Transforming India
March 17th, 2010 |Today after six decades of freedom from British rule, Indian society is still plagued with corruption, poverty, illiteracy, inequality and inefficiency. Corruption has engrained into the basic fiber of our society. You may not be able to get an electricity connection without paying bribe. We have skewed sex ratio. We have only 933 female per 1000 male in our population. Discrimination on the basis of cast, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and status is everyday phenomenon. Proportion of Black economy is almost equal to that of the white economy. While buying a small piece of land you may need to pay half the amount of total deal in black.
456 million Indians (42% of our population) live below poverty line according to World Bank estimates. We have only 66% of our population that can read and write. The male literacy rate is 75.96% and female literacy rate is 54.28%. We do not treat our citizens as equal. There is rampant VIP culture. You can find separate security checkups at air ports for so called VIPs. You may require diverting your way, if a VIP is traveling through that route. We have little respect for the life of ordinary citizen.
Not everything is so bleak. A lot has been achieved since independence. India has achieved enviable position in space technology, nuclear science, and Information technology.
After a lot of brainstorming, I have reached to the conclusion that all this can be changed in next 10 years provided the behavior of the people at large can be changed but that is not an easy task. Change in mass behavior needs simultaneous application of many strategies so that the number of people more than critical mass starts behaving quickly in desirable direction to transform India.
We have often observed that motivation and inspiration are important tools for transforming social behavior. Helping people understand the broad implications of their actions and choices and connecting change to their deeply held values is a good strategy in motivating the individuals to contribute to change. Intellectuals, leaders, writers, philosophers along with the help of print and electronic media can do a lot in inspiring and motivating the masses.
However, in addition to be motivated, people need to be capable of delivering the desired for this we need capability building institutes. In addition to the post job in-house training, this may also mean creation and strengthening of all sorts of educational institutes in order to make a world class educational infrastructure. This may require contribution of would be or existing entrepreneurs in developing these facilities. The model can be finalized after needful brainstorming for creating and running such institutes.
One may conclude that motivation and capability development of individuals are enough to tip the society in to the desired behavior, but highly motivated and capable individuals may also encounter tremendous social influences that can block change. It is our everyday observation that one is tempted to jump the red light on a crossing if most of the people are not obeying it. We need to harness the power of peer pressure to drive the change.
We also need to build up social support structure to help people during crisis. For example, a group of experts/guides/mentors may be required to guide the upcoming entrepreneurs in establishing their new business in a way as desired to realize our dream. Everyone may need to be informed about the resources and information needed to guide them for desired behavior.
Further, visibility of the change and work being done is another important factor which drives many more people to join the mainstream of change. This may be planned through media coverage and organizing some events.
We observe a lot needs to be done to improve the situation. On one hand we have a lot of unemployed of youth, on the other hand, we find that our streets are garbage laden, there is a dearth of infrastructural facilities such as road, education, power, hospitals etc. The missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle needs to be fixed to solve these problems. The solution lies in devising the mechanism such that fulfillment of the basic needs and the development process should become a business proposition rather than a charitable activity.
A suitable action plan needs to be devised by incorporating all these elements to facilitate mass behavioral change so that India can be transformed into a truly developed country by 2020. Let us come together and join hands in transforming the country into the best place on earth.
Amit Kulshreshtha is an engineer by profession working in power sector. He is aluminous of IIT Delhi and Engineering College Kota. He has deep interests in Socio- economic transformations and formed a group MuktBhaarat with an objective to transform India into a developed country by 2020. you may like to visit the site http://sites.google.com/site/muktbhaarat/ for more details
