An amazing show of inequality

[chem1st]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/8063385/Indias-richest-man-Mukesh-Ambani-moves-into-630m-home.html

 

The 53 year-old tycoon is not only the richest man in India but the fourth richest man in the world. In total there is reported to be 37,000 square metres of space, which is more than the Palace of Versailles.

(9.14 acres of space)

 

Meanwhile, just 6 miles up t'road is Dharavi...

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/theroyalfamily/8051263/Britain-could-learn-lessons-from-Mumbai-slums-says-Prince-of-Wales.html

 

Dharavi, which at 430 acres is less than half the size of the Prince’s Highgrove Estate, is home to between 600,000 and one million people.

 

 

What an amazing show of inequality.

 

The man's house (albeit in the form of a skyscraper), occupies the same amount of space as the slum accommodation for over 20000 of his fellow people just an hours walk away.

[max]

Looks like they both had the same architect though. That tower looks like a pile of shanty houses stacked one atop the other.

[Fareast]

Sounds like the old tycoon is a sort of spiritual descendent of one of the Maharajahs. Plus la change..........?

[Nagel]

The inequality in India is the thing that most people find most shocking when they visit. You will never refer to anyone in Britain as living in poverty again after you have visited India.

[Fareast]

I think the extent and depth of poverty in places like India [ which doesn 't have a monopoly on grinding poverty ] is one reason why many people in the West feel very much affronted whenever our way of life is criticised so much and so often. Yes, we have our own problems, albeit of a different nature, but I can 't imagine any country in the West getting into a dire condition like India.....or some other places.

India has been independent for 63 years now. Surely to God, they could have done better for their own people-----if the will to do so had been there----economic will, moral will, social will and religous will-------or just plain, good old-fashioned human compassion a la Mother Theresa ??

[Forumosaurus]

Ok judging by those two articles I'd give that a massive 1 on the gini coefficient

[Darth Vader]

You will never refer to anyone in Britain as living in poverty again after you have visited India.

 

Give it time, I think it's a model our government is looking towards. Even under Brown the divide got bigger didn't it? What's it going to be like after this lot?

 

Not wanting to take anything away from the OP though, it is shocking, and it's hard even for us to imagine life like that.

 

I wonder how much the rich guy pays in taxes and where it goes?

[Forumosaurus]

The inequality in India is the thing that most people find most shocking when they visit. You will never refer to anyone in Britain as living in poverty again after you have visited India.

 

Yeah but relative poverty is what matters not absolute. And, in the UK it's, almost worse because, those in poverty have to regularly mix with those who aren't, at school for example, so they know what they're missing, they know where they are relative to the rest of the country/school/class. They know what they're missing and there is a constant reminder of it.

 

These Indian kids, because the divide is so massive, the slum kids will only ever mix with each other, so, even though they know they're poor as they probably have some sort of access to the city, relative to their immediate and even not so immediate surroundings, they're not, so it's probably not something that bothers them too much, the fact that they live in shacks.

 

Like you know, on the scale of sadness, although, on the face of it the Indian kids situation seems worse but watch these two examples:

 

Indian Kid: Ah man, I don't really have much of a house, but neither do my friends and everybody in my city so, I don't seem that bad off after all =] . Sadness scale 2

 

UK Kid: Ah man, the front of my shoe is coming unglued and my toes are sticking out, I'm going to get picked on at school because everyone else has nice shoes =[ Sadness scale 8

 

You know, in an absolute sense, the Indian kids situation is far worse, obviously, but in a relative sense...he's not too fussed because that's how he's lived his life and, he's living it pretty similar to those around him and they're all in the same boat.

 

So you got to feel for the UK kid more.

 

You know, the sadness scales would be reversed if everybody got a nice new house instead of a shack, except that one Indian Kid's family, and in the UK, all the kids in the school had bad shoes, cause relative to everyone else in his school..he wouldn't have bad shoes anymore, but relative to all the Indian kid's neighbours, his shack is now crap.

[chem1st]

I'd say we'd have to be more sad for the Indian child tbh Richy.

 

The Indian kid wakes up in a morning to his poverty and looks up into the sky and sees the house of god himself, whilst aspiring to bread or rice of an evening.

[chem1st]

Sheffield City Lofts, the tallest building in Sheffiled is a mere 101m in height.

 

Anitillia is 173m.

 

Costwise, quite possibly the same.