Didn't We Collectively Mess Up India's Growth Story?

India cannot be complacent. Despite many flagship programmes for years and now followed by the Digital India, Skill India and Make in India, debottlenecking laws, creating more ease of doing business, Smart Cities, towns and villages with a vision of having round the clock power, broadband Internet connectivity, launching the infrastructure project AMRUT and the Swachh Bharat Mission to end the open defecation practice nationwide and cleaning up the Ganga, the available statistical data on socioeconomic development in India shows that India cannot blame anymore colonial rulers and their administration, exploitation and divide and rule policy or their educational system for being what we are today. 

- KP Shashidharan

India has made its Constitution one of the finest cones taking the best practices of the US Constitution and customizing for unique conditions of independent India. However, the ubiquitous challenge to India’s development story seems to be the possibilities of high-jacking the key governance issues by relatively unimportant but politically hyper party dominant agenda. Even on simple questions like whether people’s rights or animal rights are more important, we as a nation are confused and people are ready to fight and die.

We are united in mutual distrust and hatred, politically divided, becoming acrimoniously belligerent, intolerantly argumentative and violent against our fellow citizens, forgetting the quintessence of the cardinal values enshrined in the Constitution.

INDELIBLE DAMAGE

Political parties unknowingly perhaps do indelible damage to the revered constitutional principles of sovereignty which is the foundation and the very existence of the Indian nation State. While playing party politics, we fail as a nation, creating socio-politico-economic-cum-religious one-upmanship, inequality and divisiveness, spreading law and order issues, corruption, and maladministration. Most of the projects, programmes and schemes seldom achieve their planned outcome despite exceeding budgeted outlays; delaying beyond the scheduled dates and not meeting the specified qualitative and quantitative parameters.