As we have chronicled in the past 12 posts, India has a large number of significant and imposing challenges ahead of it — challenges it has to face, and conquer, to rise to the glory it aspires to. Moreover, the identified challenges of:
- Infrastructure
- Energy
- China
- Taxation
- Poverty (as 1/8th of its urban population lives in slums [PressTV])
- Education & Opportunity
- Health Care
- Sanitation
- Behavioural & Social Norms and Castes
- Accountability & Corruption
- The Media
- Politics & Democratic Complacency
are just the biggest challenges that SI has identified as being the most important to solve; they are by no means the only challenges that lie ahead of India. Pick a topic. Any topic, somewhere, somehow, India is facing a challenge. Maybe it’s just minor and restricted to a small percentage of the population or a few states, but it’s there. And until the major challenges are addressed and reasonably solved, progress is going to be slow and India is not going to surpass the US to become the number two producer of GDP as some economists and futurists are predicting. In fact, if it doesn’t make progress on a number of these challenges, India, which was ranked 10th in GDP production at the end of 2012 (Source Wikipedia), is not even likely to surpass Japan, which currently holds the number 3 slot according to the UN (United Nations), IMF (International Monetary Fund), and WB (World Bank). (However, it is quite likely to pass Italy, Russia, Brazil, the UK, France, and, a few years after France, Germany to take the number 4 slot even if it doesn’t make much progress on the challenges, simply by virtue of the growth that its middle and upper classes, which constitute about 30% of its 1.2 Billion people, can produce on their own.)
But it’s not all doom and gloom! As SI will discuss in a future series, it has as many opportunities as it has challenges and if it conquers its challenges, it will have opportunities that are only equalled by the opportunities before China (and, with China, control approximately 1/3rd of the global economy in the latter half of this century)! What future lies in wait? That’s up to India to decide, but a future blog series will discuss aspects of one possible future. Stay tuned.