Make heavy investments in education, skill and infra
India has much to learn from the economic progress made by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan which were able to generate not only faster economic growth than ever achieved anywhere else over four decades, but also achieved egalitarian outcomes.
“Agrarian reform combined with heavy investments in education, skills-development and infrastructure provided the underpinning for the success of the institutions of an elaborate developmental state,” says Prasenjit Kumar Basu in his book “Asia Reborn”.
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea achieved spectacular economic growth of more than 9% annually over 4 decades each. A “hard state” enabled credit to be directed only to the most competitive companies who achieved export targets, and the intense competition domestically helped prepare their companies for global export leadership.
Basu argues that India’s civil service and constitution, based on the 1935 Government of India act, impeded the effective pursuit of development not only because India had a soft state, but also because the civil service was aimed at colonial control rather than economic development.
The Singapore-based author’s book also places India’s independence struggle in the context of events across the rest of Asia.
Being released today, 1 September, in Singapore and India, “Asia Reborn” illumines how the Partition of Bengal (October 1905) was Viceroy Lord Curzon’s response to Japan’s defeat of a European power.
It also recaps how the Ghadar rebellion, and German support for Bagha Jatin, led to the Rowlatt Act, and how the rise of Ataturk fatally weakened Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Khilafat and Non-cooperation movement.
Touching on pre-independence history, Basu argues persuasively that it was Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA), and especially the trial of Sahgal-Dhillon-Shahnawaz that led to ending the British Raj in India.
These developments spurred the Royal Indian Navy and Air Force mutinies that undermined the basis of British imperial control: the implicit loyalty of the armed forces, which had been unaffected by Quit India, notes Basu.
“That India (1947) and Iraq (1958) both had literacy rates of 14 percent at the end of British rule was no accident: Saddam Hussein won the United Nations’ prize for literacy in 1979 for successfully using the oil bonanza of the 1970s to overcome the dearth of education and infrastructure. India was too tardy,” writes Basu in the 698-page research work of over a decade.
Overall, Asia Reborn tells the scintillating stories of Asia’s resurgence in the 20th century from the ravages of colonialism and war.
“It shows why India’s life expectancy was merely 32 years in 1947 after 190 years of British rule — far below Taiwan’s 54 years after a half-century of Japanese rule and China’s 41 years despite three decades of civil war,” Basu said after releasing the book on 1 September 2017.
He said the book’s detailed history of India and Asia highlights how the economic development models of East Asian countries can serve as a manual in India’s quest to convince global businesses to “Make in India”. fii-news.com
