An empowered India will be a nation in which we have been able to successfully eliminate the scourge of poverty. An India in which we have been able to wipe every tear from every eye, the mission that Mahatma Gandhi inspired us with.
India means basically rural India, because India lives in its villages. Over 72% of India’s population lives in rural India. India’s villages are home to 75% of India’s poor. The bulk of the population of rural India subsists on agriculture. Therefore, in order to tackle the problem of poverty in India, specially in rural India, we will have to consistently enhance the international competitiveness of Indian agriculture.
One important step in this mission is to enable, and consequently empower even the smallest marginal farmer in the remotest recess of India’s rural hinterland to use technology, especially Information Technology (IT). It has been demonstrated beyond doubt that if we enable India’s farmers to creatively leverage IT, the resulting power of information and knowledge will help them compete successfully in the Indian and world markets.
Nearly 87% of India’s 640,000 villages have population clusters of 2000 people or below. In spite of a network of roughly 3.6 million rural retail outlets, there is no active marketing or distribution of products and services in these small villages because of uneconomical ‘last mile’ logistics. Nearly 35% of India’s villages are yet to be connected by roads. Tele-density in rural India is barely 1%. Apart from being geographically dispersed, these villages, as economic units, do not have the means to support the scale of investment required to upgrade last mile connectivity.
A large segment of India’s rural population subsists on less than $1 per day. This is ironically less than half the subsidy provided to each head of cattle by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Grinding poverty is so badly crippling that the poor do not even have the awareness and the ability to hoist themselves out of the morass of penury that they are sunk in.
For the same level of income, a rural wage earner’s propensity to consume is only half that of an urban wage earner. This is because agriculture, the predominant source of livelihood for the bulk of the population of rural India, is still fraught with a lot of uncertainty and risk.
The fragmentation of farm holdings, over-dependence on monsoons, and the lack of sophisticated inputs and knowledge trap the Indian farmer in a vicious cycle of underdevelopment. To initiate the process of an economic turnaround, we need to provide cost-effective last mile connectivity, which will consequently lead to productivity-led economic growth.
In the new India I envision, village communities will be vibrant economic organisations. These villages will induce a virtuous cycle of consumption of goods and services, economic growth, education and development. But economic development and the growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will not be the sole indices for measuring progress In an empowered India. The quality of life will not be determined solely and wholly by the return earned on economic and financial capital.
An empowered India will be a nation in which we have been able to successfully eliminate the scourge of poverty. An India in which we have been able to wipe every tear from every eye, the mission that Mahatma Gandhi inspired us with.