COMMENTATOR (COMM.): Previously on Life...

DR. NAILA KHAN : They're having children when their pelvis is small, they're not developed themselves -they're malnourished themselves.

DR. FUCHS: You can't develop a society economically and financially if you don't have good health.

SUSAN GEORGE: As we go towards this totally globalised world it's going to be more and more about who has the right to survive and who does not.

COMM: Hartalle village in Mysore in Southern India. Most of the villagers here live below the official Indian poverty line - less than a dollar a day - and women and children bear the brunt of it. Pushpa was only thirteen when she had to drop out of school and get married. By fourteen she'd already given birth to her first child. Today at fifteen her health - as a child mother - has suffered, and she finds looking after her baby very difficult.

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): You were studying in school - why did you leave and get married?

PUSHPA (TRANSLATION): My mother forced me to marry. She told me to stop going to school and married me off.

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): Is that what you wanted to do?

PUSHPA (TRANSLATION): No. I wanted to study but she wouldn't let me continue.

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): Did you have difficulty during childbirth?

PUSHPA (TRANSLATION): Yes I had a lot of difficulty. I threw up a lot.

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): How are you managing your child? You are a child yourself.

PUSHPA (TRANSLATION): My mother looks after my baby.

COMM: Pushpa isn't alone. In no less than six Indian states, the average age for marrying among rural girls is under fourteen years, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research. In the Maharashtra village of Karandi in Western India, Dasharath farms just one acre of land. Today he's working harder than usual because there is an extra mouth to feed. His wife, Jayshree, has just given birth to a son - a cause for great joy for the couple. But this is their eleventh child. Five of Jayshree's children have already died - three of them boys. Jayshree's already a grandmother - her married eldest daughter is visiting her to see the new baby. But it was the desire for a son that's driven Jayshree to go through the process of child bearing again and again.

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): How is your health after so many pregnancies ?

JAYASHREE (TRANSLATION): Well I don't have a choice - it's the hope of having a son, a son who will live. That's why I have endured so much.

COMM: Repeated child bearing combined with early marriage have always been major causes of infant mortality. Two and a half million children die every year in India according to UNICEF. More than half of them new born babies. But now there is a new concern. While the Infant Mortality Rate has been declining over the last thirty years, today there are disturbing reports from over half of the states in India that the trend is beginning to reverse. The Central Health Ministry has appointed a national technical committee to investigate what's going wrong.

PROF. IMRANA QADEER, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi: The infant mortality rates in this country which were falling over the '90s - the rate of decline first reduced and then over '96, '97,'98 there's almost a stagnation and probably the beginning of an increase in infant mortality.

COMM: Chronic malnutrition is a major factor in infant mortality. The UN says more than half of India's children under four are malnourished. The World Bank estimates that chronic malnutrition costs India ten billion dollars a year in loss of productivity, illness and death. The World Health Organization defines low birthweight babies as weighing less than 2.5 kilos. One in three babies in India are now born low birth weight. Doctors say it's a vicious cycle: undernourished mothers produce underweight babies. And so it goes on from one generation to the next.

DR ANAND PANDIT, King Edward Memorial Hospital, Pune, Maharashtra: All over the country at the moment the low birth weight rate is as high as 32.5%. That means that thirty-two babies born out of a hundred are below the weight of 2.5 kilogrammes.

DR CAROLINE FALL, Medical Research Council, Southampton General Hospital, UK: Certainly in global terms, the largest cause of low birthweight is maternal under-nutrition. And this is a problem here in India where one-third of babies are born low birthweight and we know that that's mainly attributable to high rates of maternal under-nutrition.

COMM: Low birthweight babies jeopardise the social and economic development of entire generations in the developing world. Doctors at the Holdsworth Memorial Hospital in Mysore and the Medical Research Centre in Southampton in the UK are now investigating how the effects cross the generations in South India. For the past five years they've been testing six hundred children born at this Mysore hospital to try and understand the links between malnutrition in the womb and health in later, adult life.

COMM. Their first results - reported in the medical journal "The Lancet" - indicate that low birthweight babies may be more susceptible to diabetes and heart disease as they grow older. In the town of Pune in Maharashtra, doctors at the King Edward Memorial Hospital have been researching the diet of two thousand pregnant mothers. In the majority of the cases they've found their diet was worryingly low in calories. Another study of children at Pune raised further serious concerns.

