Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

India’s Growing Wealth and Deprivation

|

India’s Growing  Wealth and Deprivation

India has always been a mystical land and nation in Afghanistan. From the early years of the pre-independence era, Indian music and culture found its way into Afghan land, and Afghans found their first interactions with what is India of today with the melodies of Rubabs and Tablas. For much of the outside world as well as Afghanistan, India has been the epitome of unity and grandeur; its rich culture and fabled traditions have caught the imagination of Afghans and much of the world.

It has been only in recent years that a constant flow of Afghans has been trickling into India and finding a measure of familiarity with a land and people that had remained shrouded in mystique for most of the Afghan nation. It is heartening to see the impressive growth in the ties between the two nations. On political, cultural, economic and people to people levels, Afghanistan has begun wide-ranging interactions with India and is well-poised to immensely benefit from this bi-lateral relationship.

India, in recent years, has caught headlines and the attention of much of the world as a "new world power". Inside India, it is fairly common to hear jingle advertisements describing the country as "shining India". From the early 1990s that India adopted an open-doors policy, the country has seen much transformation. Today, 56 Indian companies are listed among the Forbe's Fortune 500 companies. This means that more than 10% of the largest and most prominent global companies are Indian.

This is a significant achievement for India, a country that had its modest economic beginnings barely 20 years ago. Its economic growth has been impressive touching 8% annual growth rate on a year-on-year basis. Its booming information technology industry has been steadily growing and providing revenues to the government as well as direct and indirect employment to millions of people. The country's premier IT giant, Infosys, today ranks as one of the top ten global IT companies both by revenue and geographical presence.

It had rather modest beginnings in 1980s when its co-founder and chairman, Narayanan Krishnamurthy, started out the company as a small office with a small loan he had borrowed from his wife. But the success story of Infosys is also the story of hundreds and thousands of other successful private enterprises that today form the backbone of that country and nation.

The Reliance Industries Limited, owned by Mukesh Ambani and founded by his father, Dhirubhai Ambani, is today the largest Indian company by market capitalization and is featured in the Forbe's list of the 100 most respected global companies. The Tata Group and Wipro are other global Indian companies to just name a few, which have commanded the respect of industrialized countries in the West and other emerging economies in Asia.

Despite the phenomenal strides India has made on the economic front, this country remains a land of glaring disparities and inequalities. Poverty, malnourishment and destitution are daily facts of life that hundreds of millions of Indians grapple with.

As the Indian middle class has been steadily expanding to reach 350 million today, the economic growth of almost two decades has caused a mass social and economic as well as political dislocation. As the economy grows and is in need of steel and iron to build infrastructure, the iron ore and other such resources have to be extracted by the government and mining companies from under the feet of tribal people who have been living on that land for thousands of years.

The Communist-Maoist Naxalite insurgency in the tribal lands of India's Western states is now three decades old. As the government and private mining companies' push into these tribal lands has intensified in recent years, so has the insurgency and armed resistance of the tribal people spearheaded by the so-called Naxalites.

This is one sad example of the complex social issues that India of today faces. Another area that has been especially hit is the neglected farm and agriculture sector where more than a quarter million farmers have committed suicide over the past 15 years due to indebtedness to private moneylenders and the collapse of agriculture in many regions of India. This situation, termed as India's "agrarian crisis", is a symptom of wider imbalances and disparities as a result of the mass transformation that the country is going through.

Indian policymakers, with the Harvard-trained economist Dr. Manmohan Singh at the helm, have prescribed a largely neo-liberal solution to India's persisting and extensive poverty problem. The "war on poverty" announced by the current coalition government led by Indian National Congress is one such strategy adopted by India to take care of the country's widening wealth gap between the urban rich and the rural poor.

In addition, the government at the center in India has taken up an extensive work for cash, wage-hour program under the title of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in which cash is given to landless peasants and their families in return for work.

This program has been a pilot project by the government and enjoys the backing of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party's president. The government of India has introduced two other controversial legislations in the national parliament, one being the Right to Food Bill and the Right to Education Bill, both of which aim at making education and food as fundamental rights of an Indian citizen.

Eradication of poverty and deprivation is no easy challenge that confronts the Indian nation. The ongoing economic growth modeled strictly on a neo-liberal framework, is bound to produce inequalities and disparities. As some get rich thanks to the flourishing economy, there are many more that are stuck in the lower levels of a society bound by caste and social prejudice in a country that still respects the old-age traditions of caste and social stratification.

India remains an entrepreneurial nation and this is perhaps the greatest asset of that country. Educated, determined and ambitious young Indian men and women who have their eyes set on the future are establishing businesses, companies and providing employment to fellow Indians. This is certainly India's ace card that will sustain that country's rise in a global environment that is marked by uncertainties and fierce competition.

The author is the permanent writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at outlook afghanistan@gmail.com

Go Top