Driving the nail on the head… Writes Raghu Dayal, a current affairs analyst and a former civil servant, in ToI, Thursday. “Vanishing Dream of Growth – Indian needs an indigenous Margaret Thatcher or Deng Xiaoping.. “… What the economy needs is not MGNREGA, RTE or FSB, but GST and DTC, well-functioning schools and health care centres, efficient roads, railways and urban infrastructure (no, not his own prescription but that of Jim O’Neill a major proponent of the celebrated Octrober2003 Goldman Sachs Brics report). India is ranked in a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll as among the world’s worst places to be a woman; second from the bottom in the 2010 PISA tests on school education quality; 94th in Transparency International Corruption Perception Index; 131th in the 2011 Human Development Index from fallen from 124th in 2004. How do people do business ina country, which the World Bank ranks 132nd in case of doing business, 173rd in sarting a business, overall 150th, almost at the bottom of the list. Once ahead of its compatriots in Brics, Brazil and South Africa, in the Global Competitive Index of the World Economic Forum, India now trails them by about 10 places and falls some 30 positions behind China. (Me: Yesterday’s papers were agog with reports that 65 MPs have petitioned Obama against issue of Visa to Modi and that many of them have denied signing the memo claiming that doing so – asking a foreign power to intervene in domestic affair - would be a national dishonor. One would say that things wouldn’t have sunk so low if the Raj had remained. Their much-maligned divide n rule was much to the prince states or between two major communities.. Now the divisions are much deeper and sharper on caste, language, regional lines) The Benjamin Disraeli quote “In politics nothing is contemptible” succinctly sums up our case.. Of course, if it is of some comfort, we may compare our fate with our immediate neighbours Nepal, Bhutan or the others…and congratulate ourselves)
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 11:30:38 +0000
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