The new year, 2014, has a lot of ground to make up. And the reason for that is that the old year, 2013, was a year of missed opportunities. On every front, India, its government, its companies and its political parties avoided taking advantage of prospects that opened up - and thereby squandered innumerable chances to seize a better future.
A crisis, as the cliche goes, is a terrible thing to waste. In the middle of 2013, India seemed to be a hop, skip and a jump away from a crisis. Its external account was poised on the brink of a precipice, needing just a bit of panic to send it over. But fortunately, the danger receded. Not so fortunately, however, the government did not take advantage of the realisation that the Indian economy had steered itself close to a crisis to undertake long-overdue and painful reform. Some minor tweaks - such as allowing oil companies to take their dollar requirements off the open market - helped postpone the day of reckoning. But it was only a deferral, and not a cancellation. Other aspects of economic policy, too, could have been moved forward, but weren't. The goods and services tax (GST), for example, is the closest thing that exists to a silver bullet for easing the problem of excessive paperwork that bedevils small business in this country. But brinkmanship by some Opposition-ruled states and an unwillingness on the part of the Centre to accept second-best solutions have caused, instead, an indefinite postponement of the GST. If a new government comes into power in 2014, it may well take office in a more politically polarised atmosphere than ever before. If so, the failure to push the GST through in 2013 will be seen as, to bring up another cliche, the mother of all missed opportunities.
Then there is foreign affairs. India's relations with Bangladesh may well take a dive in 2014 if the Bangladesh Nationalist Party takes power. If so, it will be partly because the Indian government moved too slowly in giving current prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, what she needed to shore up her domestic position. And the Opposition blocked solutions to crucial border disputes in Parliament. Meanwhile, towards the end of 2013, the Indo-US partnership was in disarray over the arrest of India's deputy consul general in New York, Devyani Khobragade, for visa fraud. This also reflected the decline in the importance of the strategic relations that the two countries had sought to build between themselves in the last several years. Sadly, there has been no attempt to re-inject a grand strategic vision into the partnership, allowing instead a dry transactional process to influence bilateral relations.
Finally, Indian companies could have seized on the weaker rupee and the changes in their export markets to completely retool their business plans for dealing with the rest of the world. Moving up the value chain is an imperative. But India Inc panicked about a lower currency instead of welcoming it; it appeared that many of them were too dependent on foreign capital, not excited enough about foreign markets. This, too, was a brilliant opening that was wantonly ignored. In 2014, those mistakes cannot be repeated; for, as time goes by, the consequences of missing opportunities get worse.
