What are the prospects for the expansion of liberal space in India over the next two decades? To me this desirable objective requires both growth and equity. It’s happening, but there’s still a lot that needs to be done before we get there.
The benefits of economic growth must reach all Indians — the majority of whom are young, and the majority of whom are poor. Statisticians tell us that the current proportion of the total Indian population under 25 years of age is 51 per cent and the proportion under 35 is about 66 per cent. This predominance of youth in the population is expected to last until 2050, with the average age of an Indian in 2020 expected to be 29 years.
This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that this means we will have a productive, dynamic, youthful population of working age for decades while the rest of the world, including China, is ageing. We used to bemoan our failures at population control, especially in contrast to China; but when one single Chinese, born from his country’s one-child policy, is desperately trying to support four grandparents, his Indian counterpart, the child of our country’s population-control failures, will be riding the cusp of a demographic boom.
But then there’s the bad news. The availability of a human resource of such magnitude only means anything if we can feed, house, clothe, educate and train these young people so they can actually contribute to socio-economic change. If we fail to provide them the opportunities to make something of their lives in “new India”, the same population could be not only a burden but even a threat, since so much of terrorism and extremist violence in our country is carried out by embittered and unemployed young men.
How are we going to give them these opportunities? Plainly not through agriculture alone, because rural India already cannot sustain the 700 million people currently trying to live off the land. That is why India is suffering the painful tragedy of farmer suicides every time the monsoon disappoints and the harvests fail to sustain a debt-ridden farmer’s family. Over the next two decades India will witness a massive migration from the rural areas to the urban, both to existing cities and towns and through the transformation of rural centres into urban townships.
In turn this will have an impact on other vital aspects of Indian life. First, on our education system, which will have to cope with hundreds of millions of young people who no longer intend to be farmers and peasants, but will want the education that will equip them to lead viable urban lives. Second, on our demand for and consumption of energy, which will multiply exponentially as new infrastructure is built and as urban dwellers seek electricity, water, drainage, roads, telephone connections and mass transit. Today, 600 million Indians, overwhelmingly in rural areas, are not even connected to the electricity grid. Tomorrow they will be. Our government aims to increase power generation in India by seven times — 700 per cent — over the next 25 years.
If, say, 300 million Indians were to move from the villages to the towns in the next two decades or less, can we absorb all of them, educate all of them, employ all of them? If India succeeds in accommodating and absorbing these young people, we can enhance their life chances by enabling them to seize the opportunities of the 21st century. This is a task that must be taken on by a society that only this year passed a Right to Education Act embracing all children everywhere in our country. Right now, desperately poor parents in India, working as rickshaw-pullers and domestic servants, are scrimping and saving to send their children to private schools that they can ill afford, because they see a decent education in English as the best guarantee of their child’s future. Now the state is stepping in to ensure that their dreams do not have to constitute an impossible burden on them.
If that works, and we bring the benefits of education to every illiterate child in India today, then perhaps 200 million of the 300 million people I spoke about will suddenly be able to compete with the rest of the world. I say to Westerners: These Indians tomorrow will be able to answer your phones, make your airline reservations and pursue your credit-card defaulters, but they will also be able to read your MRIs, design your automobiles, write your legal briefs and invent your next gadgets.
That is if we succeed. What if we fail? As a political representative in India today, I certainly do not take the prospects of success for granted. The process of doing what I have described is not just huge in itself, it also involves something no society, not even China, has yet attempted. And that is to connect millions of citizens in a functioning democracy to their own government: not just to announce entitlements that they are expected to grasp for themselves, but to create delivery mechanisms that ensure that these entitlements are not just theoretical, but real and accessible.
This is essential in all societies, but it is indispensable in a democracy. As a Member of Parliament, I am struck by the fact that a majority of the voters in every Indian constituency are, by international standards, poor. The basics —food, clothing, shelter, roads, electricity, drinking water, jobs — dominate our politics. This is why my party has focused on inclusive growth — the combination of economic development and social justice — as the lodestar of its work.
If this is important enough when voters are poor, it is deeply significant when they are both poor and young. Young people in India are now asking that their voices be heard, that their issues be addressed and that their roles be recognised. They want to be accepted as partners for development, helping to chart a common course and shaping the future for everyone.
As young India grows into and demands change, our national politics is undergoing a vital shift as well. I believe that a major reason why my party won last year’s General Elections is that our political leadership was able to delink the national polity from the incendiary issues of religious identity and caste denomination that other parties had built their appeal upon. Instead, we put the focus on what the people needed — more development, better governance, wider socio-economic opportunities.
And yet, paradoxically, the stresses of economic development have created disparities which risk becoming centrifugal forces, dividing our society between rich and poor, urban and rural. To counteract this, we need to devise creative, ambitious responses to deal with the challenges faced by our people —to connect them to the opportunities the 21st century offers.
One such response is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), another is the expansion of micro-credit to the rural poor, and a third possible response in the near future will be the Food Security Act my government is currently working on.
The objective of such measures is inclusion and connection — inclusion in the great Indian 21st century story, and connection to the institutional structures within which that story unfolds. In my visits to the poor and dispossessed when I am in Thiruvananthapuram, I am acutely conscious that the opposite is still the reality for millions of my fellow Indians. They face exclusion and disconnection for a variety of reasons: their place in the traditional social structure, their caste, their poverty, but also because our country has not been able to build the physical means — the roads, the highways, the power-transmission lines, the telephone systems, the schools — to connect them. Rahul Gandhi rightly speaks of two Indias — one connected, one not. Establishing the connection between the two Indias is vital to our country’s place in the world, and vital to developing a convincing sense of liberal India.
And if we succeed — when we succeed — we will be connecting 500 million Indians, over the next two decades, to their own country and to the rest of the world. Half-a-billion villagers will join the global village. That is an exciting prospect. But only then can we truly speak of an India ready to fulfil its liberal potential.
Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from
Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency
Links:
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