Gratis Mind

Celebrating 60 years of freedom from British Raj, I want to share the incredible articles from various people here. I hope these will make you as excited as me

A commemorative banner at the Red Fort, New Delhi, ahead of special celebrations for India’s 60 years of Independence.
Photograph: Manpreet Romana/AFP/Getty Images

First is the article by Shri Amartya Sen in Forbes

There have been regular and orderly elections, and the ruling parties have vacated office when defeated in general elections, rather than calling in the army. India has also had other essential features of a democracy, in particular continued freedom and vigor of the media and independence of the judiciary, with the Supreme Court often disallowing decisions of those in governmental office on constitutional grounds.
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And there was, of course, the challenge of the multiplicity of religions in India, with nearly every religion well represented. Jews came to India in the first century; Christians in the fourth; Parsees immigrated as soon as persecution began in Persia in the late seventh century; and early Muslim traders started coming to the western coast of India from the eighth century, well before the later invasion of the north of India by Muslim conquerors in the late tenth century onwards.

Shri Narayana Murthy in his article, Sixty years of progress rightly says that 60 years is a short span in the life of a nation, and barely marks the first baby steps of a toddler. Hence, any assessment of India has to be generous and optimistic.

We have increased life expectancy from 32 years to 65 years. We have built about 1.25 million miles of new roads; we have multiplied our steel production by over 50 times and cement production by almost 20 times. We have increased our exports from a few million dollars at the time of independence to more than $125 billion now, with about $150 billion of imports.

There is an equally convincing set of data to show that we have a long way to go in certain other areas. A whopping 350 million are illiterate; 260 million people are still below the poverty line; 150 million people lack access to drinking water; 750 million people lack decent sanitation; 50% of children are below acceptable nutrition levels; and basic medicines are unavailable in 75% of villages.

He also talks about the major achievements during this period that transformed the lives of people which were never imaginable during those days.

Green Revolution
Perhaps, no other Indian initiative has enhanced the national confidence as the Green Revolution initiated by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan. From being a perennial importer of grains, India became a net exporter of food grains 10 years ago.

White Revolution
Coming from a generation that experienced an acute shortage of milk, it is unimaginable that, today, we have become the largest producer of milk in the world. The credit goes to the extraordinary vision of one person, Dr. Verghese Kurien. In a nation where children are malnourished, such abundance of milk has offered us the opportunity to fight malnutrition with the means produced in India.

perhaps, Dhoni should attribute much of his success to Verghese Kurien too

Economic Reforms Of 1991

The economic reforms of 1991 initiated by the late Narasimha Rao, Dr. Manmohan Singh, Shri P. Chidambaram and Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Our hard currency reserves have gone up from a mere $1.5 billion in 1991 to over $220 billion today.

Independent Media, Brave Journalists
The courage, enthusiasm and zeal to seek truth of scores of idealistic journalists like N. Ram, Arun Shourie, Sekhar Gupta, Sucheta Dalal, Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai are what make us feel confident that the future of this country is safe.
Telecom Revolution
No other technology has brought India–the urban and the rural–together so effectively as the 500-line EPABX designed and implemented by the Center for Development of Telematics under the leadership of Sam Pitroda.

Space Technology
Yash Pal’s Satellite Instructional Television Experiment blossomed into a full-scale television facility connecting millions of villages of India. Television has made our political masters realize that their actions and inactions will be seen and judged by every citizen–from the forgotten villages of Assam to the activist villages of Kerala.

Atomic Energy
Dr. Homi Bhabha conceptualized the Indian nuclear program and initiated nuclear science research in India. His program has made possible successful utilization of nuclear energy in defense, power generation, medicine and allied areas. Our peaceful use of nuclear energy has raised India’s prestige as a mature and responsible player in this field.

Software Revolution

N. Vittal’s Software Technology Program, along with the economic reforms of 1991, laid the foundation for this industry’s spectacular progress. India’s information technology exports grew from a mere $150 million in 1991-92 to $31.4 billion in 2006-07, and is projected to reach $60 billion by 2010.

Business week names India’s Mighty Movers, elite group of business, political, and cultural leaders that helped transform India into a 21st century economic power in Asia and beyond

Rediff has a nice section commemorating sixty years of independence. Few articles from there

Could we have been worse off in 1947? - Saisuresh Sivaswamy

Five decisions that changed India - K Subrahmanyam

Dr Lakshmi Sahgal - The woman who broke the rules - Payal Mohanka

We need to set lofty goals - Girish Rishi

But, Shri V N Dhoot, Chairman, Videocon Group and President of Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry(Assocham), feels that License Raj has to be unshackled further to unleash India’s potential.

With economic liberalization initiated in July 1991, India shed its isolation and embarked upon the path of challenging the way economy was managed, leading to shedding the Licence Raj for Indian industry. As a matter of fact, even though the liberalisation took off in 1991, Licence Raj in most of the cases continued until 2000. It did not let manufacturing to take off, the way it was expected and anticipated to.

