When this post gets published, I should be on a train traveling from Tamil Nadu in the South of India to Pune on the Upper Western part of India. The journey will take me 26 hours and I look forward to it.
I will be traveling on India’s 64th Independence day, which, much to the chagrin of our notorious bureaucracy, falls on a Sunday this year.
I was four years old when India won its independence and can be called that part of a spill-over-from-colonialism generation. India chose to be a Socialistic Democratic Republic in 1950 and that socialism as practiced in India drove a rich country to its knees. In 1990, our gold reserves had to mortgaged to save us from defaulting.
Since then a lot of water has flown down India’s many rivers and for the first time ever, the number of high- income households, 46.7million, has exceeded 41 million low-income ones. For an Indian who has grown up in the Independent India, this is very satisfying.
This has happened because of some effective liberalisation measures taken after the crisis of 1990.
There is a lot that still needs to be done, but I can see that we are on the path and from now on India can only go one way and that is up. That this is happening despite India’s notorious corrupt establishment is indicative of the spirit of Indian entrepreneurship and resilience. I hope that before I go to meet my maker, I will see poverty removed and India working efficiently as it is capable of doing.
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