Seats and forms of power : Are all citizens on an equal footing in modern day India ?

NOVARINO Hugo                                                                                                                            TL

Dossier Anglais

2016/2017                                                                                                                           Lycée Périer

The notion i'm going to deal with is Seats and forms of power, I will answer at this question : Are all citizens on an equal footing in modern day India ?  

1. To begin with i'm going to talk about the inequalities among citizen

        In India there is a totally different system than in Europe : the caste system.

It begin 3000 years ago when the Hindu priests divided the society into four great hereditary social classes. Unfortunately it survives today. The Brahman caste is the highest. At the opposite, the Dalits. No one can change the caste into which they were born or marry someone belonging to another caste. This discrimination disappeared in urban areas but it still survive in rural areas. For example they can't eat where they want, they go to specific schools, temples etc...

There are 170 million Dalits in India today. Less than a third are literate, well over 40 percent survive on less than 2$ a day.

        We can say that India is a country on the march. Actually, India starts to being more developed, economically speaking, but it still has a gap between rich and poor.

17% of Indians describe themselves as thriving. They represent the “haves” of Indian society. The 55 billionaires fall in this category. They belong to the upper class.

64% of Indians describe themselves as struggling, they belong to the lower middle class of the society. To conclude 19% see themselves as suffering, they are the have nots. For example Dalits are in this category.

1. I'm going to continue, speaking about inequalities among men and women.

        Actually the level of life is not the only problem in India. There is also equality issue about men and women.

Let starts with the dowry. It's an old tradition in India in which the women's family have to give a dowry or gift the future husband's family. It's a compensation to the groom's parent for the cost of educating their son.

But sometimes, problems happened when the bride's family can't give the dowry. Harassment and torture are the price to be paid. Sometimes the women is even killed  by setting her on fire, which is known as “bride burning”. After it is disguised as an accident to avoid criminal charges and punishment. This explain why some parents in India do not want to have daughter.

        In three generations, more than 50 million women have been selectively eliminated from India's population through infanticide, dowry related murders, and other gendercide practices, because they are too numerous. There were 940 girls aged six and under for every 1000 boys.

1.  To finish let's talk about the evolution of Indian society

        The Indian society, despite the inequalities hitting the country, is a fast growing country. Actually, old generation families used to leave India to have a better life. Poverty lets place to the evolution. According to the document that we studied in class, the Gross domestic product (GDP) and the sectors of activity are growing and changing. For example in 1990 agriculture and industry both respectively account 30 and 25 percent of the GDP, now they fall to 17.5 and 20 percent. However, the sector of services is evolving from 44.7 to 62.6. We can link it with the huge evolution of the population: 319 million in 1941, in 2011 it reach 1.2 billion of people. There is more people in order to be engineer for example.

...