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From Wikipedia:
Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore to independence and served as its first prime minister. He was regularly re-elected from 1959 until he stepped down in 1990. Lee Kuan Yew was educated in England, and under his guidance Singapore became a financial and industrial powerhouse despite a lack of abundant natural resources. Lee ruled with ultimate authority, and his zeal for law and order was legendary. In 1990 he stepped down (though he remained in the cabinet as senior minister) and was succeeded as prime minister by Goh Chok Tong.
Excerpts from his 2005 speech:
INDIA IN AN ASIAN RENAISSANCE
I thank the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Jawaharlal
Nehru Memorial Fund, Mrs Sonia Gandhi (its Chair Person) for inviting me
to give the Nehru Lecture.
I belong to that generation of Asian nationalists who looked up
to India’s freedom struggle and its leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru.
I had read Nehru’s books like “The Discovery of India”, culled
from his letters from prison to his daughter Indira and many of his speeches.
On 14 August 1947, when I was a young student in Cambridge, I remember
vividly the moving and unforgettable opening of Nehru’s broadcast on the
eve of independence, “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and
now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full
measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the
world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which
comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when
an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds
utterance.”
The destiny Nehru envisaged was of a modern, industrialised,
democratic and secular India that would take its place in the larger historic
flows of the second half of the 20th Century.
Nehru never doubted India's place in the world. When
imprisoned in Ahmadnager Fort during the Second World War, he wrote:
"Though not directly a Pacific state, India will inevitably exercise an
important influence there, . . . Her position gives an economic and strategic
importance in a part of the world which is going to develop rapidly in the
future."
Nehru’s speeches resonated with me. I shared intellectual and
emotional roots with Nehru because I had also experienced discrimination
and subjugation under the British Raj and admired Nehru for his vision of a
secular multiracial India, a country that does not discriminate between
citizens because of their race, language, religion or culture. I first visited
New Delhi in 1959 for a conference of the International Commission of
Jurists (ICJ). Nehru opened the conference at the Vigyan Bhavan. He
arrived in a modest Hindustan (Morris Oxford, Made in India). Later in
April 1962, when I was Prime Minister of Singapore, Nehru gave me time
for several discussions about Singapore’s merger with Malaya to form the
Federation of Malaysia. He encouraged and supported my ideas. Nehru
received me again in February 1964 on my return from a visit to 17 countries
in Africa.
Like Nehru, I had been influenced by the ideas of the British
Fabian society. But I soon realised that before distributing the pie I had first
to bake it. So I departed from welfarism because it sapped a people’s selfreliance
and their desire to excel and succeed. I also abandoned the model of
industrialisation through import substitution. When most of the Third World
was deeply suspicious of exploitation by western MNCs (multinational
corporations), Singapore invited them in. They helped us grow, brought in
technology and know-how, and raised productivity levels faster than any
alternative strategy could.
Nehru had a great vision for India and for Asia and his elegant
style of writing and speech captivated many young minds in the British
empire. He had insights into the causes of India’s problems, but, burdened
by too many issues, he left the implementation of his ideas and policies to
his ministers and secretaries. Sadly they did not achieve the results India
deserved.
Nehru's ideal of democratic socialism was bureaucratised by
Indian officials who were influenced by the Soviet model of central
planning. That eventually led to the “Licence Raj”, corruption and slow
growth.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union
undercut the strategic premises of India's external and economic policies.
By 1991, with the country on the verge of bankruptcy, India had no choice
but to change. Some Indians believe that, had Rajiv Gandhi lived to serve a
second term as India’s Prime Minister, he would have pushed for major
reform. But he was cut down before he was able to.
It was left to PM Narasimha Rao to make the big move in 1991.
Later that year, then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and Commerce
Minister Chidambaram gave a seminar in Singapore on India’s new policy of
reform and opening up. In 1992, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao met
Singapore’s then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong at the Non-Aligned
Conference in Jakarta and persuaded him to visit India with a delegation of
Singapore businessmen. PM Goh visited India from 23-30 January 1994 and
returned enthused.
In January 1996, I visited New Delhi and spoke to civil servants
and businessmen on the changes that Prime Minister Rao and his team were
putting into place. I said that India's 'tryst with destiny' had been repeatedly
postponed.
When I published the second volume of my Memoirs in 2000, I
wrote "India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain
fallow, under-used."
_____________________________________________________________
East Asia is coalescing, brought together by market forces.
