Well, another year, another Independence day. 64 years ago, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke to India, an India that was very different to the India which Dr. Manmohan Singh addressed this morning but also extremely similar. In his famous
Tryst with Destiny speech, India's first Prime Minister talked about the long and unique road to (political) freedom, the road ahead and the dreams of the Indian people. At that time, India's GDP was close to 0.8%, and had $1.14 billion USD in foreign reserves. In 2011, India's GDP is close to 9% and has $316 billion USD of foreign reserves.
The story however is far from smooth or rosy. Until 1991, India's GDP was not much more than 1-2% per annum, thanks to the bureaucratic Licence-Permit-Quota Raj that Nehru himself put in place, despite of the rhetoric in his
Tryst with Destiny speech. Our impressive growth rate can only be attributed to changes in circumstance, wherein India would be declared bankrupt if it were to not accept IMF conditions on a bail-out. Thankfully, better sense prevailed and slowly but surely, the days of waiting for years for a simple telephone connection vanished with the emergence of new providers.
The India now, is different, yet very similar to the India in 1947. Countless slogans of the style of "Garibi Hatao" have come and gone, yet poverty remains. Large chunks of the economy still remain over-regulated and licenced, for example the
restaurant industry. Reforms at best have been slow, and at worst have been non-existent. Indeed, the current government led by the man who was Finance Minister in 1991 has been rightly lambasted for its inability to carry out key reforms.
Corruption once again has raised its ugly head and despite attempts to curtail it, has only persisted, or even grown stronger. Notwithstanding India's patchy history of dealing with the corrupt, even by this scale, the current UPA government is heading to the dubious distinction of being the most corrupt on record. Social workers are now clamouring for a "miracle cure" in terms of the Jan Lokpal bill, even going so far as to blackmail the government with hunger-strikes, a method the Founder of the Indian Constitution Dr. BR Ambedkar called "the grammar of anarchy". Having multiple yet toothless Vigilance Commissions hasn't done anything to reduce corruption so what's to say this new level will.
A great
post by Nitin Pai shows why this new style of crusading is a bad idea, and another
post here talks about the means justifying the ends. However, one way to definitely erase corruption is to give more power to the citizen. How does one do that? Simple. Open the economy up. The less licences or hurdles a citizen faces in doing their work, the less they will pay to get the work done. Reforming the sectors, ensuring that competition drives the workforce, not nepotism or cronyism, is the key to eliminate corruption.
I have a dream. A dream of a corruption free India, where the government restricts itself to economic strategy making, rather than micromanagment of the economy. A dream of a secular India, not one that is "
competitively intolerant". I have a dream where I can pursue my freedom of speech, and not have it curtailed by the State, or by pseudo-constitutional bodies deriving their power on the basis of
ex-cathedra statements. Funnily enough, this is the same dream that Rabindranath Tagore saw when he exhorted "Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake"
It's been 64 years, I think it's time we made it into a reality.
Jai Hind!!!!
