It is 60 years now since I, like many other
schoolchildren, stayed up till midnight,
bleary-eyed, to hear Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to be
prime minister of India, give his famous speech
on India’s “tryst with destiny.”
This was on the eve of India’s independence
from British rule on Aug. 15, 1947. India would
not only be, we were told, a fully democratic and
secular state but also a country that will fight
for "the ending of poverty and ignorance and
disease and inequality of opportunity." It is
interesting to ask how far along we have gone in
60 years in fulfilling that momentous resolve.
On the democratic front, India’s success was
immediate and came with astonishing speed. India
became overnight the first poor country in the
world to be a full-scale democracy. And there
was—and is—success enough here.
There was a short-lived hiccup in the 1970s
when there was a brief attempt to change the
system, but when the government sought
endorsement in a general election for those
changes, it was driven out of office by the
voters.
There have been regular and orderly elections,
and the ruling parties have vacated office when
defeated in general elections, rather than
calling in the army. India has also had other
essential features of a democracy, in particular
continued freedom and vigor of the media and
independence of the judiciary, with the Supreme
Court often disallowing decisions of those in
governmental office on constitutional grounds.
So democracy has indeed flourished nicely in
India, and that has been the case right from the
time when India became independent after two
centuries of authoritarian British colonial
dominance. India’s democratic success is
sometimes seen only as a consequence of British
rule, but that is comparatively recent history
shared by a hundred or more other countries that
also emerged from the empire, none of which has
had quite the easy success that India has had
with democracy.
In fact, as I have tried to argue elsewhere (in
my book The Argumentative Indian, Piccador,
2005), India’s long argumentative tradition and
toleration of heterodoxy, going back thousands of
years, has greatly helped in making democracy
flourish with such ease. This would be remarkable
enough for any poor country, but it was a much
harder task in a land with a great many major
languages, each with a long and proud history,
and with a rich and old literature.
And there was, of course, the challenge of the
multiplicity of religions in India, with nearly
every religion well represented. Jews came to
India in the first century; Christians in the
fourth; Parsees immigrated as soon as persecution
began in Persia in the late seventh century; and
early Muslim traders started coming to the
western coast of India from the eighth century,
well before the later invasion of the north of
India by Muslim conquerors in the late tenth
century onwards.
Even though British India was partitioned into
India and Pakistan in 1947 on religious lines,
the vast majority of Muslims on the Indian side
chose to stay on in India, and today India has
nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan and many more
Muslims than Bangladesh.
India chose to have a solidly secular
constitution, and it is as a secular democracy
that India has flourished. Secularism has been
threatened from time to time by actions of
sectarian groups, but the massive support for
secularism across India has asserted itself again
and again, the last time in the Indian general
elections in 2004. In the political field,
India’s success today is a firm vindication of
what, 60 years ago, it breathlessly tried to
achieve.
The story is very different on the economic
side. The growth rate of the Indian economy
remained stuck at its low traditional point of 3
per cent a year for a very long time. The
economic policies needed substantial reform. In
the old days, some wise guys used to put forward
the thesis that India’s growth rate was low
because of its democracy, which seemed to many of
us rather ridiculous.
But with continued low growth, that
anti-democratic point of view gained some ground
among high-octane commentators (never with the
general public, though). When India changed its
economic policies, the growth rate picked up as
expected, without India becoming any less of a
democracy to achieve this result.
The economic changes came amid much hesitation
and huge resistance. To start with, India
hastened slowly. The 1980s, which saw some
moderate reforms, produced some quickening, with
an economic growth rate of 5 per cent, which may
now seem sadly slow but was much faster than what
had happened in the early decades of
independence, not to mention a century of
colonial semi-stagnation.
But the economy was still full of problems
connected with financial instability, trade
imbalances and choking public administration. In
general, what used to be called the ’license Raj’
made business initiatives extremely difficult and
at the mercy of bureaucrats (large and small),
thereby powerfully stifling enterprise while
hugely nurturing corruption.
When Manmohan Singh came to office in the early
1990s as the newly appointed finance minister, in
a government led by the Congress Party, he knew
these problems well enough, as someone who had
been strongly involved in government
administration for a long time. (This was after
his stint as a very successful university
professor at Delhi University where I was
privileged to have him as a colleague.)
