On India’s 78th birthday, India has come a long way. When it found self-determination in 1947, it was an impoverished nation bled dry by the British empire.
You don’t need to read Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire to learn what the British did to India, but it is a great reminder. When the East India Company took control of the country, India’s share of world GDP was 23 per cent (that of the US today). When the British left, it was just above 3 per cent. Partition itself displaced over 10,000,000 people who had to be resettled. Literacy levels were low, health systems were decimated, and it took its first breaths under the shadows of communal challenges.
An India free of the British, in those turbulent times, could have gone down any of these types of government – democracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism. But the leaders chose to be a democracy – a most difficult form of government for a population of 340 million with deep-level diversity.
Fast forward 78 years, India has managed to hold on to democracy. Notwithstanding its benefits of giving everyone a voice, such a system can slow down progress, as every view is considered and debated. The leaders must account for themselves every five years – at times, leaving us surprised, like they did this year, but therein lies the beauty of democracy, where every vote is considered equal. Moving forward can be slow as compared to other regimes, but each step forward has the force of the citizens behind it.
Certainly India has a long way to go to solve some of its challenges. Corruption is one of them, as is poverty. Finding employment for its teeming millions of young people, religious differences, criminalisation in politics, and better healthcare for the masses, are some pressing issues that still need to be addressed.
And yet, in 78 years, India has achieved a lot. Its education systems such as the IITs and IIMs are world class. India has been on the forefront of the IT revolution and is well positioned to advance further, with digital economy growing exponentially. Digitisation is seeing rapid growth which will lead to better education and health outcomes.
Self-reliant in food for decades in its care of 1.4 billion people, India now exports food to the world. Polio stands eradicated, and life expectancy has increased from 32 years in 1947 to 70 years in 2022.
These freedoms have allowed India to take on new challenges such as space research. It has launched 432 satellites in space for various countries, and its Moon mission last year became the first to land in the lunar south pole regions, and only the fifth country to reach the moon when it did.
India is also now the fifth biggest global economy having surged past France and UK recently, fast closing in on Japan and Germany at numbers 4 and 3.
In global affairs, India has fiercely retained its independence. It has displayed in recent times, a high level of assertiveness in its global engagements, much to the chagrin of established international protocols.
India is shining. Happy 78th birthday, India.
