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INDIA 2020-My Perspective and Vision

I wrote this piece 7 years back, sitting in a TIME class. Thankfully, I came to realize that the class was not for me but the thoughts penned here, still resonate true. We are well on our way, Education has improved, Taxation has become simpler, and Infra is coming up fast. I remain incredibly optimistic.

A perspective from 2015 –

It’s difficult to see 5 years further but as I clear the haze and form a picture of what India would look like 5 years down the line, I see an athlete going full steam, a nation running headlong into the future making up for all those lost years, to regain its place at the top. As my heart begins to rejoice this image, my right-brain gets to work, pulling me back to reality, to the reality of some fundamental challenges we face, illiteracy and poverty.

The vision of this proactive India stems from the rapid growth witnessed in the post liberalization period. The good thing about this growth is that India’s growth and exports have not been labor intensive but knowledge intensive. India hence has a strong footing for accelerating growth in the years to come, not just as a manufacturing hub but also as an innovation hub specializing in frugal engineering. As growth subsides in the Chinese and Korean economies, India has the potential to come up as a manufacturing hub, but this potential will not translate into reality unless we correct a few basics. India is by far one of the most difficult countries for business, unclear and complex tax laws, red tape and lack of trained human resource are dragging India’s Manufacturing sector.

Political parties find it difficult to rise above personal differences and work for the nation, the recently stalled GST bill brings forward the anarchy in our parliament. Every government since Independence has been Indifferent towards education, only recently the AAP government broke the jinx doubling Delhi’s education budget. No country can dream to develop without an educated society, the Chinese and the Koreans understood this at an early stage and invested in their primary and secondary education system, the fruits of those efforts are showing up. By 2020 I see India rushing to boost its primary and secondary education system as it understands the role education plays in empowering society.

There has been a better time to invest in India as it prepares for a new dawn. The huge market offered by India makes it very attractive for multinationals to invest in. This investment brings with it jobs, which in turn effect societal upliftment. I believe we are standing at the most crucial juncture in the history of independent India. Raising Venture Capital has become relatively easy, bank loans are easily available and per capita income is encouraging people to start their own businesses. Entrepreneurship is the buzzword, new and innovation driven companies are coming up every day. Constraints aside, India has arrived at the world stage with growth in its cross-hairs. Any walls separating us from our target will be brought down be it illiteracy or poverty. I see 2020 as the year of awakening for India.

There is only so little that we see

For many years, I believed that I understood religion and its place in this world- as humans evolved and started living in larger and larger groups, they needed a guiding principle to segregate good and bad. Religion was the document that provided this. How do you make people accept this? Tell people it was written by a superior/magical being. This made for quite a logical explanation and pretty much everyone around me agreed that it must be so. I have an educational background in science and so do most of my friends, we tend to be quick to accept explanations that validate the philosophies of modern science. It was not until I got lost and needed an Anchor point that I went back and further explored Religion and its place in our society, specifically Hinduism. Why so many Gods and Goddesses, why this elaborate scheme, why an effort to try and explain the workings of the Universe? These questions helped me look at Religion in a whole new light and I found a new answer. It is not something built just to contain society in a manageable structure and people within acceptable behaviour, it is also a framework built to help us evolve, built to be a guiding light for our growth, it gives us idols to follow, it gives us stories of hard-work, sacrifice, devotion, courage, and love.

This last weekend, four of us went out for an evening, we roamed around far and wide, ended up some 20 Km from home. Returning options were a cab against the metro, one of us wanted the cab, we tried booking one, three cabbies refused. I next went on and booked one for the nearest metro, so our guy took offence, it was an insult to his decision-making, wish, judgement, etc. The thing is that he didn’t know the whole story. There is also the question of the refusing drivers, one could get furious at them for refusing a particular destination but there is one particular trivia that I am aware of in our case. We had to travel from Delhi to Gurgaon and there is a Rs 100 24h-pass for taxis entering Gurgaon from Delhi or the other way around. A 350 bucks ride with a Rs 100 entry tax might not make sense to some.

Each one of us has a huge library of concepts and thumb rules that collectively form our view of the world. We draw conclusions from the way our life plays out, and then archive those conclusions, the next time a similar situation comes up, we quickly refer to this archive for efficient answers. Unless forced to, there is resistance to re-evaluating a problem, after all, we already know the solution. The issue with this approach is that loads is hidden from our view, and hence the conclusions that we draw are just informed guesses. Alright- So What? The reason it makes sense to know this consciously is that it helps us in being more open to new suggestions, ideas, and concepts. We can be less confident about knowing the absolute answer and might give others more ears, it also makes us more open to questioning and re-evaluating our decisions, to explore and gather as much information as is possible in a given situation before we make a decision.

So the next time your reaction to something does not seem to fit logic, remember that there could be years of reinforcement clouding your judgement, it takes strength to go against all of that and make the logically correct decision, at that moment. The next time someone suggests a wacky new idea, remember that they might know something which you don’t, perhaps it’s time you re-evaluated your definition of possible.