As the nation stepped confidently into a New Year, the mood was palpably upbeat, reflected in the celebrations across mega cities that rang in the New Year at midnight with illuminations, firecrackers and an eruption of youthful joy and merriment. They rang out the old, creating the space for a dawn of new hope. Sounds of high-pitched music hung about in the air. India looks forward to better times in a world that has reinvented itself from the worries of a pandemic that killed over seven million people.
The confidence of the nation was punctuated by a statement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi that India has edged past Japan to become the fourth largest economy. His assertion was also that India would soon become the third largest by bypassing Germany, an economic giant for decades. India’s biggest strength arises less from its leadership and more from its teeming population of 1.4 billion, whose collective energy is working wonders. The economic liberalization of the Rao-Singh era in the early 1990s was a turning point. Growth gained new dynamics. Its benefits are there for all to see, but its effects fail to percolate down to the ordinary masses. Salaries/wages, for instance, are not seeing any substantial rise. Greed manifested in the loot of the exchequer by politicians and the unbridled bureaucracy, coupled with acts of exploitation by vested interests, makes the common man’s life miserable. Restructuring of the systems, as was done in the economic sphere, is an urgent requirement. This requires both wisdom and courage on the part of those who govern the nation. A steady income, big or small, keeps family hearths burning. In a nation where agriculture still remains the main source of income for families, this is easier said than done. Reforms attempted in this sector by the Modi government failed to take off due to pressure from the wealthy segments of the farming community. Judicial and bureaucratic reforms are not attempted at all, due to lack of courage on the part of government and sway of vested interests. The clogging of the justice dispensation system with a backlog of over five crore cases, a delay in delivery of justice and legal fights lasting decades, as in India, are manifestations of weak governance. Building highways through the length and breadth of the nation by itself means little, set against the drag in solving larger issues of the nation.
As one more year passed by, we have miles to go before we pause to rest. The strengths of the systems are eroding. Systems are being sabotaged from within by the crooked, semi-literate political class. To reinvent them, reforms spanning all sectors are the way forward. Very little is being attempted at, other than in the pushes like GST, the unification of the nation’s market taxation mechanism. A change in nomenclature is hardly a reform, as in the shift from Planning Commission to Niti Aayog, or from IPC to Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita or the unsung national education policy. All these failed to capture the fancy of the nation; meaning they were half-baked.
