India engaging its Diaspora

Jan 10, 2010 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
The Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi, India, was the hub of the 8th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas from January 7-9, 2010 (PBD 2010). Its theme was “Engaging the Diaspora: The Way Forward.”
The Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs of the Government of India has as its official charge the promotion, nurturing, and sustainability of an equally beneficial and symbiotic relationship between India and its Diaspora; and in this context, a key Ministry’s policy is to take a medium to long-term view of its Diaspora and establish partnerships that will best serve India’s interests as an emergent economic powerhouse; and at the same time satisfy its Diaspora’s expectations as a major constituency in India’s development.
At this PBD 2010, we saw the launching of an annual Lecture Series mobilizing the theme “India and its Diaspora: Everlasting Bonds of Togetherness.” Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University, New York, delivered the first lecture on January 8, 2010. Bhagwati spoke on the topic “India: The Role of the Diaspora.”
Professor Bhagwati argued that the Indian Government’s inflexible policy framework was responsible for the abysmal growth rate of about 3.5% from 1951 to the 1970s; and with an average population increase of 2% per year, it meant that during this period India had a per capita growth of about 1.5% per year. Today, India has about 7-8% growth rate per year, due to the liberal reforms that started after 1991.
This meant that India forfeited growth by about 4 percentage points every year; and that India’s income level was likely to reach 2.5 times higher than in 2010, if India had this 8% growth rate over the previous 45 years, instead of only after the 1991 policy reforms. The point Bhagwati pursues is that India could have become a global economic powerhouse much earlier.
And he believes that the sluggish growth diluted the attack on poverty which was the goal of all governmental planning since 1951. And argued that a sluggish economy cannot remove poverty through job creation; a failure to grow is a failure to impact poverty.
Later, however, the Indian Government’s policymaking elites experienced culture shock on two counts; first, when they sojourned overseas, they saw how imprudent their economic policies were and where India was not on the developed world’s radar.
Bhagwati described this situation, thus: “The worst kind of psychological situation is where you have a superiority complex and an inferior status!”
The second count was that the Diaspora argued ad infinitum that India’s pre-1991 rigid policies made little sense for India’s development. Bhagwati again: “I recall writing an op-ed. in the New York Times when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was coming to the United States and I had mentioned how he represented a force for change and how the licensing system had been softened to allow for product diversification.
The Editor asked me what that meant; and I explained how the Indian licensing system had gone so far as to insist on specifying whether one produced knives or forks! The Editor was incredulous: how could anyone think that good planning meant that one could not diversify production without permission?”
He thinks that such stories from the Diaspora provided the foundation “…for the abolition of the senseless licensing restrictions on capacity creation, product diversification, on import competition, that became part of the liberal reforms.”
India is now taking the Diaspora quite seriously with its move to develop a knowledge economy vis-à-vis knowledge networks.
And the Diaspora’s accomplishments, invariably, contribute to India’s attainment of world-class status in science, arts, and culture. Consider Dr. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Senior Scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, who shared the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2009; Zubin Mehta; Mira Nair; the new USAID Head Rajiv Shah, the Silicon Valley, Wall Street CEOs as Vikram Pandit, etc.
Furthermore, Bhagwati makes the case that the Diaspora acts as a mouthpiece for egalitarian values and voiced a commitment to social activism; bringing to light an energetic consciousness on the economic and social disparities in India. In reinforcing this case on the Diaspora’s contribution to making a dent on disparities, Bhagwati mentioned Dr. Ambedkar; Ambedkar, the father of the Indian Constitution, a student at Columbia University with John Dewey, said that it was at Columbia University he experienced social equality for the first time.
Finally, Bhagwati called on the Indian Government to now evaluate the work of the Singhvi Committee on the Indian Diaspora; to review the rights and obligations of the Indian Diaspora; and the need now to implement dual citizenship to reinforce the closeness between India and its Diaspora.
Prem Misir

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