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After a tryst with destiny 70 years back India is said to have now finally arrived at a take off stage to achieve the dreams and aspirations of its people. The nation is witnessing an upsurge of youth power bubbling with enthusiasm and confidence.
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It is not out of context to state here that the present government at the Centre got elected on a massive mandate from electorate consisting in abundance of young, mostly first time, voters.
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India has traversed a long way since the attainment of independence.
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The leadership of the party which guided the destiny of the nation for a number of electoral terms was obviously inclined towards socialism and adopted a model of planned development pursuing mixed economy with huge state sector investment. But the state machinery was not equipped and even prepared to own the mammoth task.
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State intervention was needed and it initially paid dividends because we could not do without it as the big investments were not possible from private sector.
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We witnessed the first decade of independent India as full of hope and aspiration for change in socio economic situations that has been stagnant for historic reasons.
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There was superb enthusiasm and confidence among the people of the new republic that they would change their destiny. However, the following decades proved to be the period of disillusionments.
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Despite the country pumping in huge public money we found, by the turn of the century, it was complete shattering of hopes as the system started showing it’s rotten state.
For a long time state sponsored economy kept the market based economy at bay. But for the first time in all these long years we are witnessing a course correction after the last elections sent a party to govern with huge electoral mandate.
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Of all the policy initiatives taken by the government, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) is the most transformative and impactful reform GST aiming at making India a common market with common tax rates.
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Replacing the leaky and inefficient welfare delivery system with the cash transfer model has been adopted using direct benefit transfer (DBT) pilots with the JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) as its foundation.
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This initiative is natural corollary of the ambitious ‘Make in India’ which aims at making the country a global manufacturing hub. ‘Make in India’ initiative encourages both multinational as well as domestic companies to manufacture their products in India and the transparent and efficient tax collection system would make it realise.
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Similarly ‘Skill India’ wants to make India a skilled country targeting skill development training to over 500 million youth by the year 2022.
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Coupled with this the flagship ‘Digital India’ programme has already started transforming the country into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy by bringing in digital infrastructure, creating digital empowerment and delivering governance and services through digital means. That brings transparency and efficient governance.
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‘Start-up India’, ‘Stand-up India’ is aiming at young entrepreneurs to become self-employed. The scheme was launched to give a boost to entrepreneurship and job creation. The policy initiative promotes bank financing for start-up ventures.
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The Prime Minister has rightly commented recently that “the pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.”
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For the first time a sustained and effective effort is made against corruption which pervaded not only the state machinery but in politics too.
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The battle against corruption has already started cleansing the rotten system it inherited.
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Election driven development schemes, wrapped in rigid bureaucratic framework, are now slowly but certainly being replaced with people’s participation. Young generation of the 21st century is now aspiring for finding its national identity too as a powerful and competing country in the world. Majority of Indians are now asserting that they be counted and are not in a mood of compromise.
Source:PIB