Word: rural
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rejected 8,000 for dubious family and residency ties to his district. "A voter card is the most valuable thing in this area," he says. It makes sure that holders get at least a share of what they're entitled to: not just a vote but also access to rural employment schemes, monsoon relief, health clinics...
...village of Panidhar is a cluster of 18 mud, brick and bamboo houses in a poor, wet corner of eastern India. Its problems will sound familiar to anyone who has traveled through the country's thick rural darkness. Panidhar's 195 residents live on rice and fish from the surrounding paddy fields and ponds; lucky children get vegetables and lentils, too, but few go to school. The brick factory across the Ichamati River sends boats to fetch a few of the young men; the rest have left for cities many miles away...
...These are reflexive mechanisms of state," says Major General Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi. "It's not a source of strength." From terrorism to rural development to its troubled relationships with its neighbors, almost every challenge that India faces is played out in some way along the border. But instead of resolving them, it only throws them into relief. "Fencing can't stop anything," says Adilur Khan, head of a Bangladeshi human-rights group called Odhikar. "It's kind of building the Berlin Wall again...
...China Back to the Countryside In a further example of China's faltering economy--exports and overall growth were down significantly in the fourth quarter of 2008--some 15% of its migrant workers are now jobless. This labor force, composed of rural peasants who travel to cities for factory jobs, is the backbone of the country's manufacturing sector. The Chinese government has said it may increase its $585 billion stimulus plan...
...would be funneled through state transportation departments that love to build unsustainable sprawl roads to nowhere. There's $4.5 billion for the Army Corps, which loves to build water projects that destroy wetlands and induce development in vulnerable floodplains. There's $14 billion for school modernization, $2 billion for rural-business loans, $8.4 billion in "state and tribal assistance grants" - and who can say how it would all be spent...