Jan 17 2020, 09:12 AM, updated 6y ago
Meanwhile, the other countries of South Asia are quietly moving past India, offering better living standards to their people.
for a brief period around the turn of the millennium, some people were convinced that 2020 would be the year India would become a superpower.
Given that we are now in 2020, we know this isn’t true – not by a long shot. Far from being a superpower, living standards in India are rather low compared to the rest of the world
the man who started it all was APJ Abdul Kalam.
In 1998, Kalam and YS Rajan, also a government scientist, co-authored a book called India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium.
The book had a simple message: “A developed India, by 2020 or even earlier is not a dream. It need not even be a mere aspiration in the minds of many Indians. It is a mission we can we can all take up and accomplish.”
Much of the book is a meandering set of wildly optimistic forecasts, powered more by an impressionable sense of patriotism than any relevant data. In many ways, the book’s style is a long-form precursor to the millions of patriotic WhatsApp messages that would flood smartphones two decades later.
Reality: 30% of world's poor live in India
In 2008, a decade after his book was published, Kalam brought forward India’s rendezvous date with superpowerdom to 2012. “Though I have envisioned India to become a superpower by 2020, the attitude and the confidence of the youth, to conquer everything in the right spirit, would make the country a global leader and super power within five years,”
Collective delusion
To make things even more surreal, this idea – the India was just around the corner to becoming a fully developed industrialised economy and superpower– entered policy and politics at the highest levels. In 2002, Prime Minister Vajpayee’s Independence Day speech argued that the aim of his government was to “make India a developed nation by 2020”.
As of today, India is very far away from being an upper-middle-income country (it would need to double its per capital gross national income to enter that bloc). Like its Raj siblings, Pakistan and Bangladesh, India is a lower-middle-income country. However, India’s small southern neighbour, Sri Lanka did quietly, unheralded by superpower prophecies, become an upper-middle-income country in 2019.
Unlike a Vietnam or Bangladesh, India was unable to develop mass manufacturing industries. In fact, the unemployment rate in 2017-’18 stood at a 45-year old high following the Modi government’s disastrous move to demonetise high value currency notes.
In spite of the fact that the original superpower 2020 prediction was widely off the mark, versions of it continue to survive (even if they pop up far less frequently now). During the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP President Amit Shah promised voters that India would become a superpower by 2024 if Narendra Modi was voted back as prime minister. Earlier in 2018, Union minister Jitendra Singh claimed that Modi would fulfil Kalam’s “Vision 2020” – although, wisely he did not mention by which year.
In the first few decades after Independence, East and South East Asia raced past India. Now, experts such as economist Amartya Sen have flagged the fact that India is even losing out to its South Asian neighbours such as Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, who are being able to offer their people better standards of living.
Sauce: https://scroll.in/article/948319/india-supe...rect-prediction
This post has been edited by JoeK: Jan 17 2020, 09:17 AM
Quote
0.0410sec
1.07
8 queries
GZIP Disabled