Comment by itspi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itspi | Hacker News Reader

I don't comment but also hate reading popular threads like this but I will do it anyway because someone was interested in hearing from someone living in India.

There's so much emphasis (from comments) on information technology services contributing to this. This is a recent phenomenon. Growth due to IT services was extremely concentrated in a few cities and most took their family there.

India was never a nation state before becoming a federal republic. Poverty was not widespread uniformly over the subcontinent. Over-reliance on agriculture and lack of trade meant factors like climate patterns disproportionately affected people in the lower social order.

Government definitely played a role in establishing energy infrastructure, educational institutions, introducing healthcare schemes and before that, smart people played an even bigger role with the constitution.

India's growth can be traced to a small list of landmark decisions which caused chain reactions.

- 1950 Constitution and enforcement by institutions

- 1954 Midday Meal Scheme

- 1956 Non-Aligned Movement

- 1961 Green Revolution

- 1970 Operation Flood

- 1991 Economic liberalisation

Looking back, just liberty guaranteed by Constitution wouldn't have worked because of the caste system.

I can add more if someone's interested.

- itspi

I would argue that India's present success is in spite of the government, not because of it. The sectors that have seen the most success in India, namely the telecom, IT and services industries, were also those that were the least regulated (because our politicians weren't smart enough to even begin to comprehend technology to regulate it before it really took off in a big way).

As for the being a nation state part, sometimes I think we would have been better off in an EU type situation rather than being one large entity.

> As for the being a nation state part, sometimes I think we would have been better off in an EU type situation rather than being one large entity.

I have the same idea. But I'm not very sure about it, specially because our divide has been the main cause of Britishers colonizing us. An united single state gives us much more resources to function properly and defend our interest against neighbors like Pakistan & China.

I could be wrong though, as EU seems to be a good example of governance

> specially because our divide has been the main cause of Britishers colonizing us

This is just plainly false. Ask any serious student of history, and he will tell you that most of India has very little in common with each other. There are at least 4 major groups of languages (groups, not counting the myriad dialects), differing opinions on laws, clothing and even food. India was never a nation before the Britishers consolidated power over present day India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan, and made it one.

Hong Kong became much, much richer under Colonial rule, without a 'Constitution'.

No other nation needed 'school meals' in order to generate wealth, it's a nice program but hard to fathom as a 'root cause' of something.

The Non-Aligned movement? India would have been much richer, much more quickly, if they were to have aligned themselves with the West.

The Green Revolution / Op. Flood - well obviously that's huge, but does having more food equate to prosperity? I mean, wherever populations are exploding, usually it's pretty poor. Though I'm inclined to agree with you.

Trade Liberalization was unequivocally a big deal and FYI Green Revolution was arguably part of that, or at least tech transfer was.

If you throw in the last item, with the vast surpluses available from technology and productivity from richer nations, it amplifies quite a bit.

Your comment makes me feel like you don't understand India at all. At the time of independence, we were robbed of our resources by the west. Our country was divided with individual identity. Poverty, economy and quality of life were pretty bad thanks to England.

"school meals" allowed families to be able to send kids to school for education instead of getting their help at work to feed families. That means, more people were inclined towards getting education and literacy. Which was a huge deal for our country at that time.

>The Non-Aligned movement? India would have been much richer, much more quickly, if they were to have aligned themselves with the West.

India "might" have been richer without NAM but did you not notice what our close relationship with west did to us? Also, that richness would have made us into a failed state like USA (yes, I know about US' homelessness, lack of social security, and the greedy capitalism). We needed to stand on our own feet before we could make alliances. Heck, the west is still opposed to India till now. As much as I dislike Russian politics, our partnership with Russia has actually helped us develop much quicker (and yes, it was a partnership in every sense)

Indian constitution was needed, specifically because our country is so much more diverse. Are you seriously comparing a tiny piece of land (HK) to a huge landmass like India, which has hundreds of different cultures, identities, religions, languages. We absolutely needed a code to unify our country. We are still very diverse, but our unified under a single identity of Indian.

And since you folks actually acknowledge the atrocities of Nazi Germany, you should definitely look into India's colonial history. You'll understand the storm we had to endure, and what we were left with once we kicked those colonizers out of our land.

You missed the Green revolution somewhere around 1967 I think. Millions would've died without it.

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