With 2010 here, 2020 is not too far ahead. Remember all those Vision 2020 stuff? It was not just our homegrown futurologist Abdul Kalam but an entire expert committee of the Planning Commission and many others, including McKinsey & Co, that had come up with visions for 2020 and their road maps to the future.
The future is almost here! The year 2020 is just another 10 years away. Time to dust out those forgotten reports and find out what they had to say about where we need to go and how. The Planning Commission report was written by a large number of specialists under the leadership of former member SP Gupta.
Painting what the report called the “Best Case Scenario”, it said: “India 2020 will be bustling with energy, entrepreneurship and innovation. The country’s 1.35 billion people will be better fed, dressed and housed, taller and healthier, more educated and longer living than any generation in the country’s long history.”
Promising to wipe out “illiteracy and all major contagious diseases”, the report placed emphasis on the development of a non-farm rural economy and the rapid expansion of employment opportunities in the services and manufacturing sectors. “These developments”, it prophesied, “driven by the firm commitment of the government and a quantum expansion of vocational training programmes, will ensure jobs for all by 2020.”
One can argue for another 10 years whether we will get to that 2020 or not, but few can argue with the authors of the Vision 2020 report about what they thought were the “nodal points of Indian prosperity”: “(1) PEACE, SECURITY & NATIONAL UNITY; (2) FOOD & NUTRITIONAL SECURITY; (3) JOBS FOR ALL (4) KNOWLEDGE (100 per cent literacy & school education, and vocational training for all new entrants to the workforce, etc); (5) HEALTH (expansion of the infrastructure for public health and medical care to ensure health for all); (6) TECHNOLOGY & INFRASTRUCTURE; (7) GLOBALISATION (successful integration of India with world economy); (8) GOOD GOVERNANCE (farsighted and dynamic leadership to maximise national prosperity, individual freedom and social equity through responsive, transparent and accountable administration that removes all the bottlenecks to economic development); and, (9) WORK VALUES (activation of all these nodal points requires firm and determined adherence to high values, including prompt decision-making, disciplined execution, systematic implementation, finely tuned co-ordination, unceasing effort and endurance.”
Who will disagree with that checklist. That was written 10 years ago. Yet, even today, yesterday’s plans seem to have relevance for our collective tomorrow.
More popular than the Planning Commission tome was former President APJ Abdul Kalam’s book India 2020: A Vision for the New Millenium (Penguin, 2000). Kalam’s plan was to “Transform the nation into a developed country” and to do this, he identified five areas based on India’s “core competence, natural resources and talented manpower” that required policy attention to “double the growth rate of GDP and realise the Vision of Developed India.”
These are: (1) Agriculture and food processing — with a target of doubling the present production of food and agricultural products by 2020. Agro food processing industry would lead to the prosperity of rural people, food security and speed up the economic growth; (2) Infrastructure with reliable and quality electric power, including solar farming for all parts of the country, providing urban amenities in rural areas and interlinking of rivers; (3) Education and Health care: To provide social security and eradication of illiteracy and health for all; (4) Information and Communication Technology (ICT): This is one of our core competencies and wealth generators. ICT can be used for tele-education, tele-medicine and e-governance to promote education in remote areas, health care and also transparency in the administration; and (5) Critical technologies and strategic industries (including) nuclear technology, space technology and defence technology.
Kalam identified “corruption, inefficiency, illiteracy and poverty” as the four “obstacles” that would have to be surmounted for India to reach its developmental goals.
To figure out how difficult it would be to overcome these challenges in the next decade, one need only check out how much we have done in the past decade. The good news is that in the period since these Vision documents were written, India has had five years of near 9.0 per cent, and more “inclusive”, growth and this has been a game changer. As last Friday’s Statsguru (BS, January 1, 2010) showed, rising investment and consumption rates have driven growth up in the past decade and made it easier for the economy to move closer to its stated Vision 2020 goals.
But the bad news is that it will require Himalayan effort to, in fact, sustain those high rates of growth and realise the objectives set out for 2020. The distance from 2010 to 2020 may, in fact, prove longer than was the case from 2000 to now. The record 9.0 per cent growth rate was facilitated both by domestic political stability, even in the era of coalitions, and a benign global environment for India. The benefits of both should not be underestimated.
Between Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, the 2000s gave India a development-oriented leadership. In spite of the terrorism problem, and a deterioration in the political climate in India’s immediate neighbourhood during the decade, a supportive global environment, best captured by the manner in which India secured the approval of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group for the civil nuclear energy agreements, helped India move forward.
To stay the economic course to 2020, India will have to work hard to ensure political stability at home and a regional and global environment that is at least stable — certainly not hostile — even if not benign.
