> the well-to-do educated class have simply stopped looking at the country as a whole

There is lot of misguided guilt-tripping that goes on in India. Misguided because it doesn't produce any outcomes.

I feel India is massive and most people including Indians don't realize how massive.

I worked on project a few years back, which required traveling around/studying just one district. That district alone had a population larger than Norway. And India has 700+ districts. Just think about that for a moment.

We might as well be talking about 700 countries when we talk about India. There are many districts doing really well and healthy and many on the other end of the spectrum. Whenever people talk about "India" as a whole they don't know what they are talking about. Get them to be specific about a district and the conversation gets much more productive.

This is true. But when discussing the economy, the Indian economy is extremely interconnected. Arguably, the Indian economy is far more integrated and 1 corner of the country is far more affected by impacts from another corner than in Norway, because the lower population numbers mean that people in Norway simply don’t rely on other Norwegians as much as they do on foreigners, which is far less true of India.

Yes India is a very diverse country and that is why policies which treat it as a single homogeneous entity won't work. They might work in tiny countries with similar populace but not when you scale it up to something like India. People fail to realize this.

>>> that is my feeling and I am guilty of the same.

To acknowledge the problem is the first step towards its solution.

Your observation is very similar to what I have felt as well. There is a wide urban-rural gap.

India is primarily an agricultural country. A fairly large part of Indian population resides in villages and is directly or indirectly dependent upon agriculture sector.

The current state of economy also stems from the agrarian crisis that has been brewing for a long time now.

I don't think this government is exclusively to be blamed for the plight of farmers, but given the mandate they got in 2014, they had the means to enable farmer friendly policies - unfortunately they did not.

I was actually traveling in different parts of India when the demonetization move happened. I saw firsthand the immediate aftermath in both the urban and rural India. There were diverse opinions, but given how simple, credulous and sheep-like most of the Indian population is, most people I talked to were ready to bear the brunt because our leader told us it was overall a good move for the country. These people didn't realize how it would come back to haunt them when they start loosing their livelihood in the coming times.

I can't imagine anywhere else in the world, where people wouldn't have protested on a mass scale, if such a sudden, disastrous move would have been made on their lives without consulting them.

If you read about the history of Independent India, we still haven't settled down as a nation yet. Each decade has brought it's fair share of challenges and the churn is always on. I hope the current situation is just one of those and the idea of India, as what our forefathers deemed it to be, shall survive to fight another fight.

Edit: Grammar, Typos

To protest on a mass scale you need resources which cost money. When the very money is invalidated how do you think somebody would be able to protest? No one would be ready to take on the risk to provide goods for money which is invalid with the hopes that a protest might be a success.

This is hardly a new phenomenon.

India has for the past few hundred years been run by an elite linguistic minority - the so called Macaulay's children. It's hardly a wonder that the deep state in India both despises and organizes self-righteous protests against local linguistic communities, all while simultaneously ensuring that education, the bureaucracy and employment remain isolated to English speakers. Little wonder that most of India's bright minds leave for the US right after (or even before) graduation.

It's astonishing that Social 'Scientists' have paid such little attention to such glaring structural disparities (compared to say China), while they go on wrecking what's left of Indian society using theories entirely developed by foreigners. Education has definitely gone downhill as a result over the past few decades - while my parents tell us stories of great education in Public schools (run, quite sensibly, in the local languages), I can see the abysmal state of these today. The state has tried to offload its duties (while imposing one of the highest tax rates in the world) by emburdening Hindu-run schools (somehow this is 'secular') using RTE, but the competition and the fees at some of the better schools has become quite absurd of late, costing people close to ~$3000 annually, and an additional one time 'donation' which will help cut the long queues for these schools.

Considering that this kind of colonial social structures are absent in most countries, it is to be expected that the Indian economy can't really outgrow its ~100 million elite, while the underclass remains bound in a sub-saharan level educational and cognitive achievements (that is if they're even literate).

It is very interesting that the self-labelled "Left" in India is at the helm of further pushing these colonial policies, while the supposed "right", in their bombastic arrogance, are happy to implement them (see Shiv Sena, BJP etc., and also the DMKs in Tamil Nadu). It's very unlikely that India will ever achieve parity with China in our lifetimes, considering its self-destructive tendencies.

English is the ideal "neutral" link language for a country with as much linguistic diversity as India (thus also making it a suitable medium for education.) The alternative would be to force the whole country to learn a single language (Hindi), which is to them more foreign than English is, or to use only regional languages, making it difficult to have countrywide exams/educational content.

There is nothing colonial or elite about English -- it is simply the most practical choice for a link language, given we have to learn it anyway to interact with the rest of the world.

Agreed with everything. English is single most important factor towards upward mobility. Hindi imposition will suffocate linguistic diversity. Even the Hindi cooking channels for example, have started inserting so much nationalistic and religious issues in there. I just prefer Pakistani channels instead nowadays or just websites.

Notice how you need English education to even comment on forums like these. Now if you don't know English you just get filtered out of a lot of big things in this age. There is little you can do about it, because the west got ahead a few centuries during the industrial/renaissance age.

