Opinion Tavleen Singh writes: Modi encouraged India to dream of becoming developed country, but we may not get there quickly

If he did, he could discover that the real reason why India has been left behind by countries that were poorer than us barely 20 years ago is because those countries have recognized the building blocks of development. They are good schools, hospitals, reliable electricity and that most basic of human needs – clean and abundant drinking water. It is true that it is the job of chief ministers to ensure most of these things, but we must keep in mind that most major states have been governed by BJP chief ministers in the past eight years. So why has there not been visible, dramatic change?

The socialist economic philosophy that the Congress Party espoused for our early years as an independent country was based on the idea of ‘alleviating’ poverty. For this you needed the poor to remain poor and they did. But, in the degraded, desperate conditions in which they eked out an existence, there was ‘alleviation’ in the form of unreliable but free electricity, free water and free food grain. And an employment guarantee scheme that provides dole not jobs.

Not a recipe for making India into a developed country. But to this day, Rahul Gandhi boasts about the economic ideas espoused by his grandmother and great-grandfather. Why he never boasts of the incredible changes that were brought about by the Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao remains a mystery. If Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh had not dismantled the license raj India would today be even farther away from becoming a developed country.

Modi was the first prime minister to not boast about India being a poor country. He also noticed that in developed countries people do not defecate everywhere. Swachch Bharat was started to end open defecation in India. It is sad that it stopped short of ending manual scavenging. Sewers are mechanically cleaned in other countries, but if it becomes necessary to manually clean blocked sewage drains, workers wear protective gear unlike in India where they routinely die from inhaling poison gas.

Much has been done in the past eight years to improve sanitation and public hygiene (except on Air India) but almost nothing has been done to take this idea forward and find modern solutions for waste management. If we can dream of sending a man to the moon, surely we can find waste management techniques that would prevent garbage mountains rising high in India’s capital city. It must be done.

There is another detail about developed countries that Modi appears not to have noticed. They do not plaster their streets, airports, and railway stations with pictures of political leaders. This is a practice that is common only in totalitarian countries where the ‘dear leader’ needs to be seen staring sternly out of every nook and cranny so that ordinary people remember that big brother is watching. In our dear Bharat Mata not only do the faces of political leaders pop up around every street corner they also pop up daily in our newspapers and on our television screens to remind us to be grateful for what they have done for us. If they had really made a difference, there would be no need for this puerile publicity.

But to end on the happy note on which I began, Modi needs to be given full credit for giving us the dream of becoming a developed country someday soon. We are not there yet and may not be for a while but at least we are no longer proud of being a poor country. As someone who spent most of my life in those dreary, socialist times when our only aspiration was ‘alleviating’ poverty, this is a refreshing change.