The long arc of India’s journey: We still have miles to go before we sleep
As we celebrate Independence Day, let’s look back at the distance we have traversed in 77 years. This was India in 1947: Life expectancy was 32 years. Literacy was 18%.
Gross domestic product (GDP) growth had been sub-0.5% per annum for over 50 years. Yes, the so-called ‘Hindu rate of growth’ of our early years of independence was an eight-fold increase over the growth rate in the first half of the 20th century. We had negligible capital.
Because the British Raj was about building capital in Great Britain, not in India. And we had dire poverty. We were far behind not just Europe and America, but even most of Asia.
Most Asian countries, even excluding Japan, had life expectancies of close to 50 years and literacy rates several times ours. We have come a very long way since and must always remember all those who fought for our freedom, giving up years of their life or even life itself. Those who put a framework in place: who had the vision, strategy and ability to take a road no other post-colonial nation took.
We do not appreciate enough that the path we took was not the only one possible. It was not inevitable, or even easy! In 1947, almost no one would have bet on our surviving as an united nation for 75-plus years, with a functioning democracy. Our Constitution, which has lasted so long, is itself an outlier in the history of hundreds of constitutions the world has seen.
It took a tremendous amount of thinking and passion, and ultimately, as all of us in business know, execution. Our leaders back then must have prepared the blueprints while they were in jail for years. Even a simple thing like universal adult franchise wasn’t the global norm and was resisted by many even within the country.
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