Hafizzz
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India Journal: Is Indias Economic Growth Socially Sustainable?
India Journal: Is India’s Economic Growth Socially Sustainable? - India Real Time - WSJ
In seeking to determine what the 21st century may look like, India matters arguably more than any other nation. For several reasons.
The first and most obvious is that it will be the most populous nation, with a population expected to reach 1.5 billion in 2030 and 1.6 billion two decades later. Indians will comprise 20% of humanity. If India succeeds in raising the great majority above the poverty level, the implications will be enormous. If India fails and maintains the current level of 50% of the population living in poverty, the social and political implications may well be quite dramatic for India and for the world.
India also counts enormously in that it is not just a populous nation, but also a democracy, with key humanistic values laid out as its core principles by its founding fathers, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. If the Indian rule of law-based liberal democratic model fails, will this mean an enduring victory for the arbitrary and authoritarian Chinese model?
Until the recent past, India was little more than a marginal player from a global economic perspective, even if Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi may have been in the geopolitical limelight. It experienced an anaemic rate of growth especially compared with its neighboring East Asian miracle economies and was insulated from international business: very little trade, hardly any foreign investment, inward or outward.
Today, the story is quite different. To borrow from the title of a book by Indian thought leader Gurcharan Das, following radical reforms undertaken in the early 1990s India became unbound. In the last two decades, Indias growth rate has been second only to Chinas among major economies; it has become a key actor in global economic governance, notably as a strong force in the G20; a number of its firms have gone global big-time the Tata Group, for instance, is the U.K.s largest manufacturing employer and foreign firms, especially in IT, have made significant investments in India.
So is the India of today very different from and a great improvement on the India of yesterday? The answer: It depends where you look. The economic data are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the panorama drawn from social indicators is pretty deplorable. These are well known and need no repeating here, except to highlight that the greatest blight on India is the very high rates of female illiteracy and child mortality the two, of course, being closely correlated.
The scorecard today is that India is succeeding brilliantly and failing miserably.
These developments have caused a good deal of thinking, soul-searching and very lively debate. This is, after all, the land of the argumentative Indian. One of the liveliest debates was sparked off following the sharp criticism levelled at the Indian government by economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen over its obsession with faster growth and the race with China at the expense of social development.
This was countered by University of Columbia economics professor Jagdish Bhagwati who argued that high growth generates better jobs and the income for government to invest in social development programs. Some 30 Indian and foreign intellectuals got involved in an online debate along these lines monitored by the Indian NGO CUTS; it was fascinating to follow.
The fact is that high growth does not seem to have made India a happier or more egalitarian place. There is a growing social backlash. Youth unemployment and disaffection are very high. There is already a strong presence in several provinces of the extreme political-guerrilla movement known as the Naxalites.
The main problem in the Bhagwati growth perspective is that if growth provides jobs, as indeed it does, society has to be geared in such a fashion that individuals have the means and skills to acquire them.
While Indias growth over the last couple of decades has been only marginally lower than Chinas, the number of people lifted from poverty in India pales into comparison with its Asian neighbor: 70 million for India; 400 million for China. Prof. Sen pointed out in his book, Development as Freedom, that the fruits and opportunities of freedom including freedom to work can only be had if people have the most basic skills of literacy and numeracy; something hundreds of millions of Indians lack.
Though it is generally held that while primary education in India stinks, higher education is brilliant, this is not entirely true. The top elitist institutions are second to none, for sure, but many in fact the majority who graduate from mainstream institutions of higher learning are considered unemployable.
Growth has allowed the rich to acquire more private gains, but has hampered the poor by neglecting social public goods, including the very basics of health, nutrition, education and shelter.
Pallavi Aiyar, author of Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, wrote that if you are born rich, choose India, if you are born poor, choose China because of higher levels of basic education in China, there is correspondingly much more social mobility. Indian thought leaders also bemoan the fact that contemporary Indian society suffers from a compassion deficit and widespread insensitivity, especially among the new brash business and finance elites.
The situation is grim; as is the outlook if present trends continue.
There is reason to hope, however, that trends will be reversed. Many business and thought leaders have determined that effective emergency measures are needed. There are also some hopeful signs in the provinces. Bihar, which has been one of the most backward, poor, crime-infested and corrupt states of India, had elections in November which resulted in the landslide victory of a pro-development coalition under the aegis of one of the few respected politicians in India, Nitish Kumar.
When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization he famously replied that it sounded like a good idea. The same could be said of Indian civilization. It is high time to put the great idea into practice. India provides the biggest challenge and hope for the 21st century global era. It must not fail.
I have confidences with India !
But China is a communist country. 
