India hopes to become the world’s third largest economy in less than three decades. The country has been witness to phenomenal growth in a relatively short span of time. The progress is clearly reflected in hundreds of millions of Indians rising out of abject poverty, and the country’s ever-burgeoning middle class. The largest in the world, the Indian middle class is expected to grow by over ten times to nearly 583 million by 2025. The economic surge will also make the rich richer; in less than two decades, 23 million Indians will number among the country’s wealthiest citizens.
The flip-side of this growth story is that most of this new wealth will be created in urban areas. Over the past two decades, annual real rural income per household in India has achieved a a slow growth rate of 2.8%. In the next two decades, this growth is likely to change by a mere 1%. Almost 70% of the Indian population will have little benefit from India’s expected rapid GDP growth of above 8%.
Mahatma Gandhi once said “poverty is the worst form of violence”. Approximately 30% of rural India lives below the poverty line. The Government and people need to join together to help bring the disadvantaged into the mainstream, and ensure that no one is denied their basic rights.
Access to power is a basic human right, and indeed the government has set laudable targets such as ‘Power for All’ by 2012, which aims at bringing light to the homes of 400 million Indians still living in the dark. The challenge here is to maintain the focus on providing for the 47% of the rural populace without electricity, and not just the middle class settled in the cities. This is a classic example of India’s urban-rural divide, and ensuring equitable access is critical to India’s growth story.
A democracy works best when the government and the private sector collaborate to achieve common goals. So, while the government develops the infrastructure and provides supportive policies, the private sector needs to innovate to make business models more inclusive.
In India, the major cities are crowded and the infrastructure is stretched to the limits. But thousands flock to the cities everyday in search of work and this, in turn, increases the pressure on our cities, threatens our rural way of life and breaks up family units. Solar Power, however, comes up in the remotest parts of the country and it can empower the rural population to create better lives for themselves. This means they can have secure, decent, sustainable livelihoods and don’t add to the migration.
