Can India be Great ?
extracts from the article:
" .... despite significant and sustained economic growth, a sizeable portion of Indias population still remains mired in abject, dehumanizing poverty. According to survey data from 2001, close to 26 percent of the population still lived below the official poverty line. Meanwhile, after 50 years of independence, almost 27 percent of the rural population still lacked access to safe drinking water. Despite varied efforts to promote literacy, in 2001 only about 65 percent of the population had achieved basic literacy. The list of such statistics goes on. Unless India can find ways to forge policies that address these deeply disturbing shortcomings, rapid economic growth and the consequent emergence of a robust middle class (variously estimated at between 100 million and 300 million) will amount to little. "
"Apart from this persistence of endemic poverty and poor infrastructure, India faces other critical challenges in its search for great power status: its acute shortage of critical human capital. At one level, the country can justifiably claim that it has some institutions of higher education which can compete with their peers on a global basis. But these institutions are mostly confined to the realms of science, engineering and management and despite the existence of these centres of excellence, mediocrity is the hallmark of many of Indias other educational institutions. For example, with the possible exception of the discipline of economics, India lags woefully behind in the other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and political science. Few, if any, significant contributions to these fields of intellectual endeavour have emerged from India in recent decades. Most scholarship in these areas is either derivative, or worse, still mostly descriptive and hortatory."
"Its said that Charles de Gaulle once mordantly quipped that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. The same, unfortunately, could be said about India. It has obviously longed to be a great power but has never marshalled the requisite resources with the necessary sense of purpose to make a breakthrough on multiple fronts. As a consequence it has made significant progress in some areas but has remained a hopeless laggard in others. Unless it can summon its human and material resources to tackle the myriad challenges that it confronts, both at home and abroad, its fond hopes of achieving great power status will continue to remain a fleeting mirage."
