As we celebrate India's remarkable economic growth of recent years and the rise of the IT and manufacturing sectors, we need to consider some sobering statistics: fully one quarter of the world's poor - almost 300 million - live in India. The IT sector accounts for almost 4 percent of GDP, but employs only a million people. About 65 percent of India's population depends on agriculture for its livelihood. In 2001, about 720 million people of India lived in 600,000 villages and 40 percent lived a significant distance from a road. And about 150 million of our countrymen live in slums.