India has been independent now for 60 years today. Like every young country it has been thru ups and downs. At this stage, it is going thru the highest and longest up in its young history. It does have serious challenges, but it also has some strong confidence accumulated in the last few years.
The biggest challenge India faces is buiding its physical, social, and educational infrastructure. And the challenges here are truly monumental. It was interesting to read a text of the speech given by Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh. In charting his plan for the future of India he said:
From this historic Red Fort , I would like this message to go to every corner of India — we will make India a nation of educated people, of skilled people, of creative people.
Very encouraging, though the details suggest that not enough is being proposed, but the next few minutes he spent on becoming political, as most poiticians do,
Apart from effective implementation of all existing reservations for them, we have announced major scholarship and development programmes for their benefit.
I am happy to say that we have been able to persuade the private sector to some extent to take affirmative action to ensure that these sections of society get a fair share of employment in industry and trade.
It is disheartening to say that a person like him who is so learned and experienced can talk about doing everything together. At the same time, the most important issue of removing real barriers to building the real infrastructure are being buried under the political talk and are not even mentioned. I do hope that this speech is slightly different than the usual speech by such politicians.
India is a country with strong intellectual traditions, good cultural values, and reasonable natural resources. It definitely deserves better leaders than it has and had at least for most of its independent life. Democracy is its strength and unfortunatle in democracy, one can not blame leaders because people elect them and India has been electing leaders and changing them.Â
Hopefully, India can really build on all the positives of the last few years and get rid of the problems that are hurdles in building its social, educational, and physical infrastructure.