Towards a Creative and Daring India ; for Development to Become a National Obsession, the Tyranny of Bureaucracy has to End

Summary

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India Today was launched in a different India. I will not bore you with statistics to prove the point. But consider just one number. Around the time that India Today was launched, economist Raj Krishna, then a member of the Planning Commission, coined the phrase "Hindu rate of growth" to dub the long-term average rate of economic growth of 3.5 per cent that India had logged over a 30-year period. In the 30th year of India Today's publication, we are poised to register more than double the "Hindu rate" for the third year in a row, with an expected growth rate of well over 7 per cent. Perhaps this year we may even touch 8 per cent.

Midway between the year India Today was launched and now, we steered the Indian economy along a new path. That has made the difference. The so-called "Hindu rate of growth" is now an intellectual curiosity. India has done well these past 30 years, but it could easily have done better. Others similarly placed, like many of the newly industrialising countries in the East and Southeast Asia have indeed done better. So my judgement would be that we have done reasonably well, but not well enough. We could have done better and can certainly do so in years to come, but this requires effort. Much of this effort will have to be at home. Much of it in our minds.

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Towards a Creative and Daring India ; for Development to Become a National Obsession, the Tyranny of Bureaucracy has to End

I stress the importance of what we have to do at home because I sincerely believe that 2005 differs from 1975 in one very significant respect. In '75, most of us believed that while there were many domestic constraints to growth, there was also a binding external constraint. We remained ...

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