India, China and Japan are readjusting their relationships with each other and
with the US. This will not be an easy process because all countries want to
preserve their independence and space to grow. If there are no mishaps by
2050 the US, China, India and Japan will be economic heavyweights, as will
Russia if it converts its revenue from oil and gas into long term value in
infrastructure and non-oil industries.
India is an intrinsic part of this unfolding new world order.
India can no longer be dismissed as a "wounded civilisation", in the hurtful
phrase of a westernised non-resident Indian author (V.S. Naipal). Instead,
the western media, market analysts, and the International Financial
Institutions now show-case India as a success story and the next big
opportunity.
______________________________________________________________
Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian political economy at
Columbia University, USA, puts the issue clearly. He noted that some have
argued that India can focus on IT, grow rapidly in services, skip
industrialization, and yet transform itself from a primarily rural and
agricultural country into a modern economy. He dismissed such ideas as
"hopelessly flawed" and "far-fetched".
IT is less than 2% of India's GDP. While services have grown
rapidly, the bulk of the growth is from service sectors where wages and
productivity are low. Business services, which include software and
IT-enabled services, account for only 0.3% of GDP. Only manufacturing
can mop up India’s vast pool of unemployed, narrow the urban-rural divide
and reduce poverty. Professor Panagariya concluded:
"The right strategy for India is to walk on two legs: traditional labour
intensive industry and modern IT. Both legs need strengthening through
further reforms ...."
India's relatively young population can be an asset if they are
universally well educated. UN forecasts that India's population will outstrip
China’s by 2030. Job creation through faster GDP growth is therefore an
urgent necessity. Growth in IT and other services will not create enough
jobs. IT-related jobs make up only one quarter of one percent of India's
labour force.
To create jobs the main thrust of reforms must be in
manufacturing. That requires a change in labour laws to allow employers to
retrench workers when business demand is down, streamlining the judicial
processes, reducing the fiscal deficit, loosening up the bureaucracy, and most
of all improving infrastructure. Let me focus on the last two as I believe
they are crucial and inter-connected.
Industrialisation cannot take off without adequate infrastructure:
better roads, and a reliable supply of power and clean water, better ports and
airports. By one estimate, economic losses from congestion and poor roads
alone are as high as US$4 to 6 billion a year. Another estimate is that the
cost of most infrastructure services in India is about 50% to 100% higher
than in China. The average cost of electricity for manufacturing in India is
about double that in China; railway transport costs in India are three times
those in China. China has spent over eight times as much as India on its
infrastructure. Three years ago, China's total capital spending on electricity,
construction, transportation, telecommunications and real estate was
US$260 billion or more than 20 percent of its GDP as compared to
US$31 billion or 8 percent of India’s GDP.
They believe it is a mindset problem. The average Indian civil
servant still sees himself primarily as a regulator and not as a facilitator. The
average Indian bureaucrat has not yet accepted that it is not a sin to make
profits and become rich. The average Indian bureaucrat has little trust in
India’s business community. They view Indian businessmen as money
grabbing opportunists who do not have the welfare of the country at heart;
and all the more so if they are foreign businessmen. Deng Xiaoping said at
the start of China’s open door policy, it was glorious to be rich. The sequel is
reported in Forbes Asia, November 14 2005, where it listed over 300
China’s richest, 40 of them with thumbnail CVs in a centre-fold. All are
new entrepreneurs creating jobs and spreading wealth. Now, after private
enterprise and the free market have generated wealth in the coastal
provinces, China’s leaders have concentrated on spreading growth to the
inland provinces by building infrastructure and offering generous economic
incentives for investments.
One Singapore businessman told me this story. He entertained
a former senior Indian civil servant to lunch in Singapore. Some months
later when he was in India, the former civil servant reciprocated by hosting a
dinner at which several other guests were present. His host made this
surprising comment that he was amazed to see that in Singapore, a business
could be successful without being dishonest.
India must find some way to reward bureaucrats who facilitate,
not hinder investments and enterprise whether Indian or foreign.
A factor worth noting: India gets a much better economic return
for the investment it makes in its economy because India’s private sector
capital efficiency is high. If India opens up fully to FDIs, the results will be
profitable for the investor and add considerable employment and added GDP
growth for India. With jobs there will be a trickle down of wealth to
millions of Indian workers, as there has been in East Asia.
_________________________________________________________
Prime Minister Singh added, "We are a coalition government and that limits
our options in some ways."
