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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...