Places and forms of power: the influence of media on the populations

...

Is today's India a modern country ?

In class we studied documents about the idea of progress and in particular about India.

The documents that I will use are “The two Indias”, “Changing India” and “Is microcredit changing India ?”.

I) the idea of progress

- In India, the concept of microcredit seems to have changing the country. This system consists in granting small loans to people who can't get loans from traditional banks because they are too poor. Microcredit has enabled many Indian people, even the women and the Dalits (or the Untouchables), to start their own enterprise. It contributes to Indian economic expansion and has even been helped some poor people and their families to extricate themselves from poverty.

-high tech cities → shows economic development. Ex: Bangalore

-lowering of poverty rate (1993 → 45% and 2011 → 21%)

II) But there are a lot of contradictions

-Although the caste system has been officially abolished and even if the government implements affirmative action policies toward the Dalits (or the Untouchables), there are still many inequalities between the different groups and discriminatory traditions against Dalits (or Untouchables) still prevail. Today, less than a third of the 170 million Dalits in India are literate and well over 40 percent survive on less than 2 dollars a day. It's one of the most prominent form of discrimination among citizens in India.

-Today, the World Bank estimates that about 800 million people, two-thirds (2/3) of India's population live below two dollar a day and, more than half of them over 400 million people survive on less than one dollar a day. In 2005, 42% Indian people were living below 1 € a day. Poverty in India is still very high and concerning.

Spaces and Exchanges

I'm going to talk about the notion Spaces and exchanges. To begin with, I'd like to give a definition of exchange. The different spaces of the world are nowadays more and more connected to each other. The exchanges can appear on many forms: people, trade, information. The immigration is linked to this notion as it implies the motion of legal and illegal people to other countries.

Is Great-Britain a multi cultural society ?

We studied in class several documents about this, I have chosen 3 of them which are the photography “The Black Queen”, “The Union Jack and the British Asian girl” and “This is Britain”

Black Queen: magazine cover, photo-montage. Queen of all → whites, blacks, asians… This show how GB is has a diversity population, every inhabitants of GB are united despite their ethnic origins. Multicultural country

Union Jack: magazine cover → “Union Jack” symbolizes British Culture whereas the woman and the traditional jewel symbolizes Indian culture which is an essential aspect of today’s Britain. Happy co-existence of both culture. She seems to be proud of both. Today Britain takes into account diversity of culture.

Very different ex colony around the world → Commonwealths (54 countrys) so a lot of diversity ethnic and cultural

Black Britons: Black Britons feel more British than before. The majority of people in Britain feel more British than in the past. Since 1960’s, Black academics, artistes… became “Britishness” or “black British”. Now, no contradiction between ethnicity and nationality. But people feel more Scottish or Welsh or English than British. North England and south-east