale Environmental Performance Index

2014 - 155

2020 – 168

Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index

2014 - 18

2021 – 7

Sustainable Development Index

2016 - 110

2021 - 120

Food Sustainability Index

2016 - 25

2018 – 33

Economics and Peace Positive Peace Index

2021 – Last out of 51 nations

Source: Aakar Patel, Price of the Modi Years

 

In every one of the above indices, India has slid down drastically during the Modi years. Some of the rankings are in ascending order and some in descending. So the numbers may confuse you a bit. But let me repeat: India came down invariably in every index.

Now tell me, is it more mothers or even fathers that we Indians need?

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 401: Cow is mother, sacred to us: PM Modi #CowMother

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more