Independence of India, amid chants of “Jai Hind”. His speech “Tryst with Destiny” on the historic occasion has become an integral part of history: ” At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
As India steps into the 69th year of independence on August 15 this year, it is time to look back and take stock of the situation, to celebrate its successes, to take stock of its failures and to look through the prism for its future.
The world too has evolved during this period. The oldest and the largest democracies of the world, the US and India, are getting closer after the days of the cold war and mutual suspicion, when there is a decline of the communist doctrine and when the ugly face of Islamic militancy is raising its head as a hydra-headed monster threatening world peace.
In order to examine the present, it would be appropriate to look back at the situation in India at the time of Independence.
Shashi Tharoor, a senior Congress politician, who was in the running for the post of Secretary General of the United Nations and was recently in the eye of a storm over the mysterious death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar, addressed a distinguished gathering at the Oxford Union Society recently on the impact of colonialism on the Indian economy. He said that India’s share of the world economy had dropped from 23 per cent to four per cent as a result of the British rule. His speech, which went viral on the social media and kicked off debates in print media and TV studios, pointed out that Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India. “In fact, Britain’s industrial revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialisation of India”, he said.
Taking example of the handloom sector, he said weavers in India became beggars and India went from being a world famous exporter of finished cloth, into an importer. It went down from having 27 per cent of world trade in the sector to less than 2 per cent. He said by the end of 19th century, India was already Britain’s biggest cash cow, the world’s biggest purchaser of British goods and exports, and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and added that ” We literally paid for our own oppression”.
He said railways and roads were really built to serve British interests and not those of the local people :“these were designed to carry raw materials from the hinterland into the ports to be shipped to Britain. In fact, the Indian Railways were built with massive incentives offered by Britain to British investors, guaranteed out of Indian taxes paid by Indians, with the result that you actually had one mile of Indian railway costing twice what it cost to build the same mile in Canada or Australia, because there was so much money being paid in extravagant returns. Britain made all the profits, controlled the technology, supplied all the equipment and absolutely all these benefits came as private enterprise — British private enterprise — at public risk, Indian public risk”.
While Tharoor may have very strong views on some of the issues, which may not be palatable or may generate adverse and equally strong reactions, the point is that it is important to take in to account the situation when the British rule ended to examine the progress made by India or otherwise. The first census in free India was conducted in 1951, four years after the independence but the figures even of that year provide a glimpse of what the British had left behind.
Education
For instance, take the literacy figures, about which Tharoor later mentioned in one of the panel discussions, when the British left India. The total literacy percentage in India around that time was only 16 per cent. The 1951 census figures state that the population of literates among males was 27.16 per cent and merely 8.86 per cent that among females. The revised 2011 census figures, the latest available, show that the literacy percentage had gone up among the males to 80.9 per cent and that of females to 64.60 percent, still far from a satisfactory number but a steep increase from the first census after Independence. As per the 2001 census these figures were 75.26 and 53.67 per cent respectively.
Experts point out that even the low literacy percentage during the British rule was deliberate and whatever efforts were made to promote education, these were aimed at the objective as to how it would help the British Raj. Thus, the British did set up elitist schools with the aim of placating the super rich and influential and creating a pool for its own civil services.
But the literacy figures emerging from the census can also be misleading. In fact these are. A study conducted by a New Delhi-based non-profit Pratham, which surveyed school children across 500 districts, found that a fifth of 10-year-olds could not read sentences. Around 50 per cent of seven-year-olds surveyed couldn’t read letters and more than 50 per cent of 14-year-olds were unable to divide numbers. Another study on higher education estimated that fewer than 10 per cent of graduates with masters degrees in business administration, were employable. While engineering colleges have proliferated, only 19 per cent of engineers they produce are employable, as per a survey conducted by Aspiring Minds, an assessment and grading firm.
The problem starts with the standard of education at the primary level. Government schools are in a pathetic shape. No person, who can afford it, likes to put his children in government schools. Same is the situation in the government secondary schools. A “test” recently conducted in Punjab found most teachers failing in subjects they were supposed to teach and even the recent government initiatives like special reservations for students from economically weaker sections of the society, also has so far not shown the desired results.
