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They said it in January
"What becomes glaringly apparent is that we just don’t have the basic school infrastructure in place throughout vast swathes of India to educationally empower the 342 million kids of 5-19, who will expect to be gainfully employed anytime between 2006 and 2020." Omkar Goswami in Businessworld (January 17) "Middle class people come here (Mumbai) for work. The poor also come here for work. They can’t afford a house, so they squat wherever they can and become a visible presence. Therefore you break their homes, ruin their livelihood and drive them out inhumanly. Why don’t you create an alternative for them? Why should they not have the same chance for employment as the middle class?" Jockin Arputham, founder of the National Slum Dwellers Federation, in an interview with Times of India (January 18) "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world." President George Bush in his inaugural address (January 20) "India needs a knowledge revolution at all levels and not just at the top of the pyramid." Prime minister Manmohan Singh (January 22) "Freedom and liberty are universal values. The founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution, admirable through they may have been, do not hold patent rights over these concepts. They are embedded in the roots of the separate tradition of European social democracy and we must not let George Bush appropriate them to provide an ideological order for his new imperialism." Robin Cook in The Guardian (January 22) "My own feeling is that India lost the chance to be the factory of the world… That opportunity appears to have gone to China and since then to some other Asian countries." Ratan Tata in Businessworld (January 24) "Today, with public health spending at a measly 0.9 percent of the GDP, India is among the five countries with the lowest public spending in the world." Abhay Shukla, joint convener of the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (Health for All campaign) in a Times of India interview (January 25) "The only answer to retain the smile from the child to youth is to generate employment. It represents the aspirations and anxiety of nearly 540 million youth of our nation." President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (January 26)
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