Question

I want summary of 12th Hsc board English chapter "India's underclass gets upwardly mobile". I cannot find it anywhere and it's hard to understand kindly help me with that

Answer 1

But most important of all, as my story ..

Read more at:

https://m.timesofindia.com/shashi-tharoor/shashi-on-sunday/Indias-underclass-gets-upwardly-mobile/articleshow/2929415.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Answer 2

This is an article by Shashi Taroor about how our nation developed from land-line telephones that were a rarity then to today's mobile phones where each and every person can be seen having one, including toddy tappers

Explanation:

• The writer talks about having visited a farm of his friend in Kerala and was surprised to see the a toddy tapper having a mobile phone, rather, he was marveled  at what the cellphone revolution has brought to our nation. The writer talks about his book ‘The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone’ which is about the transformation of India and to him me the cellphone is the instrument which most epitomises this transition.
• The writer says that he grew in an India where land-line telephones were both rare and practically useless. He says, when he left India in the year 1975 to go to the US for higher studies there were about 600 million resident in the nation and only 2 million telephones. Having a telephone was a rare privilege, and if one was an important government official, or a journalist, or a doctor, they needed to wait for very long to get a land-line telephone. Telephones were such a rarity that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate fifteen telephone connections to whomever they considered worthy.
• However, the writer also mentions the problems with landline telephones such as you never get a dial tone many times, or the line used to get connected to the wrong person, or to someone else conversation, etc. , And, in the year 1984, the telecommunication minister when was questioned about this inadequacies he replied saying that " that in a developing country, telephones were a luxury, not a right; that the government had no obligation to provide better services". Yet for this inadequate instrument there was a long waiting list to get it and people who had it considered themselves privileged
• The writer says in the present  Today, India sells four times more telephones for one month than it had for the entire world three decades earlier. Attitudes too have shifted, from that of today's educated telecom regulatory authority to those of the former communications minister in India, a role model of their kind.
• For the cellphones are now in the hands of people such as the toddy tapper, the iron man,  chauffeur, fisherfolk, farmers, etc, who would not have presumed, a generation ago, to put themselves on on those 8-year-long waiting-lists
• The writer concludes  by saying that mobile phone is not a panacea, it won't universally lead to the growth of our nation after independence. It makes a big difference, though. However, it has empowered the Indian underclass in ways that 45 years of talking about socialism has notably failed to do so