For long the argument in India has been that since we are labour intensive our growth model has got to be labour intensive. How else do we provide employment to the burgeoning numbers? In pursuit of this model we tried all kinds of labour intensive industries for domestic as well as export markets. While we met with partial success there, the real growth story was silently unfolding elsewhere.
Textiles, food-processing, handicraft etc kept on providing sustenance. But growth was creating its own momentum and rejuvenating an old asset. Utilizing the available social infrastructure our labour-power was slowly transforming itself into brain-power. Demands on our social infrastructure were great but its achievements are no less. A global perspective today sees China as the workshop of the world, the west as its marketing arm and India as its offices.
Our international prestige, our foreign exchange reserves and a large chunk of our service industry are all rooted in our revived brain-power. Thanks to it today, in our cities at least, almost everyone's relation or neighbour is close to becoming a millionaire. It is nothing short of a revolution.
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen hails ancient Indian advances in mathematics and astronomy, specially the decimal system and the cosmic calculations and measurements. He reminds us that India carries the heritage of Aryabhatta (5th century AD), Varahmihir, Brahmagupta and Bhaskar, to name only a few. They understood lunar and solar eclipses, diurnal motion of the earth and gravity (bigger mass attracting smaller mass) long before the west.
We are slowly waking up to a resurgence of that talent. In a recent issue of the Economist the write-up is titled 'How India is changing IBM world'. It says 'The Indian suppliers' credibility with international firms was boosted by their sterling work in inoculating networks against the Y2K computer bug. Indian firms have started to win outsourcing contracts, some of which IBM had counted on as its own. Just as troubling for IBM has been the effect on contracts that the company managed to win, many of which were at far lower prices than they would have been without an Indian alternative.'
In the past we could have done much better on the labour-intensive front had we not got bogged down by our deliberately restrictive labour legislation and manipulated creation of a psychological atmosphere that labour is good and everyone else is otherwise. As a result, our organized textile industry went through a cycle of death and rebirth (it is now being reborn) and new enterprises tended to shy away.
Labour could have worked wonders if we had given it a chance. After all, Indian labour carries no less a heritage. It is descended from the builders of the Taj Mahal and more recently the Presidential estate. Its ancestors furnished the splendours of the Moghul and various other courts before which western observers stood in awe. But our overprotective policies took the shine out it. The incentive to do quality work was lost and Indian labour was starved of new opportunities. Why create new enterprises if it is so much hassle? We protected existing jobs at the expense of new ones.
Luckily today that is behind us and a new window of opportunity has opened up. Let us cherish and nurture it. To that end let us expand and upgrade education at all levels, and not just by the state. All competent people have a role to play here. Charities can have a field day.
Let the state not play a spoil sport again in the name of multiple reservations or uplift of the backward (there is apparent keenness to help even before identifying them) for we are on the brink of an all encompassing broad-based growth which can take in all. In this context an analysis of US H1B visas may be enlightening. Those whom we would like to call backward may be faring no worse than the others there. That surely is a selection without a caste bias. And the latest news is that in IIT admissions of 2007 they already account for nearly 14% without the benefit of any reservation. So, why this hullabaloo?
A meddlesome, inefficient and corrupt government can totally undo the good of the situation. For a change can we be allowed to forget poverty and backwardness (there has been talk of hardly anything else) and raise a toast to incoming growth and prosperity and work for its realization for the good of all? Time has come to set our sights higher.
Dharmendra Nath, (The author is a retired IAS officer), Manuj Features
Print This Page
Terms
and Conditions