Politics is a fact of life in any country. And coalition politics is
a fact of Indian political life.
It has been suggested that India's slow growth is the
consequence of its democratic system of government. Almost 40 years ago,
Professor Jagdish Bhagwati wrote that India may face a "cruel choice
between rapid expansion and democratic processes".
But democracy should not be made an alibi for inertia. There
are many examples of authoritarian governments whose economies have
failed. There are as many examples of democratic governments who have
achieved superior economic performance. The real issue is whether any
country's political system, irrespective of whether it is democratic or
authoritarian, can forge a consensus on the policies needed for the economy
to grow and create jobs for all, and can ensure that these basic policies are
implemented consistently without large leakage. India’s elite in politics, the
media, the academia and think tanks can re-define the issues and recast the
political debate. They should, for instance, insist on the provision of a much
higher standard of municipal services.
Imponderables
There are some imponderables. American commentators believe
that China’s political system is too rigid, that it does not have the flexibility
of pluralistic politics and democracy with freedom of speech, the media,
assembly and respect for human rights. So China will encounter severe
problems and setbacks. Professor Pranab Bardhan1 of University of
California, Berkeley, has explained the problem this way:
“China's authoritarian system of government will likely be a
major economic liability in the long run, regardless of its
immediate implications for short-run policy decisions.
“But inequalities (particularly rural-urban) have been
increasing in China, and those left behind are getting restive.
With massive layoffs in the rust-belt provinces, arbitrary local
levies on farmers, pervasive official corruption, and toxic
industrial dumping, many in the countryside are highly
agitated.
“China is far behind India in the ability to politically manage
conflicts, and this may prove to be China's Achilles' Heel. Over
the last fifty years, India's extremely heterogeneous society has
been riddled with various kinds of conflicts, but the system has
by and large managed these conflicts and kept them within
moderate bounds. For many centuries, the homogenizing
tradition of Chinese high culture, language, and bureaucracy
has not given much scope to pluralism and diversity, and a
centralizing, authoritarian Communist Party has carried on
with this tradition”.
_________________________________________________________________
To read the full speech, please click here:
http://www.bridgesingapore.com/externalreports/37th-jawaharlal-nehru-memorial-lecture-lee-kuan.pdf
Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore to independence and served as its first prime minister. He was regularly re-elected from 1959 until he stepped down in 1990. Lee Kuan Yew was educated in England, and under his guidance Singapore became a financial and industrial powerhouse despite a lack of abundant natural resources. Lee ruled with ultimate authority, and his zeal for law and order was legendary. In 1990 he stepped down (though he remained in the cabinet as senior minister) and was succeeded as prime minister by Goh Chok Tong.
Excerpts from his 2005 speech:
INDIA IN AN ASIAN RENAISSANCE
I thank the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Jawaharlal
Nehru Memorial Fund, Mrs Sonia Gandhi (its Chair Person) for inviting me
to give the Nehru Lecture.
I belong to that generation of Asian nationalists who looked up
to India’s freedom struggle and its leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru.
I had read Nehru’s books like “The Discovery of India”, culled
from his letters from prison to his daughter Indira and many of his speeches.
On 14 August 1947, when I was a young student in Cambridge, I remember
vividly the moving and unforgettable opening of Nehru’s broadcast on the
eve of independence, “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and
now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full
measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the
world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which
comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when
an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds
utterance.”
The destiny Nehru envisaged was of a modern, industrialised,
democratic and secular India that would take its place in the larger historic
flows of the second half of the 20th Century.
Nehru never doubted India's place in the world. When
imprisoned in Ahmadnager Fort during the Second World War, he wrote:
"Though not directly a Pacific state, India will inevitably exercise an
important influence there, . . . Her position gives an economic and strategic
importance in a part of the world which is going to develop rapidly in the
future."
Nehru’s speeches resonated with me. I shared intellectual and
emotional roots with Nehru because I had also experienced discrimination
and subjugation under the British Raj and admired Nehru for his vision of a
secular multiracial India, a country that does not discriminate between
citizens because of their race, language, religion or culture. I first visited
New Delhi in 1959 for a conference of the International Commission of
Jurists (ICJ). Nehru opened the conference at the Vigyan Bhavan. He
arrived in a modest Hindustan (Morris Oxford, Made in India). Later in
April 1962, when I was Prime Minister of Singapore, Nehru gave me time
for several discussions about Singapore’s merger with Malaya to form the
Federation of Malaysia. He encouraged and supported my ideas. Nehru
received me again in February 1964 on my return from a visit to 17 countries
in Africa.
