Birth of a ......Nation

 

 

It feels like yesterday that we heard the famous speech of Pandit Nehru on the radio on August 14, 1947, at the midnight hour, given in the Central Hall of the Parliament, to the Constituent Assembly.

His stirring words, “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially”. His words that inspired our young minds were, “The service of India means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity”. With the declaration of freedom of India, the entire nation arose with joy all over the country.

The next morning, on August 15, along with hoisting of India’s Tricolour flag at the Red Fort by Panditji, there was flag hoisting in homes and offices all over the country. I recalled how we, young college students, had taken a morcha on August 12, 1942, to the District Court at Nagpur in the Quit India Movement where Prashant Pande and myself had climbed the parapet and removed the Union Jack and hoisted the Tiranga, before we were fired upon by the police. I recall how I was injured in the police lathi charge that followed, and sent to Central Jail, Nagpur.

Yet all this was now forgotten, and we looked ahead to a new free India. Our nation had to be built from scratch. There was no private sector except for a few houses like Tata & Birla, hence it was the responsibility of the government to build infrastructure industries like power plants, atomic energy, transportation, communication, education, science, etc. All this required huge investment for which Pandit Nehru laid the foundation of public sector enterprises in these sectors. He introduced the Industrial Policy Resolution in 1956, in which he stated that the Public Sector Undertakings must be run on commercial lines and must generate surplus for further investment.

Unfortunately, in the post-independence era, this main objective was forgotten and public sectors like steel, fertilisers, coal, etc., became over-manned, non-competitive, and loss making, contrary to Pandit Nehru’s vision. Fortunately, during this period of half a century, the private sector grew substantially, mainly because of its competitive character. Because of this, the government of India had to adopt an open market economic policy, and hand over quite a few public sector undertakings to the private sector. This new economic policy, initiated first by Dr Manmohan Singh as the Finance Minister under the Prime Ministership of Mr PV Narasimha Rao, has paid rich dividends and India, despite its three-fold population growth since independence, has achieved substantial economic growth. The top ten per cent layer of people can claim to match those of any developed country in the world. This means that we still have twenty per cent as the middle class and rest seventy per cent of our population of over one billion people living below poverty line and whose tears are yet to be wiped.

Thus, the objective spelled out for the nation in his speech of ‘Tryst with Destiny’ by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru remains yet to be fulfilled in large measure and it is for our young generation to take a pledge afresh to fulfil our nation’s destiny.