Skewed notion?

India is gearing itself up to become a developed nation by 2047 or so, thus finally shedding its uncomfortable but presently tailored to fit garb of a developing nation. I for one will be more than happy to see the country reach that milestone though one may miss out on its benefits either due to advanced age or transition to the other side—both inevitable milestones for me.

Many may say that India was already a very developed country and its regress into an under developed/developing country was all part of a colonial conspiracy. Our attempts to bring back crowns and jewels from the museums of colonial masters could perhaps be one way of progressing back to our foregone era. But the road to development has no short cuts to the future or U-turns to the past. Besides, history does not have much currency in the present otherwise we would not be spending billions to re-invent the Tejas today!

What worries me though is the kind of developed nation we are aspiring to be. We revel and rejoice in trivial data like the number of billionaires we are producing and the number of luxury cars a diamond tycoon has bought in some small town. One family spends an amount equal to the entire annual budget of some our states on a single wedding and the whole country celebrates. Our worship of wealth and fame even when they belong to someone else is strange indeed. And talking of billionaires, it should be sobering to ponder that while we have around 200 billionaires in a population of 1.40 billion amounting to 0.144 per 1 million citizens, tiny Singapore has 6.6 per one million persons. For Indians, glamour, money, luxury and power have become aspirational symbols and the media feeds into this by thrusting upon us images that ally with these notions as the new virtues of society without which we are doomed to misery and despair. As long as a small minority displays these virtues unashamedly and can keep pace with the rich world outside India, the remaining majority have no reason to be unhappy. It is almost as if we have accepted the divine right of just a few to be rich and happy. For others, the philosophical paracetamol of “money can’t buy happiness” is sought to be forced down our collective throats.

Old timers will recall the magic Hall of Mirrors that used to come up whenever the local fair and circus visited the country side. The Mirrors showed you as what you are not- sometimes tall, sometimes dwarfish and at times bloated sideways like an expanding balloon, all for a good laugh! The mofussil circus has been replaced by the urban media circus for which a glamorous wedding dripping with diamonds worn by both human and canine attendees is prime news mirroring a distorted India. Regular reports of scores of mostly poor people dying in temple stampedes or perishing as overloaded buses plunge into gorges from ill maintained roads have become footnotes hidden in the obscure inside pages or drowned out between shrieking episodes of what constitutes TV news and debates now. Almost every traffic light area in the capital city is swarming with half naked urchins peddling pens and pencils they should have been learning to write with. Our public grief and anger have become very subjective now and the national media is the best mirror of this truth. But look carefully and you will see a country that is moving along like a train with one first class AC coach followed by a long tail of lessor bogeys crammed to the brim with travelers. Nobody really cares about-the poor, the destitute and the penniless mingled with a much touted middle class, all on a painful journey in search of dignity and livelihood. The middle class is perhaps the most miserable because their reservation in the first class cabin appears to be permanently wait-listed! It’s like some genius has attached the Garib Rath to their Bullet Train!

A large Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with a high per capita income, industrialisation, well developed infrastructure and a high Human Development Index (HDI) are just some of the basic requirements for joining the league of developed nations. The denizens of a developed country are generally at peace with themselves going about their lives with a sense of confidence in themselves and in the system they live in, with access to healthcare, social security, good education, ease of living, reliable infrastructure, clean air, livable and affordable housing, a functional rule of law environment, work life balance, basic necessities like food and clothes and perhaps most importantly a life of dignity valued by others. Even the most patriotic of Indians would find it difficult to deny that many of these conditions are yet to manifest here. A recent report on the social media site Reddit quotes NRIs reluctant to return to India for reasons like good infrastructure, a better work-life balance, a judgement-free society, low crime rates, clean air, less corruption, civic sense, better work culture, higher standard of living, reasonable dividend on tax among other things abroad as opposed to an apparent lack of all the above in India.

The government perhaps realises that there is no prescription which can relieve you of these imperfections overnight and thus in its wisdom has set a realistic and not overly ambitious target date for attaining the status of a developed nation. It is being realistic and that’s commendable. According to the 2023-24 Human Development Report (HDR) of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), we rank 134th out of 193 countries. Considering that only the top 40 or so qualify to be termed developed, it is still going to be a long haul by any count before we emerge from the giant shadow of being an emerging economy.

But the government alone cannot provide all the impetus for becoming a developed country. As citizens we must change some age-old habits, foremost in my view being our testiness and thin skinned response to criticism and dragging the corpse of colonialism everywhere. These negative traits are omnipresent across our national canvass and betray a lack of confidence that ill suits an aspirational society. And we should honestly celebrate the cultural diversity of our communities and seriously work on bridging what divides us financially and socially.

An Indian American friend who made a good life for himself and his family in the USA once told me that the most amazing fact he finds about living there is that his part time Hispanic maid eats the same breakfast as the US President every day despite the vast gap in their social and economic status. May be that’s the real definition of a developed nation—a certain degree of equity and level playing field starting with the morning breakfast table!

Views expressed are personal