terms of poverty and income, nearly one third of the world's poor live in India. The complexities of ths situation are compounded by vast disparities between the States. Thus 90% of the population of Kerala above the age of 7 years is literate, while the comparable figures for Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh are 44%, 41% and 47% res~ectively. Increasingly, it becomes evident that the way to improve the quality of life of people is to invest wisely and substantially in education and health. In India, such investment is $14 per person per annum; in the Republic of Korea it is $160. To mention such figures is no: to decry the efforts made since Independence, when life expectancy was 27 years, as against 61 years in 1993, when the country was ravaged by food scarcity and frequently wracked by famine and is now, on balance, proudly selfsufficient. But the 'purpose is, indeed, to remind ourselves that the pledge of Independence is far from being redeemed for many in this country, when it comes to the exercise of tl-eir economic and social rights. This short-coming diminishes us as a nation, and inhibits the capacity of our compatriots to exercise their civil and political rights with the freedom and clarity that is their due. 2.15 It is for reasons such as these that this Commission has considered it to be its duty to repeatedly recommend and press far the right to free and compulsory education for the children of this country upto the age of 14 years as Article 45 of the Constitution directs. It is for similar reasons that the Commission has urged greater gender equality and respect for the rights of women, in accordance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). It is facts such as these that have compelled the Commission to take cognizance of complaints that drinking watzr supplies in vast stretches of Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal are poisoned by fluoride or arsenic. And it is, again, for reasons of human dignity, that the Commission has intervened to heighten awareness of the plight of innumerable young mathers in India who, despite readily available and inexpensive forms of preventive action, give birth to children with mental disabilities because of iron and iodine deficiencies in meir diet. It was similar compulsions that led the Commission to investigate the arcurnstances of tribals ousted from the site of Bargi Dam on the river Narmada. And it was complaints of d e a t h by starvation resulting from the drought, that led the Commission to send its two senior-most officers to look into the situation in the districts cf Bolangir and Kalahandi in the course of this year. 2.16 In the seztions that follow, a detailed account is provided on the specific ways in which the Commission, in this fiftieth year of Independence, sought to continue to redeem the pledge of the founding fathers of this Republic.