India is a fast developing economy. It has one of the huge markets, talent and resources. At the same time being a large nation with multi-religion multi-cultured, highly populated country India comes with great many problems. The sub-continent faces issues right from poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, underemployment, gender issues, caste issues, trafficking, brain drain, corruption, multi-party, communalism, climate related concern, health – malnutrition, HIV, infant mortality, female feticides, less hospitals and practitioners etc. The list could go on; if I need to single out the biggest challenge, it will be inequality in development. Like the great economies of the world India too is creating a huge gap between rich and poor which is phenomenally increasing.
HDI of India is 128 out of 177 countries. For a country to develop literally, widening of economies and infrastructures are not the only key. Even though GDP is growing the per capita income is just above Rs 35000. Considering growth in gap between rich and poor one can easily gather the actual situation.
In the next decade India’s economy will grow fast. India will completely consume itself for this growth, but with little interest in human development. There will be chaos with in the nation as concentration will only be on growth of economy itself. We are already at the starting point. We see every day the number of people getting displaced, losing farming lands, traditional occupation, and property in name of development, farmer’s suicide for example.
Increase in gap is usual situations found in most developed nations and so we cannot call it as normal indicator of development. When recession hit, it was the nations that had huge gap which trembled the most. “Greater income inequality stifles upward mobility between generations, making it harder for talented and hardworking people to get the rewards they deserve, It polarizes societies, it divides regions within countries, and it carves up the world between rich and poor.” said OECD’s Gurria. With population as huge as India with such diversity and already existing caste and communal issues, with capitalism the path to increase in gap is wide open. With increase in gap there’ll be difficult in bringing about any change in current issues forget resolving them. Quality education, food, health care etc will only become affordable by riches leaving hardly any competition. Poor will start fighting for social security - for the most basic needs, quality is one thing they’ll be forced to compromise on. These concerns already exists with so many well distributed classes today, imagine what will be the condition with phenomenal gap in a decade.
Concentration on controlling the gap, in fact bringing it down is very essential. One of our goals has to be equality in development. We have to concentrate on Human development as it is one of the key elements to cut down the growth in gap.
If we consider increase in gap between the rich and poor, with rich is becoming richer and poor
becoming poorer achieving millennium goals will become severely difficult. Every citizen of this
country can ensure that we do end up making same mistake as many other developed economies, as we cannot survive as they did. They have option on feeding on developing countries, we don’t.
Our resources is all we have and if that is not reasonably equally distributed then our huge nation cannot take from others. How can we ensure that we do not take that path? There is nothing we can do to prevent it as we have already in it! It will take a very detailed well thought planning on side of government, right amount investment of time, money, personnel etc from our end. It is not easy as problem is complex. We need to divide it into simplest units and solve it. It is at these units level is where an individual can contribute. A unit could be for example: Buy ‘made in India products’, increase production at home rather than importing thus increase employment, ensuring higher distribution of monies. It is of course not as easy as it could be said, but we have to start somewhere!
