India’s most pressing problem in the 1950s was to feed its poor, who made up roughly half of its then burgeoning population of 350 million people. My father, one of the first Indians to come to America to study after India gained its independence in 1947, was working on a degree in soils analysis at Oregon State University. This was the era of the "green revolution."
Fueled by a mixture of Gandhian idealism and American can-do spirit, his plan was to complete his degree, return home, and do his part to help "Young India"--as it was often called in those days--improve agricultural production. But the attractions of making a decent living were irresistible. He decided to stay in America, switched his career to aeronautical engineering and got a job with one of the cutting-edge companies of the time: Boeing. My father became part of the "brain drain" that subsequently brought thousands of engineers, scientists, doctors and other professionals from India to America in search of a standard of living their country of origin could not afford to give them.
India’s Poor
Half a century later, India’s most pressing problem is still how to deal with its poor. The green revolution did allow India to dramatically increase crop yields and become self-sufficient in food production. But India’s population more than kept pace with the country’s economic growth which ambled forward at the rate of 3.5 to 5 percent for many decades. Only after a balance of payments crisis forced India to take steps to liberalize its economy in 1991 did the country begin to achieve consistent growth of between 6 and 7 percent. But even this was not enough.
Today, more than fifty years after independence, India remains a country where 350 million people--a number equal to the entire population of the country in 1950--live in absolute poverty. India’s poor make up fully one third of its total population, which passed the billion mark on May 15, 2000. And India’s population is increasing by 15.5 million people each year. This means the country will need 125,000 new schools, 373,000 new teachers, 2.5 million new homes, and 4 million new jobs every year to meet the needs of its new citizens. With its current rate of growth, India cannot possibly hope to keep pace.
More alarming, even were India to move forward quickly with the next round of economic reforms and push growth up to the 8 to 10 percent range, and even if it were able to sustain this high level of growth over the next ten years, the lives of the poor would remain substantially unchanged. In fact, in this best-case scenario, per capita income in India would rise from the current $300 per year to all of $500 per year a decade from now. India cannot simply grow its way out of poverty.
The cost of the poor to India is inestimable. First and foremost, of course, there is the wasted human potential and the very real human suffering due to preventable contagious disease, lack of access to basic health care and education, even to sanitation and clean drinking water. Mass poverty is having a devastating impact on India’s environment, which is under attack from accelerated deforestation, overgrazing, and extremely high levels of air and water pollution, especially in urban areas. Mass poverty also affects India’s ability to compete against countries with better physical infrastructure and more educated populations for foreign direct investment, which India badly needs to face a fiscal deficit the IMF has recently deemed "unsustainable" and to jump-start badly needed infrastructure development in transportation, communications and power. Finally, mass poverty and the growing gulf between haves and have-nots poses a looming threat to India’s internal security and to its political and social stability.
A succession of state-directed five-year-plans for development, the injection of billions of dollars of foreign aid and loans, and the dramatic improvement in agricultural production following the green revolution did have positive effects. Despite a tripling of its population, India has been able to reduce the total percentage of the poor from 50 to 35 percent; to nearly halve illiteracy, reducing it from 81.7 percent in 1950 to 48 percent today; to reduce the birthrate from 40 per thousand to 26 per thousand and to increase life expectancy from 32 years to a little over 62 years.
India can be proud of its many successful domestic industries in manufacturing, information technology, textiles and many other sectors. For all that, India remains a "developing" country. With one-sixth of all humanity living within its borders, India is still playing catch-up to the world’s great economic and political powers. During this time, it has seen countries in Southeast and East Asia no better off than India was after World War II achieve phenomenal improvements in their economies and for their people. And India has watched China transform itself into one of the biggest global economies.
Time and time again, whether in those heady days following independence in the 1950s or in the euphoria following economic liberalization in the early 1990s, India’s aspirations to overcome mass poverty and create opportunities for all its people to realize their potential have gone tragically unfulfilled. Three generations after independence, India’s poor are still waiting for their lives to improve. Their patience is wearing thin, especially in a world where they can now easily see on television what others have, how others live.
The Imperative for a New Development Paradigm
It is clear that for India to make real gains in alleviating poverty a radical solution must be found. The development paradigms of the post-war 20 th century worked some wonders but failed, overall, to solve the problem of mass poverty in India. In fact, the digital revolution has made the imperative for dealing with mass poverty in India--and elsewhere in the developing world--a critical priority demanding immediate action. Indeed, there may be no issue facing humanity at the beginning of the 21 st century of greater importance than finding solutions to the yawning divide between the world’s rich and poor.
The new millennium has brought with it a new geoeconomic reality. The forces of globalization, propelled by rapid advances in information, communications and bio-technologies, are deepening divides between haves and have-nots, creating, on the one hand, a transnational class of people who move competently in a knowledge-driven economy and, on the other hand, masses of people with no knowledge of, no access to, and no skills to exploit this new economy. Fortunately, these very same forces offer unprecedented opportunities for creating entirely new approaches to alleviating world poverty and closing the inequality gap.
Of all the developing countries in the world, India offers a unique opportunity to launch a new development paradigm that harnesses global market dynamics. India’s economy may be growing overall at a modest rate of 7 percent but its information technology sector is booming at an explosive 50 percent rate of growth. Already a $5 billion-a-year undertaking, India’s information technology sector is expected to reach $87 billion by the end of this decade. Bangalore alone is home to 300 technology firms that employ 40,000 people.
Indian immigrants in the United States, as a group, have been highly successful, earning the highest incomes per family of any immigrant group and enjoying, in general, a standard of living well above the American norm.
India remains a country where there are only 0.21 personal computers and 1.86 telephones for every 100 people. But then 71 percent of India’s people do not have access to basic sanitation.
The current critical juncture in world history presents India--a country that supplies 35percent of the world’s software engineers but accounts for 25 percent of the world’s poor--with a both a challenge and an unprecedented opportunity.Reinventing India means creating a new paradigm for development that harnesses the irresistible market forces driving the transformations in the global economy. It means creating new partnerships between government agencies, NGOs, philanthropic institutions and grassroots entities created by the poor themselves.
In the 1950s, my father felt he had to choose between helping the poor in India and making a good living for himself and his family in America. The digital revolution’s impact on the global economy is giving members of the Indian diaspora new opportunities to do both. But even highly creative solutions to specific, localized problems will have a limited effect on the alleviation of poverty in India as a whole unless they are deployed in concert with a massive effort involving alliances across traditional development divides. This is the fundamental challenge of the India Initiative.
About the Author
Mira Kamdar is a Senior Advisor with Digital Partners and a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University in New York City since 1992. She is the founder of the Institute's Emerging Powers Program: Brazil, India, South Africa, and currently directs the India segment of the program.
Her work has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Times of India, World Business, the American Journal of Semiotics, the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, and World Policy Journal. She is a member of the editorial board of World Policy Journal. Mira holds MA and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.
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