| From The Chief Executive Officer India, of late, has been receiving wide international attention because of its positive growth rate which is around 7%. Over the past 15 years, India has been the second fastest growing country in the world, after China, averaging about 60% growth rate per year. Many economists believe that India can well depend on this higher rate for the next decade or so. It is no wonder then at this point that an impression is created both within the country and outside that India has achieved the desired development impetus. Therefore, it is strongly believed that India will grow on its own and there is no need for any kind of development assistance from outside, either on to country-to-country, or to a NGO-to-NGO or to a people-to-people basis. The story of India's development is always one-sided. One group of development economists project the positive sides of India's growth, but a few economists who side with the poor portray its unmatched growth. The real story is yet to be highlighted. The story behind the growing and shining India is its growth – both its fastest trend and its inequitable growth.
India's Growth: The story of India's development is a great puzzle to many of us. As Newsweek recently reported, India's growth is messy , chaotic and largely unplanned. It is not happening because of the Government, but largely despite it. But due to its vast and growing number of entrepreneurs who want to make money, somehow they find the way to do it overcoming the obstacles bypassing the bureaucracy. The country'sentrepreneurs and middle class are happy about their new prosperity. They are the engines of change that will eventually modernize the whole nation. India is a focus for the twin drivers of our age – globalization and technology. The economy has doubled its size in 15 years, foreign direct investment is 40 times more than what was in 1991 and India how has more world class industries. There are 70,000 millionaires in India! The above is a rosy picture of growth. There is another India which is cause for concern among many right-thinking political leaders, bureaucrats and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). “In the history of the human generation, the present generation is the one which has wealth at its disposal, has the means to do things, has the technology to innovate and adopt for its use and has the political will. Therefore, no family on earth should go to bed hungry, no child should be out of school, no family should be without a roof, no community should be vulnerable and no group / nation should be in conflict. It is no easy task to achieve this, we need not only the technical revolution but also the corresponding ethical and moral revolution to see to it that we establish a community without hunger” The poor are here to stay for another decade: It is the story of the Indian Development experiment. It is true that out of 1.1.billion of us, about 2535 million earn $3, if not less than 2 dollars a day. The growth figure of 68% sounds pretty but it just means an extra $40 (Rs.1800/-) a year for the average Indian. The developmental change necessary to improve the lives of all ending all malnutrition and corruption, performing infrastructure,education and healthcare will take a couple of more five – years plans to achieve. In spite of the well-planned Five Year plan programme and monitoring system, Indian history suggests that the progress is uneven and messy. It is in this context that development agencies still talk about the underprivileged / the most vulnerable who matter more than the computer literate that bracket themselves with the world class intellectuals. “If we look at all areas of excellence in recent years, be it corporate, media, infotech, telecom, fashion and so on, we see that initiatives and successes are all in the private sector, not in the Government.. The worse manifestations of poor governance is seen in the public delivery systems…It is the delivery of public irrigation where nobody knows the number of deformat or absent tube well in a deferred space, of primary health centres where doctors are absent as a routine, of primary education centres where there is rampant teacher absenteeism or neglected. These are services that cannot be substituted by markets or technology”. Mr. Bimal Jalan, Former RBI Governor
Sources : Economist Intelligence Unit; National statistics, Thomson Data stream
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