Deprivation of basic necessities in India is equal to worse than sub-Saharan Africa. Just look at any data on food, clothing, shelterm sanitation etc. and you'll know it.
Not knowing Friedman and Stratfor shows your own ignorance. Even people who don't like him and his think tank analyses have at least heard of him.
Manmohan Singh, Bharat Verma, Prof Pradeep Chhibber of UC Berkeley know more than you about the reality of Maoists insurgency.
It is conservatively estimated that Maoists, also known as Naxalites, control almost 25% of Indian territory in eastern and central states. Indian defense analyst Bharat Verma claims that "New Delhi and the state capitals have almost ceded the governmental control over 40 percent of the Union's territory to the Naxalites". A Newsweek story last year quoted Deepak Ambastha, the editor of Prabhat Khabar, a Hindi daily newspaper in Jharkhand state, as saying that "the state's writ runs only within city limits." Similar situation exists in many of the 20 Indian states, home to nearly 80 percent of those 836 million Indians, where the Maoists dominate the rural landscape. Indian government knows that it can ignore the Naxal threat at its own peril.
Haq's Musings: India Targets Rights Groups as Maoist Insurgency Grows
