Meanwhile, the other countries of South Asia are quietly moving past India, offering better living standards to their people.
Missile man
There’s little doubt that the man who started it all was APJ Abdul Kalam.
Collective delusion
Rather than bemusement, these incredible targets were actually met with admiration at the time.
Misplaced optimism
To the Planning Commission’s credit, it did not reproduce Kalam’s formulation of India becoming a superpower. However, it did continue the trend of Pollyannaishly overestimating how much a poor country can achieve in twenty years
The report’s actual predictions continue in much the same credulous vein. The report confidently states, “India will move from a low-income country to an upper-middle-income country”. That of course did not happen. As of today, India is very far away from being an upper-middle-income country (it would need to double its per capital gross national income to enter that bloc). Like its Raj siblings, Pakistan and Bangladesh, India is a lower-middle-income country. However, India’s small southern neighbour, Sri Lanka did quietly, unheralded by superpower prophecies, become an upper-middle-income country in 2019.
At one point, it lists out India’s 2020 targets, “not only to reach these reference levels but to surpass them in many cases”. The confidence was misplaced. India in 2020 did not reach any of the Planning Commission’s targets.
For example, the report assumed India’s female adult literacy rate will be 94% by 2020. But according to latest figures from the previous census, that stands at only 65%. Infant mortality will be 22.5 per 1000 births, predicted Vision 2020. But latest figures from 2017 have it at 33, well above the global average. Child malnutrition based on weight for age will be only 8%, said the report. In reality, it is more than four times that prediction at 32.7% (India in 2020 is one of the most malnourished societies on earth).
Enter the memes
While the Superpower 2020 predictions did not materialise, that did not mean they did not result in anything useful. The forecast was so wildly off the mark that the Internet smelt blood, seeing in it a rich source of irony: perfect raw material for memers.
The costs
In spite of the fact that the original superpower 2020 prediction was widely off the mark, versions of it continue to survive (even if they pop up far less frequently now). During the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP President
Amit Shah promised voters that India would become a superpower by 2024 if Narendra Modi was voted back as prime minister. Earlier in 2018, Union minister
Jitendra Singh claimed that Modi would fulfil Kalam’s “Vision 2020” – although, wisely he did not mention by
Some of this might seem funny or absurd. Indeed, some of it is. Yet, this does not mean there aren’t real costs associated with this “superpower 2020” business. It seems for the past two decades, many Indian policy planners were designing programmes based on absurdly unachievable targets. This would have had real implications in terms of misplaced allocations.
In the first few decades after Independence, East and South East Asia raced past India. Now, experts such as economist
Amartya Sen have flagged the fact that India is even losing out to its South Asian neighbours such as Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, who are being able to offer their people better standards of living.
All this while India – home to a sixth of humanity – tragicomically, keeps dreaming of becoming a superpower.
https://scroll.in/article/948319/in...story-of-a-spectacularly-incorrect-prediction
