Condition of Indian Infrastructure

These below facts are from an article CREAKING & GROANING from THE ECONOMIST:

1. 1,000 Indian children die of diarrhoeal sickness every day

2. Ganga river contains 60,000 faecal coliform bacteria per 100 millilitres, 120 times more than is considered safe for bathing.

3. An estimated 700m Indians have no access to a proper toilet.

4. It takes an average of 21 days to clear import cargo in India; in Singapore it takes three. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai, which handles 60% of India’s container traffic, has berths for nine cargo vessels; Singapore’s main port can handle 40.

5. India’s 3.3m km road network is the world’s second-biggest, but most of it is pitiful.

6. 8,000km, are dual carriageways, where as China by 2007 had some 53,600km of highways with four lanes or more.

7. Last year 130,000 people died on India’s roads, 60% more than in China, which has four times as many cars.

8. An even bigger worry is India’s shortage of power. Last year peak demand outstripped supply by almost 15%.

9. According to the World Bank, 9% of potential industrial output in India is lost to power cuts. Some 600m Indians have no mains electricity at all.

10. In 2001 only 65% of the population was literate, optimistically defined, compared with 90% in China.

11. Half of ten-year-olds could not read to the basic standard expected of six-year-olds. Over 60% could not do simple division. One reason is that, according to a World Bank study, only half of Indian teachers show up to work. Half of Indian children leave school by the age of 14.