Thursday 15 January, 2009
Empowerment
We arrived at 10:30 for a meeting with the women leaders of one of Amethi district's 1200 villages. They told a remarkable story of genuine empowerment - right down to threatening to beat up the corrupt local police. These were the poorest of the poor, but came from all castes, 5 out of 40 had mobile phones, and none could conceive of Britain - even Delhi was a long stretch. There was real appreciation for the programmes of self-help, micro-finance and education that have been introduced.

Squirm
Amethi was the last place I would have expected to watch my first cataract operation. But the drive to end blindness from cataract disease is real. 12,000 cataract operations per year are being done in state of the art facilities, for the equivalent of just $10 for the operation. The operation projected onto a TV screen was a stomach-turner, but the change in people's lives was real.

Wednesday 14 January, 2009
Amethi
I am at the airport on the way to Amethi district in Uttar Pradash. 800m Indians live on less than 2 dollars a day, 450m on less than 1 dollar. Today I will get a chance to see some of the gap that exists between metropolitan middle class India and the rest.