Licence Raj continues even now, despite nearly 60 years of Independence, but in a more diluted form. In my view, it must be unshackled further.

We must accept the fact that liberalisation exposed Indian business and industry to global competition that was initially opposed and resisted by various groups within the domestic political and economic spheres. Joint ventures formed out of globalisation spirit did not last long and dumping took place in huge numbers during 1991-2000. This taught a great lesson to Indian businesses to stand on their own rather than relying on their foreign partners for transfer of technology. It was a challenging decade for the domestic corporates, majority of who accepted it for better and came out of it.

The result today is that domestic industry is on a takeover spree, doing much better and the world has already taken note of it. It is evident from the number of outbound mergers and acquisitions India has gone ahead with. Likewise, our growth rate has come up to about 9% in the last six decades as a result of hard work that Indian people have put in.

The only disappointing feature that India is confronted with is that its exports to world markets are much below one percent of the total trade. Exports need to go up by at least ten times over so that our share in world trade is of significant proportion. It is unfortunate that our share of global exports has become an abysmal 0.8% from being 3% in 1947, 27% when the British entered India and over 33% about 1000 years ago.

As the President of Assocham, I suggest that the focus of India should now be manufacturing as most other sectors are doing reasonably well and contributing to our national GDP in a proportionate manner. India needs manufacturing and labour intensive units to increase its domestic production, attract foreign direct investment, enhance exports and receive foreign exchange to meet our import needs.

Apart from these is an excellent article, Happy Diamond Jubilee, fellow Indians!, by Shri T V R Shenoy who gives a perspective of people who have seen all this.

There was neither electricity, nor piped water, nor even the suggestion of a proper tarred road in my village. Forget the Internet, there were days when even the daily paper arrived a good 24 hours late.

And the sights and sounds and smells of my formative years are now little more than legends for urban India — the roughness of a rope’s hairs as you drew water from the well and the squelch of mud between the toes as you walked in a rice field, the flickering light of a hurricane lamp and the whir and click of the charkha. (Mine was a resolutely Congress family, I can remember making a speech at a political function half a century ago!)

Coming from that background, it never ceases to strike me as utter nonsense when younger generations speak of how things are deteriorating. In the purely material sense matters have improved almost beyond recognition. I mean that literally — my village of Cherai is now being touted as a ‘Beach Resort’ by Kerala [Images] Tourism, with all the comforts that such visitors demand as a matter of routine.
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India was bankrupt in 1991, with the Chandra Shekhar ministry needing to pawn gold to bring in essential imports. The country was forced to liberalise the economy due to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. (No, Dr Manmohan Singh and Narasimha Rao did not move away from Nehruvian socialism under any conviction, they had no choice in the matter.) Yet those days are now so distant that the first-time voters in the next General Election would not have been born at the time.

It is taken for granted that a booming India is a major factor in every calculation of the global economy. And it is, or should be, a matter of pride that we have achieved so much with merely a fraction of China’s resources. How many people realise that India has received barely a tenth of the foreign direct investment that went to our giant northern neighbour?

So yes, in the purely material sense India has achieved progress in many fields, beyond the wildest dream of my generation. But, as we stand on the cusp of independent India’s Diamond Jubilee, it behoves us to also take stock of the places where we have gone wrong.

It is not just nostalgia when I say that the communal divide has widened to alarming proportions. My formative years — the late 1940s and the 1950s — were an age when the wounds of Partition were still raw and bleeding; there was a conscious effort in those years to prevent anything of the sort from ever happening again.

I fear that the consequences of Partition have been forgotten even as 1947 itself is now consigned to a chapter in the history books. It took Adolf Hitler six years to murder six million Jews; India and Pakistan between them slaughtered a million people in just three months. Do we remember any of that?

Truly, if the Indian economy gives us the greatest reason to rejoice then our political classes probably offer the greatest cause for despair. It is at such time that we remember all those predictions of despair hurled at India, both before and after 1947. Yet the genius of the Indian people has demonstrated the capacity to trip up such doomsayers, even those trained in the study of history.

Who remembers Winston Churchill thundering to the House of Commons that India would be torn asunder if the British Raj ever gave way to ‘men of straw?’ Who remembers a despairing Aldous Huxley prophesy that the death of Jawaharlal Nehru (whom he admired immensely) would mark the beginning of a military dictatorship?

Neither the statesman nor the writer-philosopher were completely in the wrong, of course. Pakistan, which sprang from the same stock as India, would indeed suffer both military rule and further partition after its founding fathers passed away.

It is the challenge of every generation of Indians to continue to prove to the world that Churchill and Huxley got it wrong. But, perhaps for just one moment, we can all be excused if we relax a little, and take stock in our not inconsiderable achievements?

Happy Diamond Jubilee, fellow Indians!

The Ministry of Tourism has chosen the 60th year of Independence to launch a promotional initiative on YouTube. It already has a website, Incredible India.

Happy Independence day indeed!