Here is a news which no Indian would be happy about:
“India has slipped by two places to 51st in the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness rankings, while rival China has managed to improve its standing to 27th (from 29th a year ago).”
The first question which comes to our mind is: “Why?” Details of the news says that India has fared badly due to poorer performance in the social sectors like education, healthcare and infrastructure. And a startling statistics tells that life expectancy in India is 10 years shorter than in China and Brazil!
I agree with the report that India fares poor in areas like education, health and infrastructure. But these are merely symptoms or results rather than the root cause. I think the root cause in these cases is the rampant corruption in public services. Do our teachers attend our government schools regularly? Are the funds meant for public health schemes spent properly? How many infrastructure projects complete well in time and without corruption charges made against the contractors or the administrators? (remember murder of engineer Satyendra Dubey because he was honest?)
I hope government of India identifies and targets the root cause of our poor performances in global competitiveness. It is not impossible to weed out corruption. There are many ways to achieve it and the efforts should be multitired. Just as a pointer – increasing use of technology, IT and computers in public departments results in avoidance of corruption chances too. The simple reason is that systems make manipulation difficult or impossible. Historical data on the systems can be retrived easily and used to support systems like RTI. E-Governance is a transparent, fair and systematic system. Then there are so many other ways to simply deny any malpractice from happening.
I think the next five to ten years are very important for our nation’s progress. Not only the race among BRIC nations would be decided by then, the generation which witnessed economic reforms would be ready to nurture its subsiquent generation. And we can put a lot of hope on the youth…
- Rahul
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