And Singh’s response was sure-footed though
cautious, given the complex politics of policy
reorientation. While the going has been rough
from time to time, the direction of policy change
has been unmistakable from that point onwards,
endorsed even by successor governments run by
other political parties.
India is now getting used to its much higher
rate of growth, first around 6 per cent a year
and now about 8 per cent, occasionally touching 9
per cent. It is also remarkable that India’s main
success has come not in traditional areas of
exports but largely on newer industries, with a
large component of high-tech, such as the
information technology industry, which has
rapidly grown to be a giant from a very modest
beginning.
Another area is that of pharmaceuticals. Even
though in that field the Indian entry began with
generic drugs (with a huge reduction—sometimes a
cut of 80 per cent or so in the price for many
essential drugs, like AIDS medicines), it is now
going much more into new research as well.
There is reason enough to celebrate many things
happening in India right now. But there are
failures as well, which need urgent attention.
For example, there is still widespread
undernourishment in general and child
undernutrition in particular—at a shocking
level. The failures include, quite notably, the
astonishing neglect of elementary education in
India, with a quarter of the population—and
indeed half the women—still illiterate.
The average life expectancy in India is still
low (below 64) and infant mortality very high (58
per 1,000 live births). It is certainly true that
India has narrowed the shortfall behind China in
these areas—that is, in life expectancy and
infant mortality—but there is still some
distance to go for the country as a whole.
The problems are gigantic in some of the more
’backward’ states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
And yet there are other states in which the
Indian numbers are similar to China’s.
There is also one state, Kerala, where the life
expectancy is higher than China’s (75 years at
birth, as opposed to China’s 72), and infant
mortality lower (12, as opposed to China’s 28).
Kerala has had good state policies of supporting
school education for all and making sure that it
works, and has provided free health care to all
for many decades now. Even though now many
better-off families choose private medical care,
everyone still has the option of having health
care from the state.
If India has to overcome these failures, it has
to spend much more money on expanding the social
infrastructure, particularly school education and
basic health care. It also needs to spend much
more in building up a larger physical
infrastructure, including more roads, more power
supplies and more water. In some of these, the
private sector can help.
But a lot more has to be spent on public
services themselves, in addition to improving the
system of delivery of these services, with more
attention paid to incentives and disciplines, and
better cooperation with the unions, consumer
groups and other involved parties.
On the basis of some investigations that have
been done by the Pratichi Trust (a trust I was
privileged to set up in 1999 through the use of
my 1998 Nobel money), it is clear how much needs
to be done and can be done to change the
organizational structure of school education and
basic health care. (We studied only one part of
India, but the results from other studies from
elsewhere in India are often quite similar.)
However, aside from organizational change, more
public funds, too, will be needed. Where will the
money come from? Well, to start with, India can
spend a much higher proportion of its public
resources on school education and on basic health
care, on both of which its percentage share of
public spending is among the lowest in the world.
There is, furthermore, good news that has been
discussed astonishingly little. If the total
revenue, from taxes and other channels, of the
central and state governments keeps pace with the
rapid growth of the economy, when the economy is
growing at 8 per cent a year, that would be a big
rate of increase of available funds for public
services.
As it happens, government revenue has
persistently grown faster than the growth of
gross domestic product: in 2003-04, the economic
growth of 6.5 per cent was exceeded by the
revenue growth of 9.5 per cent, and in 2004-05 to
2006-07, the growth rates of 7.5 per cent, 9 per
cent, and 9.4 per cent have been bettered,
respectively, by the expansion rates of
government revenue (in ’real terms’—that is
corrected for price change) of 12.5 per cent, 9.7
per cent and 11.2 per cent.
Money will continue to come very rapidly into
the government’s hands if the fast economic
growth continues. What is critically important is
to use these generated resources to remedy
India’s continuing deficiencies, in particular in
basic health care, in school education and in
rapidly expanding its physical infrastructure.
So, as we look back over the last 60 years,
some things have happened well enough, and some,
where the gaps were large, have started to catch
up. However, there are other areas in which there
are still huge shortfalls. These gaps would need
to be urgently remedied. We know what to do, and
there are resources to do it. What we need now is
some determined action to do what we can do and
must do.