SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND GDP GROWTH

REDISCOVERY OF INDIA

The time is right for India to make dramatic and continuous improvements in health, education and public services to keep pace with the high GDP growth rate

N. S. Ramnath and Udit Misra

Forbes India, January 23, 2012

In the late 1950s, Ved Mehta, a blind writer from Oxford, spent a summer in India, a good part of it going around the country with the poet Dom Moraes. One of the high points of his trip was a meeting with the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He had lunch with Nehru and his family (his daughter Indira Gandhi and his ‘two quiet grandsons in their teens’) and a long chat later on. His account of that conversation—published in a book Walking the Indian Streets—is marked by youthful optimism. “I am left feeling that the problems we are facing are of epic proportions, and that men who wish to do their duty must measure up to the heroic possibilities. While heroism seems to be playing out in the West, it is just beginning in the East.”

Mehta was not the only one to see the heroic possibilities those days. India seemed to be a huge canvas and a giant laboratory—coaxing people to think big. It was in this spirit that Milton Friedman, in 1955, wrote a memo at the invitation of the Indian government. “The great untapped resource of technical and scientific knowledge available to India for the taking is the economic equivalent of the untapped continent available to the United States 150 years ago,” he wrote and went on to prescribe policies that would yield a higher growth rate, and to criticise the path India seemed to be taking.

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