OK, great. So why there are 340,000,000,000 million people in India below the poverty line?
do you know how many people were below the poverty line in china in 1978 which is when their economic reforms were started there?
do you know how many people were below the poverty line in china in 1996/8 which is where india today stands in relative terms vis-a-vis china?
do you know how many people were below the poverty line in india in 1991 which is when economic reforms were started in india and now compare today's poverty line with that period.
you have to realize countries like india and china are massive in size and in problems that get faced and when it comes to india, it is that much more difficult.
we have a lot of problems, there is the democracy which takes its own sweet time, central government wants to pace up the things but finds it hard because of coalition and vote bank politics, state governments which are the real players play their own politics.
we have home grown insurgencies which massively impact our growth prospects. the point here to be pondered is had these insurgencies been not around india would have been growing at a much-much faster pace.
we have tribals who do not want any sort of interference and they want to live the way they have lived for centuries. they are happy being that way.
our literacy rate is pretty low and more importantly and which is what really matters, people having minimum 10 years of formal education are way too less.
we have a hostile neighborhood which means india needs to spend much more on its defence than it would other wise.
the most important, the size of the population which today has become an asset was for the most part of india's independence a liability.
india faces problems that someone sitting outside cant even imagine, the scale is massive, so it is a slow process and there is not the slightest of the doubts that even if we were to maintain the same growth rate for the next 10 years we will still face more or less similar problems though the scale might have minimized.
what india requires is, atleast 25-30 years of 9-10% real gdp growth rate (which is what the PM articulates from time to time) with not more than 5% annualized inflation rate to have a society where extreme poverty completely gets eradicated, poverty percentage dramatically reduces which is no more than 1-3% of the population and where insurgencies give way to an all out nation building process. its a tough task but we now after near 60 years of independence have started getting leaders who understand all this well and are coming up with practical solutions to solve these problems.
last i heard nandan nilekani could possibly be the next congress PM candidate for the 2014 elections, now you can imagine the levels that are being raised. more about mr nandan -
Nandan Nilekani - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
