India cannot modernise without international help

India cannot modernise without international help


Time was when all we knew was frozen in time. We implemented Laskian socialism and gave every commanding height of the economy to the public sector. Typically, we did not throttle the private sector but put a strict watch on it instead. All around us we had either/or choices and life was as simple as the Fiat and the Ambassador. A man knew where he stood.

Time came when the citadel developed not just cracks but structural faults, serious enough to threaten the entire edifice. We were forced to change economic policies which had driven us nearly bankrupt, and that is when the confusion began.

Bureaucrats used to intoning shibboleths on “maximum employment” and “social objectives” underwent a culture shock when confronted with “return on investment” and “viability”. Manufacturers of goods made with pre-world war technology, when technology itself was young, scurried to modernise.

Foreigners streamed into our city hotels clutching shiny plastic credit cards, purveying all manner of enabling know-how, designs to revolutionise our infrastructure and multiply our options. Media folk coined images of springing tigers and lumbering elephants to depict an economy awakening. Think tank gurus extolled the virtues of the largest working democracy in the world, replete with an independent judiciary, a free Press and the “steel framework” of an extensive bureaucracy. Opportunity stared us in the face as we emerged from the socialist shadows, blinking in a market driven sunlight.

Now we are four years down the high road towards an open economy. Treasury coffers look genteel, far from over-flowing yet, but bound to grow, nudged by an annual GDP doubled since liberalisation began. Throughout our socialist years the gross domestic product managed to “grow” at no more than two per cent. A statistic dubbed the “Hindu rate of growth” by international sceptics, ironically contrasting India’s population explosion with her economic performance.

Even our present pace is not much faster than the proverbial pilgrim’s when compared to Pacific Rim economies posting annual growth in double digits. We could catch up if we wanted to. The bulls are indeed snorting behind the arras of cyberspace but the bears are still squatting in the arena. Four years down the road of our boldness we have developed cold feet wondering when we saw the last milestone and what was written on the gantry signs overhead.

Nostalgia hits us for that time past when it stood still. A time when all our deficiencies could be jettisoned at the altar of socialist ideology. When we comforted ourselves that after all, “social justice” did not come cheap.

Meanwhile the car we are in keeps rolling inexorably on towards the free market. It is no longer the familiar hold-all Ambassador, nor the constant Padding but a new fangled Maruti mutating into a Peugeot, a Cielo, an Opel Astra, even a Mercedes as the kilometres flow by. We look with distaste at this apology for a high road impervious to the high tech machinery straddling it. There is so much to update now that the citadel is breached!

Where do we begin? Fact is we already have-four years ago, but now we are not so sure. That is why there are3 anarchic winds blowing around and opinions like blades of grass sweeping left, right, and standing straight up, buffeted from all sides.

Change is scary, there, I have admitted it, but we can either make room for it or collapse under our cumulative burdens like our erstwhile friends, the USSR. Every civic and infrastructural facility we have today is an anachronism: roads, airports, stations, ‘phones, schools, colleges, hospitals, insurance, law courts like bedlam, gardens like garbage dumps, garbage dumps like mountains, adulterated food, contaminated water, sub-standard and expensive housing, inadequate and temperamental electricity- the list is so long we have grown apathetic to its ravages.

We cannot solve our problems fiddling like Nero as India gets mired deeper in the morass. Harking back to a mythical golden age in the long ago cannot wipe out the stench of a present decay-a symptom of a dying civilisation is to refuse to look upon the face of reality.

Ladies could not stop the industrial revolution. Hydra –headed fundamentalism will also, in time, be ironed out of the history pages, just as a wrinkle is smoothed away. Discarded, not because of its ideological debilities alone, but overtaken by independent compulsions to modernise everything, produce competitive goods and services, carve a niche for India, in order to survive in the global village.

We cannot modernise unless we take the international help that is being offered. We fed our hunger with the Green Revolution. As consequences we have growing surpluses after feeding a population doubled in the interim. We beat back drought with canals, irrigation, dams and wasteland reclamation. We did not do these things alone. The benefits are so profound that the word “famine” has been obliterated from the Indian lexicon. There were so many starvation deaths in the 19th century that it makes the losses of the holocaust look like a bus accident.

Reinventing the wheel will take too long. We have to take charge and pay attention to the terms on which we induct technology. Our intelligence must be harnessed to getting ourselves the best catapult to make up for the inward looking years.

Today we might consider ourselves desirable because of a huge, potentially lucrative domestic market. We should be careful not to sit too long admiring ourselves. Suitors get tired of uncooperative damsels and settle for the charms of more pliable ones.

We should all get this clear-that a country of the size and importance of India has no choice but to clamber to its new tryst with destiny inside shiny buildings o0f chrome and glass at the free market. There is no mileage in looking wistfully at quaint mud huts rushing by the car windows because they, and their ilk, cannot meet our burgeoning needs, and if truth be told, never have! We cannot cling to a tattered dogma on the threshold of the second millennium.

Our very own Swedish Camelot is waiting for us on the round table of global cooperation now, not among the crumbling ruins of our socialist citadel. We have to learn to enjoy the new found choices given us by the gods of technology. Techno Gods who have abstracted the gold and jewels from sovereign crowns and replaced them with invasive inter-networked information beamed from the heavens.

If we go out and meet this brave new world head on we will not be intimidated by the glare. If we resist the inevitable, the tottering citadel will collapse upon us.

That would be the epitaph fit for a dinosaur – a country grown too tired to adapt, an ancient civilisation preferring to climb into permanent slumber on the pages of history encircled with encomiums and laurels.

( 1, 142 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
First published in The Pioneer www.dailypioneer.com on Monday 26th February, 1996 on the Edit Page in the main Opinion slot