INDIA-‘our motherland’ is the 7th largest country by geographical area, the 2nd most populous country, and the most populous democracy (so called) in the world. India is a republic consisting of 28 states and 7 UTs with a parliamentary system of democracy. The Indian economy is the world's 11th largest economy by nominal GDP and the 4th largest by purchasing power parity. Economic reforms since 1991 have transformed it into one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
Inspite of being such a largest economy by GDP and PPP, the bitter truth is that India is still a developing economy which is trying to be developed for last more than 60 years now and with no change of status. Why??We are independent now and having largest democracy which also is well stabilised. We the people of India have shown to the world that we are the most intelligent brains and most hard-working race and we have the potential to achieve whatever we want. We can find successful Indians everywhere in the world (but -but rarely in India). We all are proud to be an INDIAN but we are not proud of living here. Isn’t it??Something surely must be responsible for all this.
Our present Prime Minister has done great job in stabilising the economic scenario in India and reforms since then have transformed it into one of the fastest growing economies. But then why still we are lagging behind?? Nah it cannot be the pace with which we are growing, neither it is the industrialisation (atleast I don’t think so) but still for the last 60 years we are struggling to enrol our name in the developed nations of the world. But since we are not there, then there should be some reason which our govt is overlooking.Yes,there is a most important factor which our govt is not giving importance to and that is HDI. India ranks ‘134’ on Human Development Index chart and this clearly shows where are we lagging.
As an economist, our PM knows better than you or I that the things that need drastic, revolutionary change lie mostly in what economists call the social sector. Our state schools are among the worst in the world, our public hospitals are horrific, we have more mobile phones than public toilets and this absence of basic sanitation along with unclean water is the cause of most of our diseases. No matter how fast the economy grows, no matter how much money we pour into NREGA, no matter how many airports and roads we build, if we fail on the education and public health front, there is no chance of India becoming a developed country in this century.
Sadly, all that Dr Manmohan Singh’s social sector ministers have done is tiptoe around these problems and pass the buck to the state governments. It is true that primary education and healthcare are state subjects but it is also true that when the Government of India lights up a new path, state governments happily walk down it. Did a single chief minister sneer when Rajiv Gandhi came up with the idea of Navodaya Vidyalayas? And, nobody would sneer now if Kapil Sibal formulates a policy to radically improve state schools. India used to have the best universities in Asia in the sixties and the seventies. We no longer do and the reason is mostly too much government intervention. It is on account of too much government intervention that we are nowhere near building the 600 more universities that we desperately need. Instead of getting on with the job, the Government of India spends its time banging on about the Right to Education Bill. What use is the right to education if there are not enough schools and colleges? Indian citizens already have the right to free healthcare but so horrendous is the state of our public hospitals that more than 80 per cent of Indians use private services. Nothing has been done to make things better. Nothing at all. What makes things worse is that, for those who can afford it, private hospitals in India are today among the best in the world. We receive increasing numbers of medical tourists every year. If public hospitals are to improve, we need hundreds of thousands more doctors and nurses but government makes it almost impossible to set up new medical colleges. Now that they have caught the criminal who was running the Medical Council of India like a mafia operation, can something not be done to facilitate the setting up of new medical and nursing colleges?
On the sanitation front, it is something of an achievement that the Ministry of Urban Development did a survey of our cities and found that not one of them meets standards of hygiene and sanitation. Now that the Minister has discovered this, could he please come up with solutions? It’s true that every city must deal with its own unique problems but can the Ministry of Urban Development not act as a consultant? There are other areas in which Dr Manmohan Singh’s second government is not showing dynamism but in my humble opinion, there is nothing more important than education, healthcare and sanitation. Everything else will fall into place once we have healthy, educated citizens who live in sanitary towns, cities and villages. Why is India one of the only countries left in the world that has not been able to deal with problems that are so fundamentally important? Why is the Prime Minister unable to make the sort of dramatic changes here that he made with the economy in the nineties?
The inability of our govt to deal with such fundamental problems is only responsible for a sense of backwardness among its citizens. I am waiting for the time when our govt will focus on such problems and do its job to make really INDIA SHINING!!
