T N Ninan: '...better all the time'

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

Among the courses that had to be done for a degree in economics at the University of Madras, back in the late 1960s, there were two that sat side by side: Modern Economic Development, and Indian Economic Problems. Comment was superfluous because the choice of words said it all: the world had been developing economically for at least two centuries ("modern" meant the eighteenth century onwards), while India had problems! Those courses have presumably undergone some change of definition, after the passage of nearly 40 years, and I hope someone now also talks of Indian economic development.

Because the single-most striking change in India over the past three or four decades has been that of attitude and mood: from self-doubt to self-belief, from pessimism about the future to optimism, and from the sense that we have to protect ourselves from the world to confidence that we can take on the world. Sometimes we strut our stuff too much, and too soon. China, for instance, had the same per capita income as India up until the mid-1980s, now it has twice India's average""so we should be conscious of the missed opportunities. Still, there is no question that the mental baggage of a post-colonial society has largely been shed. This becomes most obvious when you strike up a conversation with those in their 20s, because what comes across is the unconscious assumption that their world is going to get better. And it showed up, equally unconsciously, when a leading businessman said in a meeting of the Prime Minister's Advisory Council on Trade and Industry a couple of years ago that he wished he were 10 years younger, because the future looked so exciting.

One can root this seminal shift in many substantial changes: in recent economic performance, of course; in the individual successes of Indians overseas; in the knowledge that things are changing when a Mumbai-Pune expressway gets built, or a Delhi metro starts running; in the successes that Indian companies have had in acquiring and running businesses in other countries. That we are still starved for success shows up, of course, in the excessive response to a tennis player getting ranked in the top 35! But the surveys suggest that Indians are happier than the people of many other countries""and it must go without saying that a good deal of this has to do with the sense, as the Beatles sang, that "it's getting better all the time", and the knowledge that your children will probably be better off than you.

It is easy to under-estimate the importance of this new self-belief and the optimism about tomorrow. It reflects itself in the ease with which individuals take on large personal loans""they obviously expect no repayment problems because they assume a constantly expanding income stream. It reflects itself in TCS' willingness to shoot for a $10 billion revenue target five years from now (from a base of barely $2 billion!). It reflects itself in the scale of ambition that is displayed by young, well-educated businessmen and women, who have no doubt that they can take on the world.

These thoughts sit badly on a week in which the news headlines have been dominated by Bihar, where there can't be much sunny optimism around because the state has been withering away. They also sit badly on most sectors that are dominated by the public sector and by government control of pricing: power supply, the transport infrastructure, public health, public education, sanitation levels ... it's a long list. One has to add farming, which is private and not public sector, and still blame the government because of the slow progress in providing assured irrigation, and the poor productivity levels that result in low farm incomes. It seems obvious that reform of governance, not just in Bihar but all over the country, has to assume over-riding importance. Whether this is done through public-private partnership, or through civil society action, or through administrative reforms is a matter of detail. If the manifold failures of governance are not addressed, even those who are bathed in sunny optimism will find their world invaded by those whose lives are blighted.