PM Modi spoke about India’s achievements and challenges while rolling out this 25-year goal that he wants to be realised by the 100th year of the country’s independence in his Independence Day speech with policies to support domestic production in power, defence and digital technology.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his Independence Day speech :
“We must work towards turning India into a developed nation by 2047.”
Now there are 3 questions which make sense :
- But what makes a country developed?
- What keeps India still in the category of developing nations?
- And what must we do to become developed?
We have all grown up reading in textbooks that India is a vikassheel (developing) and krishi-pradhan (primarily an agricultural economy) country.
We have aware that countries like the UK and France are developed.
But we have basically a third-world country after the end of the cold war in 1990 between the Western Bloc led by the capitalist US and other First-World (developed) nations, generally liberal democratic but tied to a network of authoritarian states, mostly their former colonies, and the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union that influence the Second World (communist and militarily powerful) and tied to a network of authoritarian states.
Even if we don’t straightaway get into the international standards that define developed and developing nations, without much consensus though, we have a fairly good idea of what separates the two.
In developed countries, a vast chunk of the population has access to basic requirements such as quality education, healthcare, and transport.
There is apparent prosperity often symbolise by big cars and high residential and commercial towers, besides robust environmental protection and adherence to civic norms.
In a US city residents will be seen using separate bins to keep dry and wet waste.
An automatic mechanism is in place to pick up and dispose of what has discard.
If a woman falls down while walking her pet and gets injure, she only has to dial a telephone number and medical help will come rushing.
In a developing country, people in distress may not find immediate relief because cops are either overburden or the criminal justice system is inefficient.
In developing countries like India, where there has substantial progress in infrastructure development in the last 75 years, millions in villages even now go hungry and are devoid of schools, hospitals, roads and other such facilities.
The situation even in cities is not too good, with mountains of garbage, inadequate pipe sewerage networks that mean choke stormwater drains, polluting rivers and causing flooding on roads during the rains, besides water and electricity crises.
And in the developed West, people vote on demands to make their lives better, or their countries more prestigious in the global order, politicians in India, essentially a country of villages, still play ‘mai-baap’ politics and offer handouts like ghee and bicycles to woo poor voters during elections.
But, what makes countries developed or developing?
Developed vs Developing
A ‘viksit rashtra’ is industrialise, has a high quality of life and a develop economy and advance technological infrastructure relative to less industrialised nations.
‘Vikassheel’ or developing countries are those in the process of industrialisation or are pre-industrial and almost entirely agrarian.
The most common criteria for evaluating the degree of economic development are :
- The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or the monetary measure of all goods and services produce in a country in a year. Countries with a high GDP and per capita income means the amount of money earned per person are consider developed.
- The level of industrialisation. Countries in which the tertiary (companies that provide services such as entertainment, financial, and retailers) and quaternary sectors of industry (knowledge-based activities such as information technology, research, and development, as well as consulting services and education) dominate are describe as developed.
- Developed countries generally have more advance post-industrial economies, meaning the service sector provides more wealth than the industrial sector.
- Some other criteria are the scale of infrastructure, the general standard of living, and the Human Development Index (HDI).
- HDI focuses on indices for life expectancy and education and does not take into account factors such as the net wealth per capita or the relative quality of goods in a country.
- This is why even some of the most advance countries, including the G7 members (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the US and the European Union) and others, do not do too well on HDI.
- That’s why countries like Switzerland rank high on HDI.
Definition
There is no all-agreed definition of a developed country.
More than a strict definition, a developed country differs from a developing one in categorisation use by international institutions.
Agencies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization or the World Economic Forum use their indicators to club developed and developing countries.
Like UN classifies countries into low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high-income countries.
This classification is base on an individual country’s gross national income per capita.
A country with GNI per capita of up to $1,085 is a low-income economy, up to $4,255 in the next bracket of lower middle-income, up to $13,205 as upper middle-income and above that high-income economy.
The low and middle-income countries are refer to as developing countries, and the high-income economies as developed nations.
Besides high per capita income, a developed country usually has a low poverty level, higher living standards, low population growth rate, low unemployment level, and rank higher on the human development index among countries of comparable size.
The UN also has a separate list of the least developed countries, which have low GNI per capita and fare worse on the human development index.
India’s Situation
The World Bank currently categorises India as a lower-middle income economy meant for countries with a gross national income per capita of between $1,086 and $4,255.
High-income countries, like the US, have a per capita income of $13,205 or much more.
India is expect to grow at over 7% in the current fiscal year ending in March 2023.
This is the fastest among major economies.
Estimates and experts say India’s economy could expand to become the world’s third-largest by 2050 after the US and China, although per capita income, currently around $2,100, may remain low compare to many countries.
But countries like the US already see India as a future challenger to China’s dominating influence in Asia and beyond, India with many other developing economies, continues to be known for widespread poverty, poor illiteracy rates and its skewed sex ratio.
But that’s not to say there has not substantial progress since it became an Independent country in 1947.
India’s Achievements
- India’s GDP rose from Rs 2.79 lakh crore in 1950-51 to an estimated Rs 147.36 lakh crore in 2021-22. India’s economy, currently at $3.17 trillion and it is expect to become the fifth largest in the world in 2022.
- India’s per capita Net National Income (depreciation deducted from GDP + income from foreign sources) has jump from Rs 12,493 in 1950-51 to Rs 91,481 in 2021-22.
- Government’s total revenue receipts have increase from Rs 171.15 crore in 1947-48 to Rs 20,78,936 crore in 2021-22.
- India’s foreign exchange reserves have risen from Rs 911 crore in 1950-51 to Rs 45,42,615 crore in 2022.
- India has the fifth-largest forex reserves in the world.
- Foreign trade (merchandise and services) has risen from Rs 1,214 crore in 1950-51 to over $143 billion now.
- India’s foodgrain production has increase from 50.8 million tonnes in 1950-51 to 316.06 million tonnes now.
- Literacy rate has also improve from 18.3% in 1951 to 78%.
- The female literacy rate has improve from 8.9% to over 70%.
In 2020, the US said India and some other countries were no longer developing and call them developed.
In some circles in India, there was jubilation but it soon became clear that the new tag was not an acknowledgement of India actually becoming a developed nation.
Why India is still Developing?
For this there is a historical context.
The British came, rule and exploit India for about 200 years.
India may not exactly have a sone ki chidiya but it was a thriving economy.
Some estimates claim that India contribute to about one-fourth of the global economy before the British colonise it.
British economist Angus Maddison said India’s share of the world economy decline from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950.
When the British left India in 1947, it was no longer the same country.
Part of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s popularity is because of his articulation some call it a rant that India would have better off today, had the British not colonise it for so long.
He explains in his book and interviews that what we consider British contributions, such as the Railways, to India were actually means of exploiting the Indian people.
75 years have pass since India’s independence and the short answer as to why India is still a developing country is that the speed of development has not as good as it should have to leapfrog to the developed nations bracket.
Despite perhaps best of the intentions, successive governments have not able to do enough.
One of the hindrances is India’s population, mostly poor.
India is the second most populous country but that’s also a demographic dividend that needs to be tapped.
High levels of corruption and inadequate technological advancement have also slow down India’s growth story.
And, more than 70% of the people are still engage in the primary sector (agriculture).
Vast potentials in the secondary (industry) and tertiary (services) also require to be realise.
In essence, becoming a developed country may not be as easy as it sounds.
As a matter of fact, PM Modi had in 2017 as well talk about India becoming a developed country by 2022.
