India:
Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow
Devendra Gore
From
one of the poorest countries in the world with a highly regulated business regime,
we seem to be freeing ourselves from the shackles and become a forward looking,
growth oriented economy. Poverty is decreasing but at a speed that is far
insufficient. We need to bring depth to our reforms proceeds so that it seeps
to the poor man in term of education, jobs, as an increases in per capita
income etc.
Some of the things which we have make us great country a vibrant
democracy, flexibility, religious tolerance, youthful demography and a great
desire to succeed what we still lack is the combined vision on several fronts
including infrastructure, anti-corruption drive and competitive positioning. Be
it water, electricity roads, ports or airports we need several times
improvement over what we have. Corruption is absolutely undesirable but it is
everywhere in the world. What we need to follow is the Singapore model that has
“Zero Tolerance” for corruption so that it is no longer active and the country
gains some respect in global market. On the competitive positioning I
personally find that India is much more expensive in everything except labour
at the quality purity and we need to work hard to change this situation.
I remember the days
when telecom minister used to take pride in the fact that India had the lowest
density of phones because it was not possible to provide phones to cores of the
people and waiting list used to be years long. After privatizing India become
one of the fastest growing markets and it has created hundreds of thousands of
jobs, lots of wealth as well as
opportunities in the field of industries something holds good for electricity, water,
roads, airports as there is huge need for the same.
Anywhere in the world , Indian stands out as exceptional people with
their Intelligence and work ethics we just need to work on some of the things at
our end to make India one of the most competitive and powerful forces in the
world.
I believe that our increasing middle class population and its spending
power could be a boon to the country rather than a curse if the government truly
provides goods governance and improves some of the things that I just talked about.
