Monday 4 January 2010


2020 IS JUST TEN YEARS AWAY
India has come a long way since 2000, but there's a longer road to 2020.

Sanjaya Baru

Business Standard, January 4, 2010

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.”

(...) [artículo aquí]

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