Like Nehru, I had been influenced by the ideas of the British
Fabian society. But I soon realised that before distributing the pie I had first
to bake it. So I departed from welfarism because it sapped a people’s selfreliance
and their desire to excel and succeed. I also abandoned the model of
industrialisation through import substitution. When most of the Third World
was deeply suspicious of exploitation by western MNCs (multinational
corporations), Singapore invited them in. They helped us grow, brought in
technology and know-how, and raised productivity levels faster than any
alternative strategy could.
Nehru had a great vision for India and for Asia and his elegant
style of writing and speech captivated many young minds in the British
empire. He had insights into the causes of India’s problems, but, burdened
by too many issues, he left the implementation of his ideas and policies to
his ministers and secretaries. Sadly they did not achieve the results India
deserved.
Nehru's ideal of democratic socialism was bureaucratised by
Indian officials who were influenced by the Soviet model of central
planning. That eventually led to the “Licence Raj”, corruption and slow
growth.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union
undercut the strategic premises of India's external and economic policies.
By 1991, with the country on the verge of bankruptcy, India had no choice
but to change. Some Indians believe that, had Rajiv Gandhi lived to serve a
second term as India’s Prime Minister, he would have pushed for major
reform. But he was cut down before he was able to.
It was left to PM Narasimha Rao to make the big move in 1991.
Later that year, then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and Commerce
Minister Chidambaram gave a seminar in Singapore on India’s new policy of
reform and opening up. In 1992, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao met
Singapore’s then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong at the Non-Aligned
Conference in Jakarta and persuaded him to visit India with a delegation of
Singapore businessmen. PM Goh visited India from 23-30 January 1994 and
returned enthused.
In January 1996, I visited New Delhi and spoke to civil servants
and businessmen on the changes that Prime Minister Rao and his team were
putting into place. I said that India's 'tryst with destiny' had been repeatedly
postponed.
When I published the second volume of my Memoirs in 2000, I
wrote "India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain
fallow, under-used."
_____________________________________________________________
East Asia is coalescing, brought together by market forces.
India, China and Japan are readjusting their relationships with each other and
with the US. This will not be an easy process because all countries want to
preserve their independence and space to grow. If there are no mishaps by
2050 the US, China, India and Japan will be economic heavyweights, as will
Russia if it converts its revenue from oil and gas into long term value in
infrastructure and non-oil industries.
India is an intrinsic part of this unfolding new world order.
India can no longer be dismissed as a "wounded civilisation", in the hurtful
phrase of a westernised non-resident Indian author (V.S. Naipal). Instead,
the western media, market analysts, and the International Financial
Institutions now show-case India as a success story and the next big
opportunity.
______________________________________________________________
Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian political economy at
Columbia University, USA, puts the issue clearly. He noted that some have
argued that India can focus on IT, grow rapidly in services, skip
industrialization, and yet transform itself from a primarily rural and
agricultural country into a modern economy. He dismissed such ideas as
"hopelessly flawed" and "far-fetched".
IT is less than 2% of India's GDP. While services have grown
rapidly, the bulk of the growth is from service sectors where wages and
productivity are low. Business services, which include software and
IT-enabled services, account for only 0.3% of GDP. Only manufacturing
can mop up India’s vast pool of unemployed, narrow the urban-rural divide
and reduce poverty. Professor Panagariya concluded:
"The right strategy for India is to walk on two legs: traditional labour
intensive industry and modern IT. Both legs need strengthening through
further reforms ...."
India's relatively young population can be an asset if they are
universally well educated. UN forecasts that India's population will outstrip
China’s by 2030. Job creation through faster GDP growth is therefore an
urgent necessity. Growth in IT and other services will not create enough
jobs. IT-related jobs make up only one quarter of one percent of India's
labour force.
To create jobs the main thrust of reforms must be in
manufacturing. That requires a change in labour laws to allow employers to
retrench workers when business demand is down, streamlining the judicial
processes, reducing the fiscal deficit, loosening up the bureaucracy, and most
of all improving infrastructure. Let me focus on the last two as I believe
they are crucial and inter-connected.
