Sudhir Kumar Rakesh, IAS (Retd.)
Patna : While everybody thinks that India is reeling under severe impact of CORONA crisis, many indicators are appearing everyday which point towards the emergence of a new – more dynamic, more focused and more determined – India.
Attention must be paid to these indicators. Here are a few. Even while Kharif is being harvested across India, the Central Government had set a record foodgrains production target of 298 million tones for the year 2020-21. Coming in the backdrop of the prediction of a normal monsoon in India by the IMD and also an estimated record output of foodgrains during the year 2019-20, this is an indication of the resilience of the Indian farmers and also the confident mindset of the entire nation.
While the experts do not tire of telling us how badly prepared we are on the Healthcare front, evidence leads us to believe that in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, India has been able to serve its citizens much better than the so called havens of excellent healthcare facilities. The expert would have us believe that total spending on healthcare in India is an abysmally low 3.6 percent of its GDP, while the developed countries spend more than 10 percent of their GDP on healthcare for their citizens. Even BRICS nations spend much more – Brazil 9.2 percent of its GDP, Russia 5.3 percent of its GDP, China 5 percent of its GDP and South Africa 8.1 percent of its GDP – on healthcare.
By citing these statistics, we are required to believe that there is no future for Indian citizens in the wake of the CORONA crisis. However, ground situation and India’s current position prove decisively that mere expenditure has no direct co-relation with the actual healthcare of a nation’s population.
Look at additional evidence – most countries are requesting India for supply of essential drugs and medicine for fighting the CORONA battles within their national boundaries. According to the latest information available, India is going to provide Hydroxichloroquine (HCQ) – a drug likely to prove effective in fighting COVID-19 – to at least 55 nations across the globe.
The beneficiary nations are – the US, UK, Russia, France, Brazil, most SAARC nations, African countries, Carribean nations and many more. India has said that it is going to provide pharmaceutical and other items, which include Hydroxichloroquine and Paracetamol to SAARC countries, Mauritius and Seychelles as humanitarian aid. So much for the alleged low expenditure on healthcare and the poor healthcare facilities in India!
Crores and crores of face masks have been produced in a decentralised manner in thousands of villages and small towns across India during the last few days. Panchayats; NGOs; Schools, Colleges and even IITs; women’s organisations and individual volunteers; Railways; Defence; Central Police Organizations – all have put their heart and soul into the job.
If any other country had arranged for so many masks to be procured from the regular healthcare suppliers, it would have cost billions of dollars. But the beauty of India is that these billions of dollars worth of masks have been provided to the nation mostly through voluntary effort. Traditional analysts would never take these things into account. That is where their India models fail to study India correctly.
Another indicator: According to the latest data available with the Central Government, less than 2 percent of CORONA virus positive patients have filled for health insurance claims. Why ? Because around 98 percent of the patients of COVID-19 have been treated in government facilities. Has this been made possible without any healthcare infrastructure being there in place ? Let the expert find the answer for himself. We Indians already know the answer!
In the midst of these, there is another significant development. Seven IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) – Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee – have announced that they are going to boycott the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, 2020. Reason ? The feel that the process of ranking lacks transparency.
For the first time premier Indian education institutions are raising doubts about the level of transparency and the methods employed by THE (Times Higher Education) and QS (Quacquarelly Symonds) higher education surveys, both of which are based in London and are counted among the most prominent surveys in the world.
These are small, yet extremely powerful, indicators of the direction in which new India is progressing. The traditional analytical tools to examine and predict the India story are bound to fail, unless these indicators are factored in.
A nation has to be judged by the quality of its population. Hope, faith and self confidence define the qualities of the population of nation. India Experts may kindly look at these hidden strengths of the Indian society as well as the self confidence being exhibited by new India. Otherwise their predictions with regard to India and the Indian economy may go wide off the mark!