Public and Republic

Yojana Bhavan, home to the Planning Commission, is normally associated with dour planners and dull publications. Rarely is a Planning Commis...

Yojana Bhavan, home to the Planning Commission, is normally associated with dour planners and dull publications. Rarely is a Planning Commission paper of general reading interest. Worked up as planners get with models of a rather different kind than what excites lesser mortals, the statistics that turn them on are no less than vital to our daily needs. When an organisation known for turgid prose starts quoting poetry then something’s stirring in the Bhavan’s corridors. While most cynics may well dismiss the officiously titled ‘Report of The Committee on India Vision 2020’ as mere verbiage, it is worth a read, especially by those charged with running the country. The poetry in the report is from Rabindranath Tagore and the authors must be complimented for the most original and innovative interpretation of Tagore’s ‘Where the mind is without fear’.

The Planning Commission has imbued each line of that famous poem with contemporary relevance, invoking the national poet in support of development, investment in health and education and the building of a knowledge economy, economic liberalisation and globalisation, national security and peace, communal harmony and social equality, increased productivity and efficiency. Yojana Bhavan’s Vision 2020 is no more than Tagore’s vision of a new India. The document is very forward looking. It envisions an India of greater equality and human development that is also more liberal and open to the world outside. The only fancy number in the report is the target rate of growth for the next decade. If India grows at 9 per cent, says the Vision statement, then India 2020 will be an upper middle income country. While there are many, ranging from management guru C.K. Prahalad to industrialist Mukesh Ambani, who have asserted in recent weeks that India can log a 10 per cent annual rate of growth, provided the required homework is done, a more realistic projection would be to assume an average of 7 per cent growth over a decade, and see where that will leave India by 2020.

The picture is not all that bad and can get better if that growth comes in the more backward regions and in the more labour-intensive sectors so that there is adequate employment generation. Growth alone is not enough to satisfy the aspirations of the electorate in a democracy — it must be egalitarian and occur within a stable socio-political framework. What the Planning Commission does not dwell upon is that Tagore also talked about a world ‘not broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls’. These are not just tariff walls, as the document seems to suggest, but also ideological walls, and sectarian and communal walls. A Vision 2020 for India must reiterate the essential importance of the founding principles of the Republic — those of democracy and secularism.