For much of the two thousand years of the Common Era, India was the largest economy, contributing a third of the global output. Archaeological evidence traces the origins of ancient India’s Indus Valley Civilization to the fifth millennium before the Common Era. During medieval times too, India witnessed several glorious empires and great civilizations spread across millions of miles under enlightened emperors.
Towards the last quarter of the last millennium, India came under the influence of the East India Company for almost a century during the 18th and 19th centuries. Thereafter, the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 compelled the British to place India directly under the British Crown for another ninety years.
For almost two centuries, therefore, India was anchored to Great Britain, serving the interests of only the British Empire. Of all the colonies the British conquered, controlled, and immensely benefited from, it was India that was by far the biggest and wealthiest and was often referred to as the Jewel in the (British) Crown.
Before finally leaving India, the British divided the Indian subcontinent into two countries in three parcels: India, Pakistan West and Pakistan East. India’s population then was 330 million, and the GDP was INR 2.7 trillion – a paltry three percent of the global GDP. For much of two millennia, a country that accounted for a third of the global output had been bled dry by the colonial masters.
Independent India
Independent India has seen 17 free and fair Parliamentary elections with 15 Prime Ministers at the helm, each contributing his/her mite to the growth, stability, and development of the Indian Nation, its society, and economy. How individual Prime Ministers of India tried to build a modern India from the debris of two centuries’ rule by the British Empire is in itself a great story and has been narrated by many authors, Indian and foreign.
In the 75 years since independence, India has negotiated a difficult, at times treacherous, journey replete with five wars (1948, 1962, 1965, 1971, and 1999) and the frequent occurrence of natural calamities, i.e. floods, famines, droughts, and epidemics. Two of its elected Prime Ministers were brutally assassinated and a third died mysteriously after signing the Ceasefire Agreement in the Soviet city of Tashkent, post the India-Pakistan 1965 War.
A stretch of 21 months from 1975-77 remains an aberration in India’s otherwise uninterrupted democracy when the fundamental rights of Indian citizens were suspended during the period of national emergency.
Progress achieved
Much water has flown in the Ganga since India attained independence. In 1950-51, the contributions to the Indian GDP by agriculture, industry and service sectors were 56, 15 and 29 percent, respectively. Agriculture employed 72 percent of the work force, while manufacturing and services providing 10 and 18 percent of the jobs respectively.
Today, the service sector accounts for 54 percent of India’s GDP. Industries and Agriculture follow with 25.92 and 20.19 percent, respectively.
Life expectancy on the eve of independence was 32 years. It has now gone up to 70 years. In 1950, the infant mortality rate in India was 145.6/1000 live births, and the maternal mortality ratio in the 1940s was 2000/100,000 live births, which declined to 1000 in the 1950s. There were just 50,000 doctors across the entire country, and the number of primary healthcare centers was 725.
Today, infant mortality is at 27.7 per 1000 births and the maternal mortality rate is at 103 per 100,000. India now has more than 1.2 million doctors. As of December 8, 2021, there are 54,618 sub-health centers (SHC), 21,898 primary health centers (PHC) and 4,155 urban primary health centers (UPHC). There are as many as 70,000 public and private hospitals. As of April 5, 2022, there were 117,771 Ayushman Bharat-Health and Wellness Centers (AB-HWCs) operational in India, apart from the 748 e-Hospitals established across the country as part of the “Digital India” initiative of the government.
As for education, when the British left India, there were 210,000 primary schools, 13,600 middle schools, and 7,416 higher secondary schools, apart from 498 colleges and 27 universities. Today, there are 1.6 million schools, 42,343 colleges, and a thousand universities. More than 250 million children are going to school today in India, and close to 40 million are enrolled in our universities.
In the 2020–21 fiscal year, India’s economy contracted by 7.3 as a result of a devastating, once in a century pandemic, COVID-19. It may be some consolation that this contraction was lower than in other major economies. As per the latest available estimates, the growth rate of GDP for 2021-22 is pegged at 8.7 percent, which has to be seen in the context of a 7.3 percent contraction in the preceding year.
India is bound together as a great nation by the strength and stability of its democracy, the rule of law and the breath-taking diversity of its populace in terms of religion, language, culture, climate, history, geography and more. At the time of India’s first census in 1951, Hindus were 305 million (84.1 percent), Muslims 35.4 million (9.8 percent), Christians 8.3 million and Sikhs 6.86 million (1.9 percent).
In 2022, the estimated population is 1090 million Hindus (79.80 percent), 200 million Muslims (14.23 percent), 31.2 million Christians (2.3 percent), 23.7 million Sikhs (1.72 percent), 9.6 million Buddhists (0.70 percent), 5.1 million Jains (0.37 percent) and 9.1 million (0.66 percent) other religions and 3.3 million (0.24 percent) religions not stated.
There are two million Hindu temples, 300,000 active mosques, 8,114 Jain temples, a few of them abroad, more than 125 Buddhist temples, monasteries, stupas and pagodas; some 35 Jewish synagogues etc. At the time of independence, many predicted that India would splinter into pieces based on caste, creed, tribe, language, culture, etc., but it has remained in one piece and stronger than ever.
Future Prospects
In the last ten years, despite a sliding down of growth rates since 2016 till the economy picked up this year and a significant unemployment burden haunting policymakers in the country, there has been a quiet revolution taking place in the arena of technology, digitization, and innovation spearheaded by young Indian companies. The government’s Atmanirbharta crusade has given an impetus to it.
The latest research of the Indian economy in the last ten years by analyst Ruchir Sharma has a few exciting revelations. In 2011, India had 55 billionaires with a cumulative wealth of USD 256 billion, which was then equivalent to 13.5 percent of India’s GDP. Ten years later, in 2021, India hosts 140 billionaires with the cumulative wealth USD 596 billion, equivalent to 19.6 percent of the GDP. Sharma adds that 110 of these are new billionaires, created during the course of just the last decade. At the time of independence, India had the sixth largest economy in the world. In 2021, it retains the same position, which is no mean achievement with India’s population having more than quadrupled.
Notwithstanding the above, there is no room for complacency because India still has a large population that lives below the poverty line, estimated by the World Bank at 140 million, which is 10 percent of the population; the formal and informal sectors may not be able to absorb the large number of educated young people who are passing out of colleges (2022 estimate is 10.76 million); external and internal factors will keep haunting the policy establishment in its effort to achieve a double digit GDP growth rate, which is the need of the hour for India.
Be that as it may, India also has several advantages, of which some include the median age is less than 30 years; a strong and focused government; a growing market; and an innovative Indian youth.
A brighter future can be ensured for its future generations if India persists with its pursuit of building and consolidating its infrastructure, keeping the society cohesive and harmonious, and stabilizing predictable consistency in policy formulation and implementation,
(A. R. Ghanashyam (Amb.) is a retired Indian diplomat who has served as Ambassador of India to Angola and High Commissioner of India to Nigeria]
Contributed by A. R. Ghanshyam