DR ANAND PANDIT: We did two studies. One was on four-year-old children and those when they became eight years old and to our great surprise we could see indicators which suggested that they were compromised as far as their glucose metabolism was concerned. And they also had secular trends that suggested that they had higher pressures - higher blood pressures - even at the tender age of seven and eight.

COMM: The director of the diabetes unit at this hospital says that in the 1970s there were just over two per cent of adults in Indian cities who had diabetes. Today, that figure's gone up to twelve per cent.

DR C S YAJNIK, Director, Diabetes Unit, King Edward Memorial Hospital, Pune: It's a massive increase. Such increase has never been seen before. And the prediction is that within next twenty years, India will have the dubious distinction of being the country with the highest number of diabetic patients. Almost sixty million of them.

COMM: According to the Indian government, GDP is growing at six per cent a year - faster than in the United States. But the World Health Organisation statistics still ranks India at only 112th out of 191 member countries. Despite the Green Revolution India's food supplies remain precarious; income from agriculture is unreliable - and there's endemic hunger in many areas. In this village, the women told us that lack of work meant three out of four families have to go hungry - here the stoves are rarely lit these days

MALLIGAMMA (TRANSLATION): There is no farm labour and therefore no wages. If there is a family of ten then even two people don't get work. It has been four months since we had regular work.

MAHADEVAMMA (TRANSLATION): We starve - there is no choice! If we have no money and we go to the shopkeepers then they don't give us anything. They tell us, "You have no money, why have you come to the shop?" So we just return empty-handed and starve!

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): What have you eaten since the morning? 2nd VILLAGE WOMAN (TRANSLATION): Nothing!

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): What about the children?

MAHADEVAMMA (TRANSLATION): They have had a cup of coffee.

JAYATI GHOSH, Economist, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi: In India the evidence is very clear. We've had the NSS data - the National Sample Survey - shows an increase in not just the absolute numbers of the poor, but in the proportion of the rural population living in absolute poverty. And it's quite a substantial increase: the data for 1998 shows that it's as high as forty-two per cent of the rural population. And it's up by about six percentage points from 1990 - so over that decade. This has a terrible long-term effect. You know what protein deficiency does to mental development over time. And many of these effects are not reversible. So there is a real danger that we are actually undermining the next generation.

PART TWO

CAPTION: 'Jungpura Slum, New Delhi'

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): What were you saying about why we are filming here?

YOUTH (TRANSLATION): Yes, you're shooting the slum. So, when it's demolished, you'll come and show the slum dwellers: "How nice your slum was - now, it's a broken ruin!" That's all I was saying. What will I say?

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): Why will it be broken?

YOUTH (TRANSLATION): Why? Because the order is out. In two months the notice will come. By the third month the slums here will be cleared, like the Nehru stadium slum was cleared.

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): Then where will you go?

YOUTH (TRANSLATION): Then where will we go?

ALI (TRANSLATION): Wherever the government gives us land.

YOUTH (TRANSLATION): We'll go to America or London. But we'll go somewhere or the other.

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): The government is saying that it is opening up India to the world -

ALI (TRANSLATION): They can't look after the people who live here and they're calling outsiders. What sense does that make? They want to make Delhi into Paris. First make Delhi - the Delhi we had.

ROOPWATI (TRANSLATION): No one listens to the poor. The only time they think about the poor is when they come with folded hands to ask for votes. After that they don't care whether we live or die? If we try to ask them for any jobs they just tell us to leave!

INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): Doesn't your arm ache with all this ironing?

ROOPWATI (TRANSLATION): Don't ask me about the physical pain I suffer! Ask me about the pain in my heart! I have to work hard and support my family. My husband is ill and needs medicine and my own health is bad.

ALI (TRANSLATION): The poor have nothing to eat and the rich drive cars! Take a small example: it takes one machine to dig soil - ten men used to do that work now one machine does it, and the work is over in about an hour. That leaves nine men unemployed. Where will they go?

COMM: In 1991 the Indian government - along with many other countries - embraced market reforms. Under trade liberalisation, the emphasis was on maximising exports and attracting inward investment. The beneficiaries are India's middle class - now two hundred and fifty million of them. But there have been losers too. As market reforms took hold, India was also beginning to feel the effects of structural adjustment policies laid down as conditions for loans taken out in the 1980s from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The public health care budget and basic subsidies on food were cut. The poor were the first to suffer. A meeting of Global Investors in Bangalore, India's own booming Silicon Valley. India's Finance Minister uses the occasion to reaffirm his commitment to globalisation and market reforms.

