What Holds India Back?

Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog said on Wednesday that seven to eight States in eastern India are responsible for “holding back” the tion, and that there was a need to me and shame them. He said that alysis had shown that there were close to 200 districts where there was a failure in terms of education, health and nutrition. “When we break them down, the southern and western parts of India do reasobly well, but it is the eastern part which is totally in the red,” Amitabh Kant said at the Impact Conclave in New Delhi. “So failure of India is accounted for by these States. Until you radically reform them and the 200 odd districts, it will be very difficult for India to grow,” he added. Unfortutely, Amitabh Kant has so far not med the States, though he has alleged that there had been a huge failure of governce in those places. He said that unless they were transformed, India would “fail Sustaible Development Goals as we miserably failed Millennium Development Goals”.

What the NITI Aayog CEO has clearly failed to appreciate is that States that have not been fortute enough to have an industrial culture tend to remain much more dependent on the Centre than industrially developed States. This differential in the tion’s industrial performance is not something that has happened in just one or two decades. Several decades of deprivation of development funds coupled with a total failure to monitor the proper utilization of such funds is at the root of a lack of industrial development. When the tion permits such a differential to be created in the country, major aberrations of a failure to ensure proper utilization of funds comes about turally—mainly due to a lack of skills to sustain development. And yet, the prevailing corrupt ethos soon devises ways to divert the money to all the wrong coffers. The root of the problem is that the ready providers of big money in New Delhi have rarely taken any genuine interest in developing skills and abilities that make for genuine development in parts of the country not blessed with an industrial culture. Those who believe that the mere act of doling out big money ensures development must begin to introspect on this highly fallacious assumption. This is what holds India back.