A moment comes, and that comes very rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Thus spoke India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in the midnight of August 15, 1947, announcing India’s historic birth as a newly independent state.

Sixty years later, those words still carry a new meaning as we deconstruct it in the larger context of India’s journey in freedom in the last 60 long years to assess the strides it made in political and economic spheres. After six decades, India is yet again at the threshold of a new moment, trying to demonstrate its prowess in effecting development through democracy. This is in stark contrast to the “disciplined” masses of China ruled by a monolithic communist party.

India is a success story and this is not to underestimate its new-found global status as a fast growing economic and nuclear power. From the vantage point of its 60th year in independence, the view suggests that India has come a long way and has diverged a lot from its past and is trying to script a new destiny, with its aspirations for a global role. India’s backlog is perhaps scattered development and the balancing act to undo the chasms of prosperity and poverty.

Tryst with Democracy

The biggest tribute India deserves is about sustaining the democratic mode of government for 60 years. This is no mean achievement when compared with several other developing countries in the world. India with the second largest population in the world will obviously have pains in producing faster results through the democratic way all the while ensuring that the economic development is uniformly shared.

Democracy can breed populism, pandering and delays. But it can bring long-term stability also. This is the message that India sends out. Not that India has been immune to mistakes. India lost precious time in the 1950s and 60s, trying to create the magic of a ‘mixed’ economy by juxtaposing capitalism and socialism. The more it tried to become socialistic, the economic results turned to be catastrophic. A few examples will suffice; in 1960, India enjoyed a higher per capita GDP than China; today it is less than half of China. The same year, it had parity with South Korea on per capita GDP; today South Korea is 13 times larger than India in per capita earnings.

The United Nations Human Development Index ranks countries by income, health, literacy and other parameters. India ranks 124 out of 177, way behind Syria, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Female literacy is at an abysmally low 54 percent. These are challenges that India can never ignore.

Higher Economic Growth

Despite these flaws, what makes India special is that unlike the state-driven growth of China, India’s success in economic growth has been albeit slow and steady in pace. India certainly wants to live with its boisterous, noisy democracy and empower its people. In this, India bears striking resemblance with the United States of America where often the society triumphs over the state.

In the past 15 years, the world has noticed India’s metamorphosis as a fast-growing country, after China. In the last few years, its economic growth has even surpassed the 8 percent band and observers believe that India can sustain this high growth rate for a long time.

A study conducted by Goldman Sachs confirms this. It concludes that in the next 50 years, India will be the fastest-growing economy because its workforce will not age as fast as others. The report estimates that in another 10 years, India’s economy will be larger than Italy’s and in 15 years it will have overtaken Britain’s. By 2040 it will be the world’s third largest economy. By 2050 it will be five times the size of Japan’s and the per capita income too will rise 35 times from its current level.

Historic Liberalisation

The trigger for this economic emancipation came in July 1991, when the minority government of P.V. Narasimha Rao opened up the economy with a wave of liberalisation measures. The new economic policy dismantled import controls, lowered customs duties, and devalued the currency, virtually abolishing licensing controls on private investment, dropping tax rates and broke public sector monopolies.

The liberalisation served as a second independence of sorts for Indians who saw the collapse of a rapacious and domineering role by the state in their economic affairs. The results too shared this enthusiasm; by the mid-1990s total foreign trade—imports plus exports—amounted to more than 20 percent of GDP. Foreign direct investment grew from a startling zero in the 1980s to $5 billion a year by the mid-1990s.

New Development Mantra

Coming back to the economic turnaround and India’s democratic journey, it needs to be acknowledged that a country like India that is too complex—17 languages, 22,000 dialects and all major religions, nothing succeeds like democracy as a better mode of governance.

The Indian experience is that good economics can even cleanse the politics. The new priorities about investing in rural education, health and ways to make agriculture more productive become commendable from this perspective. This signals a new desire to empower the underprivileged sections and mitigate the danger of limiting the gains of economic growth getting disbursed among a few sections of the society.

Since 1993, India had been experimenting with grass roots democracy; for a democracy that is more pervasive and can provide the villages a bigger say in their affairs. As a result, all village councils have 33 percent of their seats reserved for women. There are now one million elected women in villages across the country. They have a new platform to demand better education and healthcare. Simply, it is a case study in bottom-up development, with society pushing the state.

Facilitating the Industry

Already India has proved that there is no better facilitator than the state in making private sector more competitive and successful. A well-regulated stock market and financial system having more transparency, adjudication and enforcement can make the private sector really thriving. This is well etched in the success of private companies like Infosys, Reliance and Ranbaxy, to mention a few. The booming telecommunications industry is another example of intelligent government deregulation and re-regulation doing wonders.

Foreign Policy

At the foreign policy front too there are commendable achievements. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Indian leaders do not announce new doctrines frequently. However, in recent years, India has succeeded in elevating its regional and international standing for greater clout. There has been palpable change in New Delhi’s attitude to China and Pakistan. Bilateral relations have improved and there has been more cooperation at the trade front. India’s standing in the near abroad: parts of Africa, Persian Gulf, Central and Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region have improved. Ties have also expanded with the big powers, especially the United States.

At the world stage, India is meticulously positioning itself as a large, economically powerful, culturally vibrant, multiethnic, multi-religious democracy outside the geographic West. This is all fine.

At 60, perhaps the biggest paradox bothering India is the dichotomy in the expectations between the society and state. The Indian society is way ahead, more open, eager, confident and ready to take on the world. It can brook no lag or delay from the state in capturing this spirit and wants faster solutions for their aspirations through more good governance. To conclude, this is an opportune time to think aloud about the ways and means to enhance the delivery of effective and efficient governance in India. Otherwise, it may look like an opportunity squandered away.