Real Lives 2010 was developed with the help of developers at Neeti Solutions, in Pune, India. Pune is a city of five million people in Maharashtra state, not far from Mumbai. I visited Neeti for a week in November of 2008 to kick off the Real Lives 2010 project. Both Pune and Mumbai have seen big changes since I traveled there in 1985 on my way home from two years of Peace Corps work in Seychelles. Mumbai, of course, had changed its name from Bombay, but both cities also had seen enormous growth.

This growth was evident to me several ways, some positive and some negative. There were far fewer beggars on the street than 23 years before and the general living conditions seemed better for most people. There are more cars and the rickshaws are now motorized and not human-powered. With the increased affluence though has come traffic and polution like I have never seen before. Mumbai now sits under a cloud of smog much of the year that resembles what one would expect if there were a forest fire nearby.

I visited families in Pune and villages to the south that ranged from affluent to very poor. Like in the US, there is a huge variety of living conditions. However, the range I saw in India was skewed sharply toward poverty. The affluent were far less affluent than in the US and the poor were far poorer.

One village family I met shared their home with their livestock and had only one piece of furniture. Family members sat on rocks while tending a dung fire. We passed a migrant work crew, comprised entirely of women, breaking rocks with sledgehammers by the side of a rural road. I will never forget these sights.

Real Lives attempts to give users a sense of the range of living conditions in different parts of the world. However, no software can ever adequately convey the meaning of these differences.

Real Lives website

Checking the Real Lives 2010 Country tab we see the statistics to the left for India. How do those compare with the US? Here are the same statistics for the US:

Birth Rate: 14.0
Male Literacy: 99.0%
Female Literacy: 99.0%
Persons Per Telephone: 1
Persons Per Radio: 1
Persons Per Vehicle: 1
Purchasing Power Parity: $41,950
Wealth Per Capita: $66,650
GINI Index: 0.41
Urban: 80%
Human Development Index: 0.94

So there are huge differences between the US and India in these measures of affluence. I want to focus on one statistic, purchasing power parity. This is a good estimate of how much spending power the average individual has in a country after adjusting for cost of living. This number is 12 times higher in the US! This accounts for the enormous differences I saw when visiting Mumbai and Pune (which are, by the way, some of the wealthier parts of India). People, on average, are living on one twelth as much in India as they do in the US, after adjusting for cost of living. How would you do in the US if your income were reduced to a twelth of what it is now? Millions of people in India are doing something similar right now.

Future editions of this newsletter will feature stories from Real Lives users in this space. Do you have an inspiring story to tell about how Real Lives reached your students or a great idea for using Real Lives in the classroom? Email it to bobrunyan@educationalsimulations.com and we'll share it here and on the website at www.educationalsimulations.com.

Last month we offered a free site license to the school that did the best job of raising awareness and mobilizing students about conditions in Haiti after the earthquake. We free site licenses to the following two schools, which are doing some amazing work in this area:

Woodmen-Roberts Elementary School in Colorado Springs, Colorado
Benjamin Stoddert Middle School in Temple Hills, Maryland

Congratulations!