India is yet to reach the ‘finish line’ of achieving its intended goals, even as the country is celebrating 70th ‘Independence day’ on August 15, this year. Sadly, despite seven-decade long ‘self-rule’, India continues to be plagued with burgeoning population, soaring inflation, widespread poverty, political turbulence, uncontrollable corruption in public administration and an all pervasive atmosphere of destabilising conditions within the country and in the neighbourhood.
On the midnight of August 14, 1947, the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in his famous ‘tryst with destiny’ speech, had pointed out that our endeavour should be ‘to bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman”. That night, millions of Indians went to sleep with Nehru’s words still reverberating in their ears and high hopes in their hearts of a heavenly India.
Indeed, the magical words of an enigmatic political leader encouraged every Indian, from poor to rich, to have a dream and work towards its fulfillment. The theme of the dream was prosperity, both personal and national. A large chunk of the population was extremely impoverished, they could not afford to buy essential food articles from the market.
They dreamt of two square meals a day in independent India. The government’s public distribution system intended to provide foodgrains at highly subsidised rates, to people living below poverty line. The Public Distribution System (PDS) induced them to dream again about two square meals. But corruption in the implementation of the PDS scheme continues to rob them of the dream despite the Supreme Court’s intervention. The foodgrains vanish from the Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns and surface in the open market bypassing the poor. Consequently, an alarming percentage of the population of India is suffering acute malnourishment.
India has over 230 million hungry and malnourished people, according to UN Agency Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). With a large percentage of its population undernourished, nearly 44 per cent of under-five children are under-weight and 7 per cent of them die before they reach five years. India is firmly established among the world’s most hunger-ridden countries, according to UNICEF. Pregnant women too suffer because of poor nutrition, and their number stands at 83 per cent, the highest in the world.
The Supreme Court, time and again, in various judgments, has reminded the government of its constitutional obligation to ameliorate the lot of the poor in the country. Nothing much has been achieved. A recent international survey on poverty shows that India is home to one-third of all poor people in the world, or 33 per cent of the global poor, which is pegged at 1.4 billion people. India continues to remain a poor country and its human indices are a shame of the millennium – the grinding poverty coupled with rapid price rise of all essential commodities, have pushed a large section of the country’s population below poverty line.
The poor dreamt of earning through work after the government floated the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) Act. It guaranteed corruption to the implementers but no benefit to the poor. Corruption confined the work and the wages to paper. Over 1.8 crore people (children included) in India are working as bonded labour, according to International Labour Organization (ILO). Most of the bonded labourers are victims of kidnapping and human trafficking, which is the worst problem plaguing the country since independence
Farmers dreamt of prosperity as millions of hungry mouths needed food. They toiled in the fields and hoped to produce more. But lack of irrigation facilities failed them. They invested heavily in pumping out ground water, but more than half the traditional hand-dug wells and millions of tube wells have dried up across the country. Money lenders and middlemen, including land mafia, stepped in. The debt burden crushed farmers’ dream. They started committing suicides.
Since the last over two decades, the Apex Court has been emphasising that ‘justice – social, economical and political’, and ‘citizens – men and women, equally, have a right to an adequate means of livelihood’, which the Constitution of India promises is still a distant dream. There are millions of registered unemployed. The unemployed still dream of a job that ensures equal pay for equal work. The government, in spite of the constitutional mandate, is unable to provide them with employment.
Every common man had a dream of his own – communal harmony, a speedy justice delivery system, a responsive bureaucracy, a corruption-free polity and above all, honest and transparent governance. Of course, given requisite will and collective effort, things can be vastly improved. But does the mammoth inefficiency and mind-boggling corruption of the entire Indian system give any hope of this?
At present, there is utter lack of security. The innocent still get killed by terrorists’ bomb blasts, communal riots and mob lynchings. Instead of acting against the perpetrators, politicians play the game of one-upmanship using religion as a pivot. So surcharged is the atmosphere that one thinks twice before asking the government as to what steps have been taken to ensure safety of commoners.
So, in this situation, on the eve of August 15, after 70 years of independence, what does a young Indian dream? A fresh tryst with destiny?
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
