Vision of India
India Vision 2020 sivakumarsachin 22-Apr-09
Identifying potentials and anticipating the challenges to our future progress in different sectors of the national economy does not constitute a vision of the country's future. These disparate threads need to be woven together to reflect the integrated nature of our national life. Then, there still remains the question of whether to be preoccupied by the negative possibilities or to throw our full weight behind efforts to fully realise the positive potentials revealed by this analysis. That will determine whether we regard the following statement as a promising glimpse of what India can become in 2020, or as mere fantasy and wishful thinking.
India 2020 will be bustling with energy, entrepreneurship and innovation. The country's 1.35 billion people will be better fed, dressed and housed, taller and healthier, more educated and longer living than any generation in the country's long history. Illiteracy and all major contagious diseases will have disappeared. School enrolment from age 6 to 14 will near 100 per cent and drop out rates will fall to less than one in twenty.
A second productivity revolution in Indian agriculture, coupled with diversification to commercial crops, agri-business, processing industries, agro-exports and massive efforts towards afforestation and wasteland development will generate abundant farm and non-farm employment opportunities for the rural workforce. These in turn will stimulate demand for consumer goods and services, giving a fillip to the urban economy and the informal sector as well as rapid expansion of the services sector.
India's claim to the title Silicon Valley of Asia will be followed by the diversification from IT to biotechnology, medical sciences and other emerging fields of technology, widening the field of India's international competitiveness and generating a large number of employment opportunities for the educated youth. These developments, driven by the firm
Identifying potentials and anticipating the challenges to our future progress in different sectors of the national economy does not constitute a vision of the country's future. These disparate threads need to be woven together to reflect the integrated nature of our national life. Then, there still remains the question of whether to be preoccupied by the negative possibilities or to throw our full weight behind efforts to fully realise the positive potentials revealed by this analysis. That will determine whether we regard the following statement as a promising glimpse of what India can become in 2020, or as mere fantasy and wishful thinking.
India 2020 will be bustling with energy, entrepreneurship and innovation. The country's 1.35 billion people will be better fed, dressed and housed, taller and healthier, more educated and longer living than any generation in the country's long history. Illiteracy and all major contagious diseases will have disappeared. School enrolment from age 6 to 14 will near 100 per cent and drop out rates will fall to less than one in twenty.
A second productivity revolution in Indian agriculture, coupled with diversification to commercial crops, agri-business, processing industries, agro-exports and massive efforts towards afforestation and wasteland development will generate abundant farm and non-farm employment opportunities for the rural workforce. These in turn will stimulate demand for consumer goods and services, giving a fillip to the urban economy and the informal sector as well as rapid expansion of the services sector.
India's claim to the title Silicon Valley of Asia will be followed by the diversification from IT to biotechnology, medical sciences and other emerging fields of technology, widening the field of India's international competitiveness and generating a large number of employment opportunities for the educated youth. These developments, driven by the firm