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Health
National Family health Survey in 2006. And India invests only 1 per cent of its gross domestic product in health care
Health is another major parameter which reflects the lop sided growth in the country since the independence. Average life expectancy in India has risen to 68.89 years from 32 years at the time of independence in 1947. As per an official estimate released in 2009, the life expectancy for males was 67.46 years while that for females was 72.61 per cent. However, it also brought out the fact that the infant mortality rate was as high as 40 deaths per thousand, one of the highest in the world.
Almost half of the country’s children under five are classed as chronically malnourished, and more than a third of Indians aged 15 to 49 are undernourished, according to India’s National Family health Survey in 2006.
The state of government hospitals and dispensaries in the country remains abysmal even as swanky, 5-star health facilities, have sprung up in the urban areas. These facilities, which at times match international standards, have given rise to what is called “medical tourism” in which foreign nationals or even the NRIs find it cheaper to get good health care facilities in India at one third of the cost abroad. Although the government has made it compulsory in some states for the new doctors to serve in the rural areas for some time but the facilities remain in a bad shape. The government has also been encouraging Ayurveda and other alternative modes of health care.
However, India invests only 1 per cent of its gross domestic product in health care, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. India’s healthcare expenditure, it found, was one of the lowest in the world.
Economy
Low agriculture output, little industrialization, low figure of national income, high poverty and unemployment, slow economic progress were the features of India’s economy at the time of Independence.
The nation’s foreign exchange reserves at the time of Independence were only $ 2 billion which have grown to over$ 300 billions. Its imports have shot up at a faster pace than exports resulting in a widening gap in the trade balance.
At the time of independence 72 per cent of the work force was employed in agriculture and it contributed to nearly 50 per cent of the national income. Industrialisation was at a very low level with only 2 per cent of the work force employed in industries. The only industries which existed were cotton and jute industries. They also suffered a major setback, as at the time of partition major jute producing areas went to Pakistan while the processing industries remained in India.
Even as India has registered some strides in the socio-economics field since the independence, it still accounts for a third of the world’s poor, as per a study published by the World Bank recently. At least 32 per cent of India’s population lives below the international poverty line – spending less than US $1.2 a day – while about 68 per cent of the population lives on less than US $2 a day, the report said.
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Political developments
As India obtained Independence after a long struggle in 1947 and the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru delivered the famous “tryst with destiny” speech, path was laid for the world’s largest democracy to carve out its future. Nehru, who headed the first Congress government, has been described as the architect of the modern India. He started implementing the “mixed economy” model, also called the Nehruvian model, for providing a thrust to the economy. His government set about to build major hydro-electricity dams, improve road and railway infrastructure and encourage industrialisation while protecting the handloom and cottage industry. He is also credited with setting up five year Planning Commissions, providing stress on Research and development and for leading the Non Aligned Movement. The 1962 war with China, which led to a humiliating defeat for India, was a major setback for the Nehru government.
There was political vacuum after his death in 1964 which was filled for a brief period by Lal Bahadur Shastri. It was during the prime ministership of Shastri that the country went through its second major war – the first against Pakistan. It was more or less an even contest with India having a little upper hand. However, Shastri died suddenly at Tashkent shortly after he had signed a ceasefire declaration with his Pakistan counterpart Ayub Khan. It was then that Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi was elected Leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party and became the prime minister in 1966.
Indira Gandhi ruled with an iron hand and took some important decisions like nationalisation of banks and abolition of privy purses of the princes who had joined the Indian Union after the Independence. However, she would be remembered for two other important events. The first one was helping in the formation of Bangladesh after encouraging and helping the movement for independence by the residents of the former East Pakistan and then leading a decisive victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war. The humiliating war for Pakistan led to the biggest ever surrender of armed forces personnel in world history in which over 93,000 Pakistani soldiers were made Prisoners of War. Pakistan is not likely to ever forget the humiliation and India may still be paying a price for it.
The second major event for which she would be remembered, albeit in a negative manner, was the imposition of internal Emergency in 1975. It was imposed following wide spread protests against her government and the decision of the courts unseating her as an MP. It was one of the darkest hour of the Indian democracy when civil rights were taken away, thousands put into jails, political activity banned, censorship imposed on media and atrocities like forced sterilisation committed on common people. She lifted the emergency two years later in 1977 and was defeated in the elections which led to the formation of the first non-congress government in the country.
