We have come a long way (though
not as long as history of United states, for example) from pre-independence
era, making some remarkable progress on multiple fronts. This suddenly gives us
some momentum, if we try to assimilate and sum up the achievements so far. Since,
Rome was not built in a day and for us, we lost quite a few years to destruction
and loot by many those were ruling the country from Mughals to British, we barely
managed to survive and struggle for independence than to grow ourselves on
science and prosperity, which is the index of the modern world on being a
developed nation. Subsequently and quite unfortunately the nation was time and again
run by unfit leaders, who had their vested interest of running the country through
dynastic politics and no development plans, thus stalling the progress to such
an extent that we could not even take the advantage of the rapid progression of
the world, where Europe and later on Japan and China learnt to recuperate and
move ahead. These were preambles and despite having a democratic set up, we didn’t
manage to pull in the trigger at the right moment, partly due to lack of right
education and partly because of the lack of a suitable political alterative
that could bring development and prosperity of common people. During the
process, certain companies with goodwill ran and became important like the Tatas
but those were not enough to compete the ever rising US, ever powerful USSR (and
later Russia), formidable Europe and subsequent growth of East Asian giants:
Japan and China. We, as Indians, unfortunately grew every day to multiply our
number in terms of being population intensive (thanks to systematic improvement
(reduction) in malnutrition, improved quality of life etc.) without
significantly adding to per capita income.
Lower cost of living is a plus, I
would say (lets compare Chandrayan, a real moon mission costing 75 MUSD, which
is less than the Hollywood movie gravity -100 MUSD)3, since it
attracts multitude of investment from others but what we lacked was a challenging business opportunity and to
make in India either for India or elsewhere. China makes literally everything
for rest of the world (ha including for India), it doesn’t matter if it were
due to cheap labor or intensive product base and the willingness of the
government to allow foreign companies to make their products manufactured
there. Even for a population of 1.2 Billion, we have been importing
significantly our defense equipment thanks to the manmade unrest around us by
our neighbours, which is nicely promoted by US through aids (such as internally
displaced Pakistanis -532 MUSD), Srilanka and the mighty China. Whatever, the cumulative
support may be, in the process we end up having a defence spending of roughly
40 BUSD in a given year1. Here is a chart from defence spending
around the world (from 2013, figure 1). Though, it’s a meagre number,
reflecting the military presence of respective countries in their own as well
as foreign territory, India’s defence budget is all the time inclined towards
its self defence and is time and again mired by corruption from army chiefs to
defence ministers and middle men, everyone is in the process making money to
make way for an otherwise unsolicited vendor! Irrespective of the situation, India
could restrict those amount of foreign imports with able scientists and gradual
increase in indigenous defence research projects! But that does not happen due
to lack of political will as well as lack of mentors and scientific advisors
who could make themselves free from politics to think beyond, for the wellbeing
of Indians.
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| Fig.1 Worldwide defence spending- 2013 |
A UK based agency predicts that
defence spending of US, India and China are going to match each other in the
next 30 years2. Some of these are unprecedented but the need of the
hour is not to increase your defence budget but make the people more aware
about many best practices that they need to do as Indians, if we were to
compete on an international level.
We need to set our houses in
order, when we get ready to welcome some visitors and that doesn’t mean to be
throwing garbage into the neighbour’s backyard, just to keep ours clean. Believe
me or not, an international colleague of mine pointed out (during one of his
visit to India and in the process a visit to one of the Indian family) “how come you Indians manage to keep your
house so neat and clean and orderly, whereas the roads, pavements are out from
a far cry?” This is true, isn’t it? No doubt, many aware citizens are doing
their bit in improving the standard of living. This is just one part of the
story, such amount of carelessness is reflected in almost all walks of our life
and its difficult to really come out of it, not impossible though.
Many of the Indians would bluff
on a situation unknown to them than plainly denying or pleading ignorance. That
kind of affects in our professional life. Remember, every single thing we do to
others, we are counted on the basis of our background as in a broad international
environment it is “Bharatiya-ness.”
This piece is to be continued and
we need to really do a lot if we were to outsmart Chinese, US and lately
Italians! But, to begin with I hope that our present breed of politicians (post
2014 to be called as Modi era) give us a platform to develop and grow beyond
self and contribute to the true nation building, coz some big Mahatma once said
getting Swaraj (Independence) is part of the problem solved and the bigger one
is about its sustainability coz we need independence from caste, culture, racism,
religion, gender, inequality and many more giant issues to be called as truly
independent practitioner.
With a quest for Swachh (in all
sense) Bharat
Wish you all a happy republic
day, may we prosper together by every bit of it we do for others.
May India shine with clean Ganga,
clean roads, clean sanitation, clean (corrupt free) system and a clean attitude,
of each one of us.
To be contd..
References:
© Subrat creations
