What young Indians want

Book Review: <i>India 2047: Voices of the Young</i>

India 2047

Voices of the Young

Bibek Debroy (editor)

Academic Foundation

162 pages; Rs 895

During a rally for the current Uttar Pradesh (UP) Assembly elections, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav reacted to the prime minister’s remarks about poor electricity supply in the state. At Milkipur, Mr Yadav recounted the story of an old man from Varanasi who had come to him requesting continuous power supply for his city. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi should speak the truth and accept that it is the Samajwadi Party government that has ensured 24-hour power supply to his own constituency,” he said.

Mr Yadav’s tone of bluster failed to mask the regrettably discretionary nature of his policy, one where power is not regarded as a public good but a political tool that can be supplied or withdrawn at random to score points. The statement was especially ironic since Mr Yadav is generally considered the face of modernisation within his party and the larger UP political sphere. 

Mr Yadav, 43, is also what one might charitably call a “young” politician. He is one of the many political figures – a list that includes Arvind Kejriwal (48), Mamata Banerjee (62) and Nitish Kumar (65), among others – who will be active on the national scene over the coming decades. What message do these political leaders have for India’s youth and what expectations can they hope to fulfil?

A new book attempts to answer these questions. In India 2047, Bibek Debroy edits a collection of essays written by young men and women who have worked for the NITI Aayog’s Young Professionals (YP) Programme. YPs do a stint at the Aayog before going on to build careers in public policy and social work. The resulting book is an interesting collection of the aspirations that the youth have for their country when it celebrates 100 years of Independence.

The essays are deeply personal jottings that choose to be optimistic in the face of long-standing and seemingly intractable problems. In “Engendering Society”, Aastha Dang and Sneha Palit write about a woman from Bihar who works as a domestic help in Delhi. Ms Sajda represents the thousands of migrants who come to Delhi and other metropolitan cities in the hope of bettering their lot. The piece meticulously explores how stereotypes continue to interrupt the progress of the girl child, and the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, irrespective of class and social status.

Some issues that the essays tackle are so well-established and -recorded that their continued presence boggles the mind. In “School Education in Palamau [sic], Jharkhand”, Aamir Ali lambasts the state of government schools in the country, where a lack of infrastructure and government apathy blights the lives of the poor. Schemes such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Mid Day Meal Scheme have improved enrolments but with little educational apparatus on the ground, even the most deprived are eager to send their kids to private schools.

Indians are a naturally hopeful lot and a few essays touch the other extreme when imagining a future that is barely 30 years away. In “The City of Kanpur in 2047”, Ranveer Nagaich imagines a city where driverless tempos running on GPS feed into a larger bus and metro network, and Hyperloop technology reduces the distance with other cities. For a city infamous for its endless power cuts, this vision of the future comes across as more quixotic than sanguine. 

This tendency mars some other essays, in which humdrum reality fails to catch up with youthful flights of imagination. In “Flying Middle Class”, Lipi Budhraja envisages a future in which the government has given up its unhealthy fascination to control Air India and the Airports Authority of India is a nimble-footed organisation. Ms Budhraja imagines a time when airport connectivity boosts tourism in Jammu & Kashmir and the Northeast manifold, a not-so-futuristic wish that may nevertheless fail to materialise because of the intransigence of our neighbours.

Some progress, though, is already visible. In “Reimagining Imaginary”, Lakshmi Parvathy writes about the passage of the Transgender Bill 2016, which accorded legal rights to transgender persons. Yet, much work remains to be done in the field of LGBT rights, including the decriminalisation of homosexual acts whose legality remains questionable under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Curiously, Ms Parvathy’s essay restricts itself to transgender rights. 

The tone of the essays is uniformly upbeat, perhaps an outcome of the age of their writers. There are ideas aplenty in India 2047 but the key, as always, lies in implementation. Technology, these essays reiterate, can be a great enabler, a lesson that this government seems to have imbibed when it comes to distributing subsidies. Yet, India is a complex country and ideas are best applied locally rather than force-fit from above. The poor execution of demonetisation, say, is a glaring example.

Other challenges hobble Indian polity. Apart from the discretionary distribution of public goods, communalism and criminalisation remain concerns. Perhaps a generational change will lessen the influence of these invidious forces on Indian politics. If the pleasingly outsize dreams of the writers of this book are any indication, one certainly has reason to hope so.