Molly & Me & The Baby Makes Three

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9tXyQ7wTOs
Molly & Me & The Baby Makes Three

Pregnant ladies with food cravings are meant to be promptly catered to, with the reassurance that they are eating for two. And the creation of family units, as in father, mother, child, traditionally brings on a glow of satisfaction in the human condition wherever we happen to live and breathe.

It is the nesting instinct, an ideal of domestic bliss, a nurturing and civilising tendency. It has meaning, truth, stability and posterity embedded within its swaddling clothes. In harsher times no one stopped at one baby, they often didn’t stop at a dozen, letting age and obsolescence take care of the big decisions, and natural selection take care of the fates.

And if many still don’t do so, especially in populous India slated to become the most populous country in the world by 2020, it is currently viewed as an expression of essential freedom and individual preference.

This is not surprising as it turns out, given the benefits of our demographic dividend. Nations too are, in a sense, a conglomeration of family units with many of the same impulses multiplied manifold. And survival, growth and proliferation are vital to both. We already have the world’s greatest human resource pool less than 35 years of age, and this vibrancy will be ground reality till at least 2035, accounting for much of our success in a twist to the Marxist dogma about “Labour”. And this, while the rest of the world ages and suffers declining population.

Today India’s gargantuan and growing population represents actual and potential demand. We are no longer afraid of starvation given the effects of greater prosperity, globalisation, international and local advances in agriculture, its mechanisation, irrigation, bio-technology, communication, supercomputers, satellites, other technological advances and efficiencies.

And neither is the world. China, our Asian competitor in the population stakes, now probably rues its Mao era one baby policy, with all its linear suppositions and Malthusian flaws, even as it shakes its rapidly greying head in the midst of its new found power and wealth. But it will be a geriatric China that is going from strength to strength.

At the start of decade two of the 21st century, independent India’s sixty plus years, its one trillion dollar economy is headed firmly towards three trillion before this decade ends.

We all need to internalise the implications of this altogether well reasoned projection. If we do so we won’t make the mistake of judging the future with the yardstick of the past. Because it is otherwise easy to be unaware of the relentless entwining of economics in our daily lives. And as things stand, we can fail to realise the message of immense hope wrapped up in its probable benefits.

Of course, things will cost more and more, but when the nation gets richer, more and more of us will get richer with it, and over time, many amongst us will be able to afford not only the lifestyle we have at present but many aspects of our aspirational lives as well. So much so, that we are likely to take our progress for granted, and find ourselves seamlessly aiming ever higher.

The key driver of this high growth for the next twenty years will not be, principally, consumption, as it has been in America for the second half of the twentieth century and more; though we are certainly a fast-growing and domestic market driven economy. But, right now the numbers reflect the focussed investment in infrastructure and power which accounts for about 40 per cent of GDP.

This is up from some 26 per cent a few years ago. But that erstwhile 26 per cent used to be distributed across a large band of industry, while infrastructure languished, usually resulting in inadequacies of various kinds amongst the beneficiaries, not to mention its muted impact on growth as a whole.

In contrast, this 40 per cent of GDP investment in infrastructure and power, albeit largely private sector investment, aided and supported by foreign investment, is boosting our annual growth figures. Even though, this bout of development is only going to meet a proportion of the pent up demand of a one trillion dollar economy grown up from half a billion a decade ago.

In other words, we are not as yet eating for two, let alone three. Our quantum investments on upgrading, modernising and infrastructure, will have to rise year on year if we are to keep pushing that ever present bottle-neck further down the turnpike. The coming decade will remain a race between growth and the seizure engendered by a full dress bazaar style logjam.

Western economies have a different history. They have transited from the harshness of a medieval existence, riches via Empire segueing into the evils of a Dickensian/Victorian Industrial Revolution, and then onwards through two World Wars and the end of the Class Divide. They went on through the shortcomings of the brave new world of Socialism/Communism to Welfare Statism and a more supervised version of Capitalism now.

India is catching up to prosperity via a very different route and experience. We are post-colonials, post feudal - up to a point, post-caste, post-socialism, secularist, but most importantly, we are standing at the threshold of post being defined by our poverty. We are therefore in a good, if unexpected place.

And unexpectedly again, if one recalls the assumptions of our early planning processes, we didn’t get here by growing our agricultural productivity as a bigger chunk of GDP. We did grow it enough to feed many more of ourselves though and generate surpluses too.

Neither did we get here via boosting manufacturing particularly, though the proverbial fat lady has by no means sung in this regard. Emerging trends in areas such as small car manufacture and auto components seem to suggest good times ahead. We have grown over the last decade, almost by default, mostly on the back of our services and software sectors.

But future growth may come from currently inadequate Education and Healthcare, supplemented with incremental growth and sophistication in everything, from agriculture using genetically modified seeds, to manufacturing where we are turning into global hubs for selected things, and from new areas such as bio-technology and drug discovery. We will also have to see further productivity gains, and show greater evidence of innovation, design engineering, confidence and quality.


(1,053 words)

January 5th, 2010
Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer as "Rich in young blood" as Op-Ed Leader on 6th January 2010. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and is archived there under Columnists.