Evan Spiegel,
Sir, You said that “India is a poor country” and trust me I’ve no problem with that what you said because this is what you believe. Here, you pointed out me to think over the problem of the vicious circle of poverty in my country. In India, the moment you stop your car at the traffic red light, you see a woman with a child in her arm come running to you or a little boy with running nose banging your car window or a handicapped old man asking for alms. This is a common sight in India. You will find many of these people in the railway stations, metro stations, and tourist spots, in temples and in many areas where there is a regular crowd. At times, out of sheer pity or out of fear from being cursed by God or out of irritation, we tend to give them some coins or money and shoo them away.
Yes, frequent flood, famine, earthquake and cyclone cause heavy damage to agriculture. Moreover, absence of timely rain, excessive or deficient rain affect severely country’s agricultural production. The growth of population here exceeds the rate of growth in national income but also lowers the per capita income which tends to increase poverty. There are farmers who are committing suicide as they are living in the atrocious conditions where they are unable either to pay their debts or to earn basic livelihood for their families. They do protest at Parliament Street where they ask for their dues sanctioned by our beloved ministers during budget session this year which was around Rs. 40,000 crores. If we can give this much portion to our farmers then how can you say us poor? (inspite the fact that we ourselves don’t know where it actually goes- to pocket of a farmer or somebody else)
No one has the right to say us poor because I think you’ve never heard the numbers of scam our country had, where thousand crores rupees were involved. Let me tell you about that too- bofor scam, fodder scam, Harshad Mehta scam, common wealth scam, chopper scam, Telgi scam, coal scam, 2G scam etc etc. ( I just stop myself writing about more because I’ve my final exams next week and I haven’t read anything yet)
You are not the first person to say such things about India, there are many Indians itself who have already published their books and articles saying India is the world’s poorest country. India super poor, not superpower, said Shashi Tharoor to Deccan Chronicle. At the same time we had APJ Abdul Kalam, I’m sure, you must have heard about this great personality and his works. In his book Lead India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium A.P.J. Abdul Kalam said, developed India by 2020, or even earlier, is not a dream. It need not be a mere vision in the minds of many Indians. It is a mission we can all take up and succeed.
According to the report by New World Wealth, India has been ranked seventh in the list of top 10 wealthiest countries in the world, which was topped by the United States with total individual wealth of $48,700 billion.
India has huge natural resources in terms of natural gas, coal and metal ores. India is the second largest country in the world in terms of GDP. It’s around $2290 billion which is around Rs 15343000 crore. Demographics-wise India is the country with the youngest population. This means that the dependency ratio will be the lowest. So we are a rich economy, we do have everything that is needed to make our citizens wealth, it is just that we need to be a bit more productive.
Evan, but when you say- SNAPCHAT is not meant for Indians, it’s for rich people not for poor like us. I won’t agree with you here, India has bypassed Japan to become the world’s third largest Internet user after China and the United States, and its users are significantly younger than those of other emerging economies, global digital measurement and analytics firm comScore has said in a report.
You’ve already lost many Indian snapchat users due to your remarks.
PS: One more thing to say, this is a friend of a person (Swati Garg) who does lot of snapchat in a day that I can’t even count.
Shweta Kukreti