Industrialisation cannot take off without adequate infrastructure:
better roads, and a reliable supply of power and clean water, better ports and
airports. By one estimate, economic losses from congestion and poor roads
alone are as high as US$4 to 6 billion a year. Another estimate is that the
cost of most infrastructure services in India is about 50% to 100% higher
than in China. The average cost of electricity for manufacturing in India is
about double that in China; railway transport costs in India are three times
those in China. China has spent over eight times as much as India on its
infrastructure. Three years ago, China's total capital spending on electricity,
construction, transportation, telecommunications and real estate was
US$260 billion or more than 20 percent of its GDP as compared to
US$31 billion or 8 percent of India’s GDP.
They believe it is a mindset problem. The average Indian civil
servant still sees himself primarily as a regulator and not as a facilitator. The
average Indian bureaucrat has not yet accepted that it is not a sin to make
profits and become rich. The average Indian bureaucrat has little trust in
India’s business community. They view Indian businessmen as money
grabbing opportunists who do not have the welfare of the country at heart;
and all the more so if they are foreign businessmen. Deng Xiaoping said at
the start of China’s open door policy, it was glorious to be rich. The sequel is
reported in Forbes Asia, November 14 2005, where it listed over 300
China’s richest, 40 of them with thumbnail CVs in a centre-fold. All are
new entrepreneurs creating jobs and spreading wealth. Now, after private
enterprise and the free market have generated wealth in the coastal
provinces, China’s leaders have concentrated on spreading growth to the
inland provinces by building infrastructure and offering generous economic
incentives for investments.
One Singapore businessman told me this story. He entertained
a former senior Indian civil servant to lunch in Singapore. Some months
later when he was in India, the former civil servant reciprocated by hosting a
dinner at which several other guests were present. His host made this
surprising comment that he was amazed to see that in Singapore, a business
could be successful without being dishonest.
India must find some way to reward bureaucrats who facilitate,
not hinder investments and enterprise whether Indian or foreign.
A factor worth noting: India gets a much better economic return
for the investment it makes in its economy because India’s private sector
capital efficiency is high. If India opens up fully to FDIs, the results will be
profitable for the investor and add considerable employment and added GDP
growth for India. With jobs there will be a trickle down of wealth to
millions of Indian workers, as there has been in East Asia.
_________________________________________________________
Prime Minister Singh added, "We are a coalition government and that limits
our options in some ways."
Politics is a fact of life in any country. And coalition politics is
a fact of Indian political life.
It has been suggested that India's slow growth is the
consequence of its democratic system of government. Almost 40 years ago,
Professor Jagdish Bhagwati wrote that India may face a "cruel choice
between rapid expansion and democratic processes".
But democracy should not be made an alibi for inertia. There
are many examples of authoritarian governments whose economies have
failed. There are as many examples of democratic governments who have
achieved superior economic performance. The real issue is whether any
country's political system, irrespective of whether it is democratic or
authoritarian, can forge a consensus on the policies needed for the economy
to grow and create jobs for all, and can ensure that these basic policies are
implemented consistently without large leakage. India’s elite in politics, the
media, the academia and think tanks can re-define the issues and recast the
political debate. They should, for instance, insist on the provision of a much
higher standard of municipal services.
Imponderables
There are some imponderables. American commentators believe
that China’s political system is too rigid, that it does not have the flexibility
of pluralistic politics and democracy with freedom of speech, the media,
assembly and respect for human rights. So China will encounter severe
problems and setbacks. Professor Pranab Bardhan1 of University of
California, Berkeley, has explained the problem this way:
“China's authoritarian system of government will likely be a
major economic liability in the long run, regardless of its
immediate implications for short-run policy decisions.
“But inequalities (particularly rural-urban) have been
increasing in China, and those left behind are getting restive.
With massive layoffs in the rust-belt provinces, arbitrary local
levies on farmers, pervasive official corruption, and toxic
industrial dumping, many in the countryside are highly
agitated.
“China is far behind India in the ability to politically manage
conflicts, and this may prove to be China's Achilles' Heel. Over
the last fifty years, India's extremely heterogeneous society has
been riddled with various kinds of conflicts, but the system has
by and large managed these conflicts and kept them within
moderate bounds. For many centuries, the homogenizing
tradition of Chinese high culture, language, and bureaucracy
has not given much scope to pluralism and diversity, and a
centralizing, authoritarian Communist Party has carried on
with this tradition”.
_________________________________________________________________
To read the full speech, please click here:
http://www.bridgesingapore.com/externalreports/37th-jawaharlal-nehru-memorial-lecture-lee-kuan.pdf