Senior leader Morarji Desai was elected the prime minister of the first Janata Government which had the blessings of the leader of the movement against the emergency, Jai Parkash Narain. However, the government could not last its full term and Indira Gandhi rode back to power in 1980. Her second tenure witnessed the most unfortunate Operation Bluestar in 1984 which resulted in her own assassination later that year followed by a massacre of Sikhs in some parts of the country, mainly in Delhi and was reportedly stoked by some Congress leaders, who are still roaming free.
After her assassination, her elder son Rajiv Gandhi was made the prime minister, the youngest to hold the office. His regime was marked by the Sri Lanka fiasco in which India sent troops to its neighbouring country, the birth of software and IT industry, and the infamous Bofors scandal but was marked by improved relations with the US an d increased international economic aid. However, Bofors scandal did him in and the second non-Congress government was formed under the leadership of V P Singh. The Janata Dal government, mainly remembered for implementing Mandal Commission report on reservations in government jobs, also did not last too long and was followed by a period of political uncertainty. Following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 during the run up to the elections, the country again elected a Congress government led by PV Narasimha Rao. His government was known for initiating economic reforms led by his finance minister Manmohan Singh. His regime also saw the demolition of Babri Masjid and riots following its demolition in 1992.
BJP emerged as the single largest party in 1996 but the government under Atal Behari Vajpayee pasted just 13 days when the rug was pulled from under the carpet of his minority government. During the politically unstable period, the United Front was formed which had two prime ministers in quick succession – HD Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral till 1998 when Vajpayee returned to head the National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP.
His regime was known for historic bus ride to Pakistan, the Kargil battle, Golden Quadrilateral highway project, attack on Indian Parliament and the Gujarat riots under the watch of the current prime minister Narendra Modi.
The 2004 elections saw re-emergence of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance which ruled the country under Manmohan Singh for the next 10 years. He was known as the nominee of Rajiv Gandhi’s widow Sonia Gandhi. The regime saw the introduction of the historic Right to Information (RTI), the Food Bill and the new Land Acquisition Bill besides signing of a major Nuclear cooperation agreement with the US. However, the second tenure of the Manmohan Singh government was engulfed in major scams like the coal scam, the 2G spectrum scam, CWG scam, Adarsh scam etc., which led to its down fall in 2015 and emergence of Modi as the new prime minister after he helped get the BJP a clear majority for the first time since Independence.
Future Prospects
India on currently on the threshold of a giant leap with one of its biggest strengths which was its biggest problem at one stage – its population. The country, which launched a major campaign to curb population and even resorted to forced sterilisation during the Emergency, now boasts of the youngest population in the world. Over 65 per cent of the country’s population is now below 35 years of age and almost 50 per cent is below 25 years of age. This gives India the distinction of the youngest nation with huge youth resources at its command. This advantage comes at a time when the population in most of the developed countries is growing older and in several countries the vast majority of their population is greying fast and number of those above the age of 65 are more than those below 25 years of age.
Yet India has to work hard in several fields to make the grade. Gender equality is one of those major areas. India currently has a sex ratio of 933, i.e. 933 females per 1000 males, which is among the lowest in the world. The US, for instance, has a sex ratio of 1029, which is 29 more females than males per thousand. In fact the sex ratio has declined from 946 in 1951 to 933 in 2011. Also less than 20 per cent of the educated females in the country are employed. The females constitute a huge human resource which remains grossly under-utilised. The United Nations Development Programmes’s Human Development index ranked India at 132 number out of 167 countries on its gender inequality index in 2013. Also, the poor standard of education, lack of discipline in public life and perhaps one of the most important factor of all – corruption at almost all levels – is what is dragging the country down.
Despite the shortcomings and the areas where it needs to improve, the country is better placed to propel itself to the next level. Its human resources, together with the strides in the field of Information Technology, literacy, entrepreneurship and a ballooning middle class with its huge potential for consumerism, are its great strengths. All it requires is leadership with vision which can rise above the party, communal and other narrow considerations.