Sam Pitroda: A time to update

Sixty years into our independence, India can justifiably feel proud of its accomplishments. In the past decade or so it has begun to leverage many of its innate strengths and gradually charted a well-defined path to progress.

While it is easy to applaud our strengths, it is hard to remain focused on our many weaknesses. The country has acquired enough political, economic, and institutional maturity to be able to recognise and debate its fundamental shortcomings.

In my judgment, India's primary challenge is innovations in organisation and execution. It relates to our weakness in management, execution and implementation. We all know what the problems are. To some extent we even know what the solutions are. What we often lack is the ability to bridge the gap between the problems and the solutions through effective execution.

As a result we haven't been able to provide basic infrastructure, health services and education to a large part of our population. This has led to the creation of separate classes: the very rich and the very poor, the very intelligent and the illiterate, the rural and the urban.

It is true that disparities will always exist everywhere; they exist even in a rich country like the US. However, it is the degree of disparity that exists in India that should make us all uncomfortable. On the one hand you have debt-ridden farmers committing suicide barely 500 kilometres from Mumbai, India's economic nerve center. On the other hand you have the rich in Mumbai buying apartments for Rs 25 crore. No one is expecting the rich to sacrifice all their luxuries in order to bail out a farmer's family buried in modest amounts of debt. But it cannot be denied that somewhere along the system has failed to reduce so much disparity.

The problem is one of organisation, management, delegation of power and dilution of central authority. We still remain comfortable with many processes and procedures which were put in place by the British whose purpose was to control and subjugate a population. The time has come for India to not just completely overhaul the system but even get rid of the outdated processes, procedures, and rules. If we want to capitalise on the full potential of information and communication technologies, it is imperative that we update our institutional mindsets to the 21st century.

... contd.

ALSO READ

Amitabh Bachchan: In search of a national character

Preity Zinta: Road to Freedom

Surprised? It’s a real job

Sandipan Deb:The Way We Are