India 2047: A vision of prosperity, equality, and innovation for the brave, new citizen of Viksit Bharat
What kind of an Indian can create a prosperous India?
What kind of an Indian can create a prosperous India?
By 2047, citizens of a prosperous India would be creative, collaborative, and liberated, embracing a modernity shaped by historical and cultural richness. What is living in the tradition would be celebrated and carried forward, what is rotten would be discarded
Thou shalt develop and grow rich, at least by the centenary of Independence. If this commandment were somehow heeded, and India were to become a high-income country, at least, by 2047, what would be the nature of a citizen of that future, prosperous India?
By the World Bank’s definition, a high-income country is defined by achieving a gross national income per capita of $13,846 or more. The trouble with average incomes is that a high level does not guarantee a comfortable standard of living for the majority: if you have highly unequal distribution of income, a super-rich minority could coexist, albeit in heavily guarded, gated communities, with a disgruntled mass of unemployed and underemployed people, with a per capita income that flatters to deceive. Think Apartheid South Africa.
Indians of 2047
Suppose the India of 2047 is a country that is decidedly less unequal than today, and its inhabitants lead contented lives, by and large. What kind of people would they be?
India would be not alone in growing and evolving, the entire world would change, too. India would have some 165 crore people, the world’s largest population, a fifth of whom would be over 60. A smaller proportion would be below 18.
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Climate change would have proceeded apace, and would have been contained and reversed, for India, and other nations, to have prospered. Global warming to raise the average global temperature 2°C above pre-industrial times would place an immense burden on humanity. Building resilience against and surviving the ravages of cloudbursts, flash floods, forest fires, heat waves, coastal erosion, and cyclones would eat up resources that otherwise could have been invested in improving living standards. To have developed, climate change would have been controlled.
Science fiction will be reality
By 2047, humankind would have mastered nuclear fusion. The challenge of constantly recalibrating the magnetic field that holds the superhot plasma in flux, in which fusion takes place, would be solved by artificial intelligence (AI).
Abundant, cheap energy would be used to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Biotechnology and chemistry would have advanced to convert the captured CO2 into graphite, carbon fibre, and the starting molecules for creating all kinds of organic compounds.
Diamonds are not naturally forever
Diamonds would lose their value, after being mass-produced as an allotrope of the carbon separated from captured CO2 . Sand mining in rivers would cease, as cheap diamond particles would stand in as the preferred aggregate for making concrete.
But AI would not just help in achieving the energy transition. It would control and coordinate industrial robots on the shopfloor, and drones in the delivery industry, making a whole lot of human labour redundant. It would process data and reach sound conclusions, displacing whole armies of middle managers and other white-collar labour. Advances in pattern recognition would make AI a better reader of medical scans than trained humans. How would Indians still earn a living, and lead contented lives?
Nothing tops being human
The lesson from past technological paradigm shifts is simple: by being human, by being creative, and creating entirely new activities unimaginable before the new technologies came up. Motor cars made horses, cartwrights, hostlers and livery stables redundant. But it conjured up industrial workers to make automobile components, assemble cars, build roads and bridges, dig up crude oil and refine it to extract both gasolene and tar, to power the car over smooth roads.
Free to collaborate
Creativity is a function of not just logic but also of imagination, of individual freedom and collective effort. To survive a technological paradigm shift, such as of AI, people, across the board, would have to discover their innate humanity.
This is not a process of deep meditation or exertions under the guidance of a Zen master. It is a societal change spanning different stages of growth and development. Children must get nutrition that develops their brains, in the womb, and at least for the first three years of their lives. They must get mental stimulation, by being talked to, by being played with, by being taught.
The girl child must get nutrition, education and, as they grow into adulthood, the agency to bear children when she is ready for it. This does not mean just good food and vitamin supplements, it also means a revolution in societal attitudes, to free women from patriarchal control, whether legitimized by the Manusmriti dictum Na stree swatantryamarhati (women do not deserve autonomy) or by Sharia or by any other tradition.
It means quality education, for all children, which ensures they master the fundamental building blocks of knowledge in the early years of school. The educated child would learn to think and explore their universe, not just pass exams. Acquiring the faculty of critical thinking would become the goal of education.
Delivering such quality education for the population at large calls for a quantum leap in the quality of governance and social attitudes, not to speak of pedagogy. The authority and legitimacy of hierarchy would crumble, before critical thinking. Caste would have to be delegitimized. Women free to choose their own life partners would breach the insularity of caste, and community centred on faith, in any case.
Comfortable with who we are
Universal delivery of quality education and healthcare would presuppose functional governance at all levels – local, state and Centre, and absence of civil strife. Communal and caste politics would have to be eliminated to achieve the required quality of governance.
Creativity calls for cultural confidence. That, in turn, means recognizing that western modernity is just one form of modernity, and that India would build its own version of modernity, drawing on its history spanning a geography that sweeps across all of Asia, embracing West and Central Asia, as well as Southeast Asia, besides South Asia, and its cultural achievements, not just in classical languages such as Sanskrit and Tamil, but also prakrits such as Paisachi, in which the oldest collection of stories, the Brihat Katha, had been written.
Yet another dimension of creativity in a globally interdependent world is respect for cultures other than one’s own, and openness to ideas, people and capital from all over. Patriotism would cease to be twinned with the notion that one’s own nation is superior to all others.
The Indians of developed India would be numerous, but liberated individuals, who respect and cooperate with others, both within the country and abroad. Caste, religion, region and language would cease to divide. What is living in the tradition would be celebrated and carried forward, what is rotten would be discarded, transcended and replaced with new components of productive human coexistence.
“Into that haven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.”