Like every such address from the ramparts of the Red Fort over the past eight decades, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech to mark the 80th Independence Day combined a short-term actionable road map with the long-term path that the country should embark on.
The PM unveiled the seven streams or saptadhara that he believed will power India’s journey to the centenary of its Independence in 1947. He correctly identified manufacturing as the first pillar. This newspaper has repeatedly noted in
Like every such address from the ramparts of the Red Fort over the past eight decades, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech to mark the 80th Independence Day combined a short-term actionable road map with the long-term path that the country should embark on.
The PM unveiled the seven streams or saptadhara that he believed will power India’s journey to the centenary of its Independence in 1947. He correctly identified manufacturing as the first pillar. This newspaper has repeatedly noted in the past that much of India’s problems with unemployment and youth discontent is tied to its failure to encourage large-scale manufacturing. But this is easier said than done, especially when a large part of the manufacturing landscape is actually in the informal sector marked by small sweatshops rather than capital-intensive, high-tech factories. Two others, devoting more attention to agriculture and technological innovation cannot come at a more urgent time, when small farmers are the mercy of increasingly volatile monsoons and climate shocks, and the IT industry — once the driver of the Indian economy and middle-class aspirations – has to quickly adapt to a world governed by breakneck innovations in AI. This government has prided itself on the expansion of infrastructure and therefore it should come as no surprise that Gati Shakti is one of the pillars. But achieving self-reliance in defence will be a tougher goal to meet, given the mixed success of indigenous programmes and the push-and-pulls of defence procurement. The focus on renewables is welcome at a time when the oil crisis has hit the country’s finances, and it is always a good idea to focus on soft power to grow India’s global influence.
Among the actionables that the PM mentioned, the most important is the free coaching classes that the government intends to run. Coming against the backdrop of sweeping student protests that extracted a rare resignation of a Cabinet member, the step can be seen as an outreach to young people and also an attempt to break the school-to-coaching-class-to-higher-education-institutions cycle that disadvantages many. The intention is laudable but its success will depend both on the quality of the education imparted and the scale of the solution. There is a larger issue: The importance of competitive exams didn’t grow in a vacuum but is entrenched in India’s political economy that offers few avenues for mobility. The problem, as this newspaper has written before, is of jobs. To resolve this crisis, the success of the saptadhara is imperative.
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