The Hindu Business Line : Sweet sixty

Sixty years ago, “India stood forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent,” in the immortal words of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in his “tryst with destiny” speech to the Constituent Assembly at midnight on August 15. What have we, as a nation, achieved and failed to achieve in six decades?

To answer this question, I went back to the answer that Nehru gave to his own question about the future: “Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour?” His succinct answer: “To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman”. He was realistic enough to recognise that hard work lay ahead and that the ambition of Mahatma Gandhi, “to wipe every tear from every eye” may be beyond us. A period of sixty years is just a blip for a nation and civilisation going back to five millennia, but long enough to make substantive progress. Have we?

Our greatest achievement is sustaining our vibrant participatory democracy, except for a fortunately brief foray into authoritarianism, an achievement with no parallel among contemporary developing countries. This is not to deny that political dialogues, debates, competition and procedures have changed beyond recognition and political corruption unknown in 1947 is ubiquitous today. But the largely peaceful changes of power at the centre and states over this period are remarkable by any standard. Communalism, casteism, and other manifestations of narrowness of thought or in action that would prevent a nation from being great, and against which Nehru warned us in his speech, are still with us. We fall far short of his conception that “all of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations.”

We are not a prosperous nation; admittedly with the acceleration of growth in per capita incomes, which came only after we gave up trying for nearly four decades to plan our economy insulating from domestic and external competition, we are now close to being a trillion-dollar economy and the second or third largest in the world in terms of gross national income (at PPP exchange rates). This was achieved even with the population more than tripling in size from 359 million in 1951 to around 1,125 million in 2007.Yet in 2005 we were a lowly 158th (143rd) from the top in dollar (PPP dollar) income per capita among 208 countries.

We are democratic, but can hardly call ourselves a progressive nation, having failed to create social, economic and political institutions for ensuring equal opportunity and justice to all citizens. Even though our judicial system at its higher levels is free of corruption and, by and large, independent in its functioning, it is slow and access to it is not cheap. Also, the voice of those long suppressed economically, socially and politically is now not only heard but also matters in economics and politics.

What about the fight against poverty, ignorance, disease? Here again the record is mixed: a female child born today can expect to live up to 65 years, compared to only 31 years in 1947, and a male child up to 63 years as compared to 32. Infant and child mortality rates have fallen from over 130 and 250 per 1,000 live births around 1950 to around 60-75 now. Literacy rates have gone up from the abysmal levels of 9 per cent for females and 27 per cent for males in 1950-51 to 54 per cent for females and 75 per cent for males in 2000-01. Despite significant progress, free and universal primary education for all children is still to be provided. Fertility rates have declined substantially with some Southern states having reached replacement levels.

In places like Kerala, these indicators are much better suggesting that improvements were possible but not made in other States. Also, other developing countries such as Sri Lanka have done much better. Healthcare has improved but inequities prevail in accessing it. Poverty, as measured by the proportion of population below our very modest poverty line, has declined from around 55 per cent in 1950 to half that level in 2004-05. In sum, a modest progress has been made in the fight that Nehru urged us to undertake, but victory is not yet in sight, even though we can be proud of our democracy. In the spirit of Nehru’s admonition that “this is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill-will or blaming others”, let us not rest “until we redeem our pledge in full, till we make the people of India what destiny intended them to be”. Let us rededicate ourselves to the task of creating a disease-free and prosperous India in which, regardless of their religion, economic status, caste or creed or language, all citizens have equal rights, privileges, and obligations.

The author is Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, and Chair, South Asia Studies Council, Yale University, Newhaven, CT USA.