Don't blame west for anything, because our country was reasonably well off. It has warm tropical weather with 12 hours of sunlight, and plenty of water with fertile soil. Plus we didn't have those bubonic plagues. Despite this the kings here barely did anything on the human resources end. Heck there isn't even a remote concept of social equity in India.

Local languages can't show any miracles because you can't do any serious training or academic work with them.

This is a lot of self hate. The west got ahead in the colonial era, not just the industrial era. We had plenty of empires that worked on developing the country such as Mauryan, Maratha etc. I very much agree that a strong command over English is the only thing that can help someone in this country if they’re not born massively advantaged; but there is no need for un-true self-laceration.

If I could go back in time I would definitely smack some emperors around the head for not being more exploratory on the Naval front - but our very fertile soil was our undoing - much like China, no need to go anywhere if agriculture is highly viable right where you are, and foreigners come to YOU looking to buy the nice stuff you grow (spices).

What I wrote is a brutal self appraisal of the reality we are living through.

Where we stand is a direct consequence of what we have done in the past. To verify it all we have to do is see where are today.

Sorry if this offends you. But this is the reality.

You didn't do anything in the past. People from the past are not here now. You found yourself here as an accident of birth and are now aware of where you are and maybe how it came to be.

Now decide where you want to go from here, just like the countless before you have done - leading to you being here.

P.S : This is more as a note to self :).

The pejorative 'Macaulay's Children' should have given ample idea to where his comment was heading, and it did not disappoint.

>>> It's very unlikely that India will ever achieve parity with China in our lifetimes, considering its self-destructive tendencies.

And to add to that, we don't really exist in the most peaceful part of the world with at least two of our neighbors ( Ch, Pk ) having fought wars with us in the last fifty years.

It is interesting that you've mentioned 50. if you expand that to 80, that would be almost every country in the world.

Our biggest worry is climate change in the near future. Especially water scarcity.

We're in for a bad time in the coming two decades unless we go on a militant drive to conserve water.

Unfortunately I don't see that happening. Agriculture is our biggest consumer of water by a huge margin, but telling farmers to not grow water reliant but lucrative crops like sugarcane is political suicide.

UP is water scarce, yet it is also one of the biggest producers of sugarcane. Go figure.

Both of them being nuclear powers further complicates our security situation.

We fought with China, not the other way around.

> We fought with China, not the other way around.

That is not true.

From Wikipedia [0]: Unable to reach political accommodation on disputed territory along the 3,225 kilometre- (2,000 mile-) long Himalayan border,[10] the Chinese launched simultaneous offensives in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line on 20 October 1962.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War

Not that I am a big fan of SCMP, but this fact is well known that India provoked the war[1]. There was even an opportunity to call off the war but we (our government) denied it.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2102555/i...

To each their own, but I'll stay with relatively neutral media, such as Wikipedia, as my source of information.

Anyway, we're digressing from the main topic of this post.

Sorry to say but Wikipedia is far from a neutral source.

I don't think that is all that relevant in this context (see Israel).

I tend to agree with you that Israel, as a country of its size and kind of neighbors its surrounded with, is not placed very pleasantly. But it is a country far more homogeneous than India in all the respects that make a nation ( religious, social, demographically and economy wise ).

As GP pointed out that India has the potential to self-implode given the inequality and poverty that has been bred for a long time ( hundreds of years ) by various rulers of the land.

The self destruction reaction might just fasten up if a catalyst is provided by anyone of the hostile neighbors.

Israel is very far from being homogeneous. It's made up of people who immigrated there from all over Europe and the Middle East. There is a big cultural divide between the people from European backgrounds and people from Middle Eastern backgrounds. It also has a significant Muslim population (17%).

Not sure about your overall points but Israel is far from homogenous with a large part of the country literally controlled by another government (Palestine).

Israel's neighbors don't have nukes. In India's case, on one side you have a known sponsor of terror(where Osama was found) and on another side we have One Party Communist China. And the fact that they both are partnering isn't helping.

The problem has been the absolutely pitiable amount of money which is being spent on human capital by the government. The government schooling systems across the country is in a mess - and this has nothing to do with "Macaulay's children" or English because most government schools are in the vernacular language.

The present government also made huge budget cuts in the mid-day meal programme which is an essential programme which draws the poor into the schools. So overall, things have gotten much worse.

> It is very interesting that the self-labelled "Left" in India is at the helm of further pushing these colonial policies..

When it comes to economy, the current Government will also fall into the "Left" category. BJP for all its talks, has done very little to take the country towards the capitalistic way. It took them years to slash the corporate tax which any economic-right government would've done long ago.

The political divide in the US is along similar lines. It's not a problem unique to India, it's driven by technology that gives those who can exploit it best a big economic edge.

It's not driven at all by technology. It's driven by central banks with easy money, further fracturing the divide between the poor and ultra wealthy. Technology just allows you to see evil for what it is.

Central banking is a technology. Capitalism is a technology. Democracy is a technology.

At least that's what the tech tree in Civilization says :).

