Not sure if the statistics are from 2002 or have been updated.<\/p>\n
\nAcademicians and professional Indians took pains to seek solutions to the long-standing problems among Indians at the Millennium Conference for Malaysian Indians in 2002.<\/p>\n
Working papers and proposals of an action plan were passed to MIC, but nothing fruitful came out of it. [Its obvious where these papers end up; Samy said nothing much happened for past two decades.<\/span>]<\/p>\n
“There are proposals we want MIC to take up… to get things moving.<\/p>\n
“There’s got to be implementation of specific policies to introduce change, not just mere talk,” says academician Professor Datuk Dr C.P. Ramachandran.<\/p>\n
While listing the negative statistics that Indians feature highest in his keynote address at the conference, Ramachandran also highlighted statistics that are far from depressing, like the Indians constituting 15.5 per cent of professionals<\/strong><\/span> in the country, including doctors (28.4 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, lawyers (26.8 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, dentists (21 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, veterinary surgeons (28.5 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, engineers (6.4 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, accountants (5.8 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, surveyors (3.0 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, architects (1.5 per cent)<\/strong><\/span>, scientists and of successful individuals in telecomunication, media, construction and other businesses.<\/p>\n
Among the negative statistics are the Indians recording the second-highest infant mortality rates<\/strong><\/span>; the highest school drop-out rates<\/strong><\/span>, best seen in the data that only five per cent of Indians reach the tertiary level <\/strong><\/span>compared with the national average of 7.5 per cent; the highest incidence of alcoholism<\/strong><\/span>, that cuts across all classes; the highest incidence of drug addiction in proportion to population<\/strong><\/span>; the highest number of prisoners in proportion to population<\/strong><\/span> and the largest number of gangs<\/strong><\/span>. Sixty per cent of serious crimes are committed by Indians<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n