13 March 2014, 01:46 PM IST
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, said the poet. For young India, it is an article of faith that such unknown delights await them in the future, whether they laze atop a penthouse in a city of lights or dare to dream from a grimy, village hovel.
Millennial goals have not changed in their essence, whether the ancients' or the UN's, only the specifics have. People need to be in equilibrium — with society and with nature, and if they strike the right balance on these two counts, they would be in equilibrium with themselves, too, by and large. Since human beings are creative, and what and how they create impacts and is impacted by other human beings and transforms nature as well, finding this equilibrium is complex and has eluded humankind, so far.
Yet, the world is closer than ever before to removing the scourges of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The era of globalised growth — which began with the big bang disbanding of capital controls in the west in late eighties, became mainstream with collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, of futile attempts to create production paradigms alternative to capitalism, got institutional strength with the founding of the World Trade Organization and its regime of liberal trade and, finally, permeated our lives through the internet — offers historically unprecedented opportunities for emancipation. The point is to identify them and build the collective capacity to grab them.
Surplus savings slosh around the world's financial networks, looking around for avenues of profitable deployment.This means a creative business idea, the appetite to take the risk of pursuing that idea and persevering with it, credible reporting systems, a well-articulated financial system capable of allocating capital where it is most productive and distributing risk across society's risk-bearing capacity, physical infrastructure needed to convert an idea into a running business, administrative systems that encourage rather than hinder enterprise, and human capacity that is evolved in terms of both knowledge and empathy.
India is constrained on every one of these factors of redemption. The caste culture makes risk a dirty word for all save the baniya. A long history of an extortionate state has ingrained a culture of fraudulent financial reporting and squirrelling away of illegal war-chests. The financial system excludes large swathes of society and remains stunted and fragmented. Infrastructure is in short supply.
Business is difficult to transact because the political system makes every interface with the state an opportunity to collect rent. Rules and procedures have been made complex, to this end. Luckily, all of it is changing for the better, even if at different paces.
The biggest change is in the biggest challenge, of building human capacity and empathy. In India, the modern nation state collides with traditional society with its segmented solidarities and jealously guarded hierarchies of social power. Politics mediates this conflict.
The Planning Commission discovered that funds meant for education, healthcare and village development carefully skirted habitats of minorities and dalits for long, in UP. In Bihar, lower caste passengers stood, even if seats were vacant on the bus. The rise of Mayawati and Lalu Yadav has changed this.
Growth is more broadbased than ever before. Empowerment of subaltern groups is leading to spread of education, healthcare and new thirst for growth and the human capacity to realise that growth. But the politics of pitting Muslims against Hindus has not waned. Riots were engineered in Muzaffarnagar just months ago and its leading lights are being lionised right now. This politics and its consequences of schism hold out the biggest threat to India realising its potential.
Politics is changing in other respects. Indian democracy has been funded in a non-institutional fashion since Independence, parties declaring only a fraction of what they got and spent. This paved the way for massive corruption, as a means of funding politics and personal enrichment of politicians. Money was mobilised by loot of the exchequer, sale of patronage and outright extortion. The civil service colluded in this, got suborned and the system lost efficiency and accountability. Two decades of reform and prosperity have created a middle class that does not owe its well-being to patronage and are angry at being 'mango men in a banana republic'. They use the institutions of democracy to fight back: the
right to information, the CAG, the Courts and a new political party.
The resultant convulsions drained the government of the day of political authority and things came to a standstill for nearly two years. India lost its growth momentum. That paralysis got over in September 2012. But it will take renewal of political authority through elections for things to get back to normal. Once that happens, whoever forms the government, the ongoing task of unleashing India's creative potential will be resumed with redoubled vigour.
Over the next couple of decades, half of India will live in towns. If this massive process of urbanisation is managed properly, young Indians will have the physical environs to realise their own creative potential in the process of working with others to help realise theirs. Women will work, earn and enjoy equal rights. Young people will have open spaces, clean air and the freedom to think and choose, including who their life partners would be.
Their social coordinates would not be defined by ascriptive identities, their imagination not grounded in the sordidness of the past. This is no longer a dream, but a reality within our collective grasp, provided we get our politics right.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Yet more reasons why India's prospects are bright
Dengan url
http://osteoporosista.blogspot.com/2014/03/yet-more-reasons-why-indias-prospects.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Yet more reasons why India's prospects are bright
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Yet more reasons why India's prospects are bright
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar