Keep the mantras simple, but keep them

By the time I came to the last job I knew where the problems lay: what I had to mobilize was the will and the resources to attempt changes...

By the time I came to the last job I knew where the problems lay: what I had to mobilize was the will and the resources to attempt changes that would go against the grain for voters, government employees, even politicians. In this century we cannot afford to continue in the old way: the government will go both bankrupt and collapse under the weight of its own administrative failures. And one billion people in a country with many resources will have to continue to suffer poverty, poor education and ill health for no fault of their own.

So what are the new mantras for the twenty-first century? As far as India is concerned, very simple ones. Better planning, intensive training for both politicians and bureaucrats, strategies that will empower the poor and women in particular, and a hard look at what the government should do and what it should withdraw from. We need to put in place policies that will help create jobs, and develop those sectors of the economy which will lead to growth.

If the 1990s for India was a decade of economic reform, in the next decade we urgently need to consider political reform. Who should be a politician, what his or her role should be, and how to bring about far greater involvement of citizens in governance are issues for us to ponder.

The third set of priorities involve technology: how it can improve government systems, deliver citizen services, and enable the country to compete globally for employment in the information technology sector which has a potential of growing from 5 billion in output in India today to 100 billion in the next ten years. Andhra Pradesh has also ventured into promoting biotechnology because of the potential it holds.

To move forward I believe any country must have leaders who can first scrutinize the existing balance sheet of assets and liabilities and then devise strategy with clarity and commitment. I have been saying from the beginning that in India we have all the resources, natural and human. India is the biggest democracy in the world. It has a large domestic market. It has a free press and an independent judiciary. It has a large pool of scientific and technical manpower. But we are not able to give its politics a direction, or able to create the proper climate for achievement. Yet Indians have achieved striking success abroad.

There are two ways of looking at the fifty years behind us: you could either look at how far India has got as an independent nation emerging from colonial bondage or at how much remains undone. By the end of the twentieth century India had the fastest growing economy in the world. But it also had a huge chunk of people who had no access even to the most basic services. That is the challenge of governing this nation.

Few countries have hung on to democracy so tenaciously, despite an increasingly divisive electorate. But the quality of democracy we offer our people leaves a lot to be desired. India ranks low in the United Nations Development Programme8217;s Human Development Index, but high up in Transparency International8217;s Corruption Index.

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Few countries have populations that spell such extremes in terms of human resources. We have more unlettered people than the entire population of every country in the world barring China. But at the other end of the spectrum, our institutes of technology are becoming recruiting grounds for the world8217;s leading corporations.

One level of Indian society has achieved so much purchasing power and become such a sophisticated market that imported goods are flooding neighbourhood stores in our cities. Yet at another level there are millions of Indians who have today less calories available to them per capita than at the beginning of the last decade.

Excerpted from Plainspeaking8217;, by N. Chandrababu Nadu with Sevanti Ninan; Viking; Rs 395