COMMENT ON INDIA ON CHANNEL 4 TV IN UK AND DEUTSCHE WELLE IN GERMANY

Date: 15 Aug 2007

Comment:

COMMENT BY CHANNEL 4TV, ENGLAND.

India's independence
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It's become one of the world's fastest growing economies since its independence 60 years ago. 

Yet amid all the pomp and ceremony in New Dehli, the tone of India's prime minister at today's commemorations was sober. 

Describing the high levels of malnutrition as a "national shame" -Manmohan Singh said his country needed to work harder to free itself from poverty ignorance and disease. Sixty years on from partition we look at the state of the world's most populous democracy.

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COMMENT BY DEUTSCHE WELLE, AUG 15, 07

India celebrates 60th anniversary

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told Indians celebrating 60 years
of independence from Britain that "the best is yet to come". Singh
was speaking after raising the Indian flag at Delhi's Red Fort,
where the British flag was lowered in 1947. He praised the work of
those who fought for India's freedom but said the country would only
be truly independent once it had eliminated poverty. Pakistan marked
its own 60th anniversary a day earlier. The partition in 1947 saw 10
million people cross borders in one of history's largest mass
migrations. But freedom for both countries came at a price as
hundreds of thousands of people died in the violence that followed.


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