Roads or killing fields?
By Vijay D'Souza, UK [ Published Date: January 26, 2010 Mangalorean.com ]
According to the official figures by International Road Federation, 479, 219 road accidents killed 114, 444 and injured 513, 340 people in India in the year 2007. As per the reports disclosed by the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways, in 2006 India has overtaken China to top the road accidents. India has been reported to record over 100, 000 deaths every year ever since. Worryingly for India while China has been bringing down its road accident figures by an annual average of 10.8 per cent, India's figures are getting worse. Reports suggest that, these figures translated into one road accident every minute and one road accident death every five minutes for India. As per year 2000 prices, this amounted to a loss of Rs. 55,000 core every year - almost 3% of the GDP (gross domestic product, basic measure of a country's overall economic output). Staggering statistics may be, however, surely not so shocking for an Indian citizen.
Grow up India: Shashi Tharoor's tweets
Opinion
Sunday, 20 September 2009 00:00
Last week in India the buzz was "Cattle Class" and "Holy cows". Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor, the urbane and articulate former international diplomat, was targeted for his light-hearted remark replying to a question on his Twitter page.
It is unfortunate that in India every remark, every joke is always taken out of context in the name of tradition or in the name of something else, and given a political colour. The funniest part of this entire episode was the way politicians used these two words and started targeting the Minister of State. There was even demand for Mr. Shashi Tharoor to resign. If this is not the height of idiocy, then what else is?
We Indians need to grow up and should try to see things with an open mind. Otherwise a simple joke can become an unnecessary political controversy and a worthless national debate.
It is only great statesmanship from Mr. Shashi Tharoor, who showed a great deal of maturity in handling this situation and moved on.
We Indians will be better served by politicians if they focus on development work rather than getting busy debating "holy cows" in TV studios.