What we need to get ahead

OUR journey as a nation began in 1947, not 2014, as some would have us believe. India has achieved a great deal in these 75 years. Most young people today assume that on August 15, 1947, the British fled, Nehru hoisted the Tricolour, and bingo, India became an Independent nation. The reality was infinitely more complicated. The future of India was not guaranteed even in 1947. At the time, ‘British India’ comprised 17 provinces and nearly 600 princely states. The British had no particular commitment to help India emerge as a unified nation. Indeed, in May 1947, the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, received authorisation from London to devolve power to each of the eight major provinces, with the princely states being free to join any of them. And they would then decide whether they wanted to be one India or several Indias.

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We must draw synergies from our diversities instead of using them to promote discord and division.

Since he was to announce this in a few days, he confided the details to Jawaharlal Nehru who happened to be his house guest in Shimla. Nehru went ballistic and bluntly told Mountbatten that this would never be acceptable to the Congress party. Mountbatten abandoned the idea and dusted off the Partition Plan, which he announced on June 3, 1947, through which the subcontinent was divided into two Dominions of India and Pakistan on August 14/15.

But this was only the first act of the drama. The second arose from the deliberate vagueness with which the British handled the princely states. They withdrew their paramountcy over them on August 15, but they were less specific about how these states were to relate to the new Dominions. Since most of them would be within or contiguous to India, Jinnah added fuel to the flames by declaring that the states had the right to declare independence as well.

Two of them, Travancore and Hyderabad, did so shortly after the June 3 announcement, others contemplated it and Jodhpur even briefly considered acceding to Pakistan. After an intense and difficult process, Sardar Patel, ably assisted by VP Menon, persuaded most of the states to sign an Instrument of Accession with the Dominion of India. To compel the accession of holdouts like Junagadh, Kashmir and Hyderabad, India eventually had to use military force.

In the ensuing years, the princely states were reorganised into the states as we know them today and the government created new educational, healthcare, scientific and industrial facilities that are the foundation of our nation. There were secessionist threats in Tamil Nadu, Punjab and the Northeast, but they were overcome.

India’s population was 340 million at the time of Independence. Only 41 million people — some 12% — were literate, and our life expectancy was 34 years, which was less than half of the US, which was 68 at the time. Today, India is 70, closer to the American 77.

An early and major success story was in agriculture. In 1950, it accounted for 55% of India’s GDP, today, it is around 14%. India is self-sufficient in food, and even exports some. The famines of the colonial era no longer plague the land.

India’s economy is now set to become the third largest by the purchasing power parity (PPP) measure and it is known all over the world for its information technology, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and petrochemicals and textiles. India makes everything, from the proverbial needles to space launch vehicles.

But this success hides some major chronic problems. While in 1950, 60% of India’s workforce depended on agriculture for a living, today, 45% still do. This staggering figure points to a major area of failure since many of the people are unemployed or underemployed. And this is despite the fact that 26% of our GDP comes from industry and 54% from services. This black mark hides within it another blot. India has one of the lowest rates of female employment in the world — 19%. This is lower than even Saudi Arabia. In India’s case, it has actually declined in the last 20 years. What this reveals is that jobs are not being created in large numbers in sectors which can readily absorb the rural surplus, especially women.

Another negative is India’s literacy and education. Universities in large parts of the country provide little by way of learning that can equip a person to earn a living in a modern economy. Only 74% of the population is literate. This may look like a huge achievement since it was just 12% in 1950. But consider China, which has risen from 20% at the time to 96.8% today. India and China had an R&D expenditure which was 0.7% of their GDP in 1999. Today, China’s has steadily risen to 2.4%, while India’s has declined to 0.6%.

There is an important caveat here. India can be proud that its national advance came through democratic means. This is in sharp contrast to China, whose authoritarian government has, in the last 70 years, been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its people through famine and violence.

We have achieved a great deal, but to get ahead, we will have to resolve our chronic problems arising from attitudes relating to caste, religion and gender. We have everything in our DNA — geography, talented people, resources — to become a great nation, if we draw synergies from our diversities instead of falling into the trap of using them to promote discord and division.