YESHWANT SINHA, Union Minister of Finance, India: Reforms in this country have come to stay. Reforms will march forward in this first decade of the twenty-first century - which I have called the "Decade of Development for India"!

BRINDA KARAT, General Secretary, All India Democratic Women's Association: Unfortunately, if you just look at the kind of super-hype there is about globalisation in this country one would never think that, you know, there's anything but happiness here. But - in fact, even if you look at the government statistics - the most recent statistics have shown that in the last ten years of so called economic reform, the absolute number of India's poor below the poverty line, has increased by something like seventy million!

LORD SWARAJ PAUL, Chairman, Caparo Group: In any globalisation process or in any process there has to be casualties. But you don't stop trying something which you genuinely believe is for the better for fear of casualty. I mean, if you see the condition of India before the process started, today the conditions are for the better. There is a different attitude in India; there is a different approach; there is a different hope. The whole liberalisation process by the creation of new entrepreneurs, new industry etc. has given a new ray of hope. All of a sudden there is a confidence at every level in India that, "Yes; we can do it!" We are already seeing the fact that it has brought benefits to much larger numbers of people than it has done ever before. India should move much faster towards globalisation.

COMM: For the beneficiaries of liberalisation, the party goes on.

JAYATI GHOSH, Economist, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi: It's very bizarre - the distinction is between the real economy and the virtual economy - there's a virtual economy out there. And it's virtual because there is a whole class of the Indian elite that wants to think it's there. And wants to wish away India - the real India which has got hungry people and no sanitation and increasing disease and increasing child mortality.

COMM: This is the India Jayati's talking about. In the village of Kher Shivpur in Maharashtra, there are echoes of the Delhi slum dwellers. Here too the new economics are bringing changes that aren't always welcomed.

APURGA YADAV (TRANSLATION): I was waiting in the rain with my head covered. They came with bulldozers and pulled down our homes, shouting, "Pull it down, pull it down!" It was raining very heavily and we gathered our small children together. They drove the bulldozer through my house! I was sick and I told them, "Please wait!" But they said, "You get out quickly - we have to pull this down now!"

KAMAL YADAV (TRANSLATION): We don't have any other occupation except farm labour. Somehow we have managed to get some increase in our daily wages but still there is no assurance of permanence. If we get work one day then the next four days we stay at home; our children don't get food.

APURGA YADAV (TRANSLATION): Wheat is twelve rupees a kilo, rice is ten rupees and sugar has gone up to fifteen rupees a kilo! Kerosene is six rupees - before it used to be only three rupees, now it is six rupees! How do you expect us to cook, to eat, to feed and educate our children? COMM: Economic indicators show that market reform policies have slashed agricultural wages by half over the last ten years. Land degradation as a result of overuse of pesticides, together with the switch from food production to cash crops have made farmers' incomes more erratic than ever. Statistics show suicides among farmers have risen - as their crops fail and they are unable to meet their debts.

PROF. IMRANA QADEER (TRANSLATION): The very fact that today the rate of migration is so high, it indicates that people are not able to subsist on what they were able to subsist earlier because the small farmer is losing his land and he has to search for food elsewhere.

COMM: Cutbacks in food subsidies have compounded the crisis caused by the loss of farmers' incomes. Prior to liberalisation, India boasted a highly organised food distribution system which ensured basic food-grains were available to the poor at very subsidised rates. Today, in an attempt to lessen food dependence, this system is unravelling. But say critics of the policy: depriving India's poor of the little security they had has only aggravated the problem of an already inadequate diet.

BRINDA KARAT: The head profile of India's poor has seen a vast deterioration - it's not as though before globalisation, you know, everybody was well fed and healthy; you already started from a very, very low level! What globalisation has done for the vast mass of India's poor is to push them further to the brink - to marginalise further.

Dr.CAROLINE FALL: With globalisation, there are widening inequalities so that there are large numbers of families - and therefore women - who are remaining poor and undernourished. And therefore this low birthweight problem will be perpetuated, if not worsened.

SUBTITLES: 'Flames from all directions have swallowed our world. . .

'Will the government of this country. . . Answer why this is so?

'We ask only for more wages, jobs for the jobless and some land to till. . .

'But all we get are threats of prison terms, bullets and sticks'

BRINDA KARAT: You create the poor; you create poverty, and then you punish the poor for being poor!

SUBTITLES: 'Will the government of this country answer why this is so?'

COMM: Ten years into the free economy there is growing concern that India is leaving behind a major chunk of its population in its rush to join the global market. The question is: who will be answerable for these lost generations?

END