Seriously, in the modern world, almost everything is a technic[1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/d...

You can choose to view things that way, but that's just a perception, not the actual nature of these concepts. You could equally well say they are all philosophies and use that to reinforce a view you hold.

Yes, my thoughts are partly shaped by how I perceive things, see them, read about them.

However when you have spent time exploring the concepts, go to their origins, subject them to your analysis, to what people before you have thought about them through the different ages, pay attention to the meaning of the names and not use them flippantly, look at who wields the power and who benefits, watch your own motivations and those of others, then I believe it ceases to be mere perception and the true nature of the thing under consideration reveals itself. Yes you may not understand it in its entirety, but you tend to grasp the essence where earlier it was cloaked in myth.

I'll give you an example. People exemplify the benefits of division of labour stated by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. That is how it is conventionally taught. But they conveniently ignore how he talks about the soul crushing, mind numbingness of it later in the book. How it negatively affects the nature of man. And this resonates with ones experience having gone through the grind.

Also the nature of things is not fixed, static. It evolves too. It changes those using it and in turn is shaped by them. What started of as a good idea, mutates into a self-perpetuating myth.

Please read the book I referred if you are really interested in the actual nature of these concepts.

Exactly. The science and art of economics is also a technique with only probability based outcomes. If the underlying assumptions change, then things will slowdown / grow in unexpected ways.

If anything, easy money transfers wealth downward. Tight money transfers wealth upward.

>>well-to-do educated class have simply stopped looking at the country as a whole

To put it bluntly they don't care. They don't care until they lose their jobs, until they can't pay their kids school fees, until they lose their home/car when they default on their loans, and more importantly they don't care for the social problems until its their kids or family whose life is on the line.

They outsource their hate to political parties who do the work for them, they wake in the morning read headlines in the news papers, and if it fits in their political world view they just carry on.

To put it frankly not a single person from the current working generation will likely face much issues from these socio economic problem. Mostly a few problems. The coming generation are screwed, they will inherit a dead economy and impossible to fix social conditions.

what do you think of movements like Sadhguru's Cauvary Calling -- to replenish the greenery in India's agricultural areas and bring back prosperity to farmers who are on the brink of suicide. I find his talks very inspirational, from someone halfway across the planet.

I think he is a charlatan who preys on insecurities and charges hefty amounts for his seminars. He was holding one such environmental one and the organization itself was deemed pretty bad for the environment. So much so that the PM didn't show up.

They've planted 35 million trees[1] through volunteer activity, trained farmers and provided schooling to poor villagers, and they are bad for environment? what sources are you using? And secondly, could you be so kind as to provide your preferred alternative organization that provides these resources in the country? I would like to learn why you think their efforts are disingenuous, and how they would function as an organization , buying assets such as centres/schools etc without charging rich(relative to the 400m starving ones in the country) people fees to attend yoga/meditation retreats. [1] https://www.ishaoutreach.org/en/project-greenhands

Sadhguru gets very cheap land in prime areas from the government.

Also this stuff

https://www.altnews.in/scientific-research-ascertains-mercur...

I have only heard but have not taken the time. To be honest, I think city-zens like myself are so far out from the agricultural areas that I have really never taken deep interest. But I have recently become more interested and I will read up.

"Prosperity" here means stable 2 meals a day...

this is happening in the west and is one of the reasons of a wave of authoritarian governments elected in a mostly democratic fashion, with a little bit of a stir from certain nation states psyops divisions.

Same as America. We have been doing this for the last 50 years.

Would you say the socialist policies of the government have had a negative effect or a positive effect on the country's economy? In your opinion as a resident, does this play at all into why things are the way they are economically?

You can hardly call the policies socialist, because there is no coherent thinking behind any of the policies.

Rather, the current government’s actions seem to be driven solely by the government’s electoral needs of the day.

New election coming up? Announce huge “socialist” policies promising free stuff to a lot of people.

Massive foreign rally where the economy will be a rallying point coming up, but your markets are at a low and falling? Announce a huge “capitalist” 10% corporate tax rate cut that boosts the markets and doesn’t throw a dampener on your rally.

> Rather, the current government’s actions seem to be driven solely by the government’s electoral needs of the day.

That's what any Government does in India.

https://m.timesofindia.com/city/bhopal/farm-loan-waiver-take...

There are both good and bad aspects to the socialist approach taken by India.

(+) The biggest gain: There have been no famines in Independent India - in the previous 80 years, around 20 million died in famines. This was a massive issue during the freedom movement.

(+) State-subsidised education has succeeded in producing an elite which is world-class. However, state-subsidised _basic education_ is non-existent in many places, and literacy rates have been slow to grow nationally.

(-) Excessive regulations have stymied industry, and led to massive corruption. The regulatory codes in India are needlessly complex and stringent. Many people opt to bribe out than comply, it is much cheaper that way.

Overall, it has taken India more or less along a path of progress and is less of a mess than others think it is (see Hans Rosling's informative presentations for this). But, Indians feel frustrated because we feel the pace of progress should be much more.