Gravity Magazine_Final - Great Lakes

COVER STORY
5
The
Growth Miracle
Dr. V. S. Arunachalam
India needs social scientists,
teachers, agricultural and
rural experts and workers to
address the rural challenges.
Only then, will India's growth
be sustainable and worthy of
adulation.
Acronyms ('a-kr&-"nim) have become so numerous and
pervasive that they, more than their expanded forms, are
better known and used: radar, laser, lbw and so on. The one
that has become popular and making its rounds in the country
today is GNP, the Gross National Product. For many decades,
GNP was only for the economists and finance ministers
delivering budget speeches. Perhaps the ignorance of GNP
was deliberate. People were not enamoured of the number
that followed the acronym, about 3 to 5 percent per year that
made them and the country look small. The numbers were so
modest that it would have taken India many decades, perhaps
a century or so to reach a semblance of prosperity. There were
also doomsayers who predicted that anything higher than this
rate - they nicknamed the numbers as the Hindu rate of
growth - would throw the country into an irrecoverable spiral
of inflation. They are proved wrong. The country is posting a
growth rate over 7 percent for the past few years. And if - not a
doubtful if - this growth continues uninterrupted even for a
decade or two, India will be able to realise at least a part of its
dreams of economic prosperity and human development
within a decade! In democracies, with a healthy growth of
economy, it is possible to be concerned about the well-being
of people and building of caring societies.
What has made this miracle? Will it last or would it vanish
away throwing the country back into the drudgery of low
growth rates?
There are many explanations for the growth, and all of them
are true in some measure or another. The economic reforms of
the government in the Nineties when it loosened its grip on
licence-permit-quota Raj has a lot to do with this. After many
decades, private industries and initiatives were not
discouraged and the obsessive indulgence towards public
sector industries vanished. There was also a new technology
knocking at the doors: Information and Communications
Technology with the acronym IT has become instantly
popular. This technology was totally new. It did not depend