India has, no doubt, make great progress since independence, yet it remain a land of poverty. A biggest cause of this poverty was overpopulation. Our economic growth is negated with the growth of our population.
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Answers
poverty in India is a reality. One needs to take a holistic view of the situation to understand the reasons -
Enormity of Challenge:
When India gained independence from British rule in 1947, it started off as a massive bunch of poor people, no infrastructure, no economy and a literacy rate of 12%. Nation building was a massive exercise and required uplifting a country where almost 9 out of 10 people could not even read or write
With population of almost 1200 million, the challenge for India is of a scale that no developed country has had to face
Germany did a fantastic job of building the country from scratch after 1945. But taking everyone in India out of poverty is like building Germany again and again - 15 times over.
Or taking entire Europe out of poverty and then repeating that one and a half times over
Or taking entire Africa out of poverty - all 54 countries
The only other country in the world that has met a challenge of this magnitude (quite successfully) is China and it is truly admirable. However, China is a single party political system which makes decision making faster and they started economic reforms way back in 1978.
more details here -
Shashank Goyal's answer to Why has China developed so much faster than India?
The Lost Decades:
The three generations of Indian Prime Ministers from Gandhi dynasty (Jawahar Lal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi) had many other positives to their credit, but their economic policies were a disaster
Successive Congress led governments believed in socialist policies where Indian companies could not even manufacture beyond the government approved limit. They maintained an era of “license raj” resulting in lackluster growth for 45 years. India lost almost half a century with no credible improvement in economy or reduction in poverty
It was only in 1991 when the first Congress Prime Minister from outside of Gandhi dynasty, PV Narasimha Rao with then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, decided to move away from 45 years old Congress ideology of socialism and unleashed massive reforms to Indian economy, India opened up it’s market to rest of the world and it gave massive returns in the long term
Over the next few years, hundreds of new businesses flourished, MILLIONS of new jobs were created, income levels soared, and poverty came down significantly
Credible action for poverty reduction in India has started only as recently as 25 years back.
The following data from World Bank is representative of India’s growth story since 1991 and its impacts on poverty reduction -
Some back-of-the-envelope calculation using the above numbers from World Bank indicate the scale of this massive transformation story -
Over a period of 18 years, India has uplifted almost 150 million people out of poverty
Statistically speaking, this translates to
more than 8 million people moved out of poverty every year
or almost 22,000 people moving out of poverty every day
India still has a huge task ahead of it. But by the time, you finished reading this answer, another 250 people moved out of poverty to a life that every human being deserves !
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