7. The Failure to Curb Corruption
The rampant corruption in public services in India is not just a sorry shame but one of the biggest obstacles to India's entry into the developed world. We have managed to become a society in which politicians and bureaucrats seek to profit from the power to permit and where every officeholder, however insignificant, seeks to leverage his position for private gain. Corruption drains resources from productive investment, distorts the true costs of doing business, undermines efficiency, and rewards influence rather than performance. That we have managed to grow and develop despite the rampant corruption is a small miracle, and proof of our remarkable strength as a society and an economy. But as long as corruption persists, we will find ourselves running the race of globalization with our ankles tied together.
8. The Risks of Demographic Imbalance
When people speak of demographics in India, it is usually to talk about the “youth bulge,” a population pattern that ensures India a majority of people in their most productive years whereas the rest of the world is aging. That's all to the good, but there is another phenomenon that has gone largely unremarked — the unbalanced growth of our population, with skyrocketing numbers in the poorer and illiterate parts of the country, mainly in the north, and declining growth in the more educated and developed south. The obvious danger is not just of the poor reproducing their poverty and illiteracy and “dragging the country down”; there is also the political danger that a fair reapportionment of parliamentary constituencies according to population would grant the north many more seats in Parliament, while the south may actually lose a few. This would potentially enable the rough-hewn political hacks of the Cow Belt to override the representatives of the south; alarmists even conjure up fears of a revival of southern separatism in response. I am personally convinced that, after six decades of independence, we are beginning to see ourselves more as Indians than just as north or south Indians; I marvel at how masala dosas, the southern spice crèpes, are just as easy to get in Delhi as chhole bature, the classic northern fried bread and chickpea platter. But we should not be completely insensible to the danger of “two Indias” emerging, in which the north has the numbers, while southern India fuels the economic growth — with all the risks of resentment that could breed.
9. The Limitations of Federalism
I have long been convinced that a country the size of India must be a genuine federation — that not every question asked in Dharwar needs to be answered in Delhi. The increasing power and influence of regional and state parties in an era of coalition governments in Delhi should not, however, give way to complacency. Because it is not enough merely to transfer powers from the center to the states, genuine decentralization must involve empowering the zilla parishads and the village panchayats, the district and village-level institutions that reflect Indian democracy at the grass roots. The only way that Indians will be able to determine their own destinies is if our political system enables them to be responsible for their own lives. The centralism of the past might have served a purpose in the first decades after 1947 (to consolidate national unity); thereafter it proved a serious handicap to the country's development. Today, it is increasingly clear: that government is best that centralizes least.
10. Neglecting the “Software” of Human Development
We are right to focus on the urgent need to upgrade our national “hardware”—the country's collapsing infrastructure. But we must not neglect the “software”—the human capital without which no country develops. We must do much more to promote education, health care, and an end to caste and gender discrimination. Only then can we produce Indians truly ready to take India to the top in the twenty-first century.
6. An A to Z of Being Indian
68. An A to Z of Being Indian
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN INDIAN? Our nation is such a conglomeration of languages, cultures, and ethnicities that it is tempting to dismiss the question as unanswerable. How can one define a country that has two thousand castes and sub-castes, 22,000 languages and dialects, and three hundred different ways of cooking the potato? Sixty years after independence, however, it will no longer do to duck the question. For amid our diversities we have all acquired a sense of what we have in common: the assumptions, the habits, and the shared reference points that constitute the cultural and intellectual baggage of every thinking Indian.
India's complexities make the task a little more difficult than that of the British friend who defined Englishness as “cricket, Shakespeare, the BBC.” Any Indian equivalent—“cricket, Bollywood, the Mahabharata”?—would be far more contentious. Instead of a phrase, therefore, one would need an entire glossary, an A to Z of Indianness. And since each Indian has his or her own view of India, this glossary must be treated as being as singular and idiosyncratic, as wide-ranging and maddeningly provocative as India itself.
And there is, of course, the great danger of obsolescence. If ever there was a time when India's cultural assumptions might have been timeless and unchanging, it certainly is not now, at the start of the twenty-first-century. Just a couple of decades ago I would have had to begin my glossary with All-India Radio—“Akashvani: The Voice of the Sky,” which was also the voice of millions of radio receivers, transistors, and loudspeakers blaring forth from puja pandals and tea shops. Its ubiquitousness reflected the indispensability of radio in a country where most people could not read, and where television was largely absent (can anyone still remember those days?). Despite the often heavy hand of government on its programs, the anodyne cadences of its newsreaders and the requests for filmi-geet from improbably remote locations, All-India Radio mirrored the triumphs and trivialities that engaged the nation.
But its moderation also meant mediocrity. In the first five decades of our independence, when an Indian wanted real news, he switched on the BBC; for detailed analyses, he turned to the newspapers; for entertainment, he went to the movies. The rest of the time, he listened to Akashvani. Today AIR's monopoly has long since given way to a proliferation of cable television channels and the mushrooming of FM stations.
So no Akashvani, but even now one cannot eliminate our first entry:
AMBASSADOR: The classic symbol of India's post-independence industrial development. Outdated even when new, inefficient and clumsy, wasteful of steel and gas, overpriced and overweight, with a steering mechanism like an oxcart's and a frame like a tank's, Ambassador cars dominated Indian routes for decades, protected and patronized in the name of self-reliance. Foreigners were constantly amazed that this graceless contraption of quite spectacular ugliness enjoyed two-year waiting lists at all the dealers right up to the 1990s. What they didn't realize is that if they had to drive on Indian roads in Indian traffic conditions, they'd have preferred Ambassadors, too.