essay on india since independence

Essay on Achievements of India After Independence

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100 Words Essay on Achievements of India After Independence

Introduction.

India has made significant strides since gaining independence in 1947. These achievements span various fields, including technology, agriculture, and space exploration.

India is now a global IT hub, with companies like Infosys and Wipro gaining international recognition. The nation has also developed its own supercomputer, Param.

Agriculture

India’s Green Revolution in the 1960s led to a major increase in crop production, making the country self-sufficient in food grains.

Space Exploration

India’s space program has made remarkable progress. ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission made India the first Asian country to reach Mars’ orbit.

India’s post-independence achievements are a testament to its resilience and determination.

250 Words Essay on Achievements of India After Independence

Post-independence, India has made significant strides on various fronts. From a largely agrarian economy, it has transformed into a global IT hub, showcasing a paradigm shift in economic growth and development.

Economic Growth

India’s economic progress is noteworthy. It’s one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 7.5% over the past decade. The liberalization of the economy in 1991 played a pivotal role in this economic surge, attracting foreign investments and boosting the service sector.

Technological Advancements

India’s technological advancements, particularly in the field of space and IT, are remarkable. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has achieved several milestones, including the successful Mars Orbiter Mission. The IT sector has put India on the global map, contributing significantly to the economy and job creation.

Healthcare and Education

India has made substantial progress in healthcare and education. The eradication of polio and smallpox, the decrease in maternal and child mortality rates, and the increase in literacy rates are commendable achievements. The Right to Education Act is a significant step towards universalizing elementary education.

Social Reforms

India has undertaken numerous social reforms, such as abolishing untouchability and dowry, and promoting gender equality. The implementation of reservations for marginalized sections is a step towards social justice.

Despite numerous challenges, India’s achievements post-independence are impressive. The journey from a struggling nation to a global player is a testament to India’s resilience and potential. However, the road ahead requires addressing persistent issues like poverty, corruption, and socio-economic disparities for sustainable growth.

500 Words Essay on Achievements of India After Independence

Post-independence, India has made significant strides in various spheres. The journey from a colonized nation to a global player is replete with numerous achievements. This essay aims to highlight some of the notable accomplishments of India since it gained independence in 1947.

Democratic Governance

India’s most significant achievement is the establishment and nurturing of a democratic system. Despite the multitude of ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, India has managed to maintain a democratic system of governance. The Indian Constitution, adopted in 1950, is the world’s longest written constitution, providing a balanced framework for political governance, social justice, and individual rights.

India has made impressive strides in the field of science and technology. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has launched a number of satellites, including the Mars Orbiter Mission, making India the first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit. Furthermore, India’s nuclear program has made significant progress, with the country being recognized as a nuclear weapons state.

India’s economy has seen substantial growth since independence. From being a primarily agrarian economy, it has diversified into a mixed economy with a strong services sector. The liberalization of the economy in the 1990s led to a surge in foreign investments and a significant increase in GDP. Today, India is the world’s fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP.

Social Progress

India has made considerable progress in social indicators such as literacy rate, life expectancy, and poverty reduction. The government’s various schemes and initiatives have helped improve the quality of life for millions of Indians. However, challenges such as gender inequality and caste-based discrimination persist, and efforts to address these issues continue.

Global Influence

India’s influence on the global stage has increased considerably. It is a founding member of several international organizations like the United Nations, Non-Aligned Movement, and South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. India’s soft power, through its culture, democracy, and diplomacy, has also contributed to its global stature.

India’s journey since independence has been marked by notable achievements in various fields. From establishing a robust democratic system to making significant strides in technology, economy, and social indicators, India has indeed come a long way. Yet, challenges persist, and the journey towards a more inclusive, equitable, and prosperous nation continues. The achievements of the past provide a strong foundation for the future, and the potential for further progress is immense. The spirit of resilience, innovation, and unity in diversity that characterizes India is a testament to its potential for further growth and development.

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Essay on india after independence.

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Essay on India after Independence!

India is the world’s largest democracy. It is the only country in Asia that has remained democratic ever since it attained its independence from British rule. The only exception to this is the brief period of the Emergency in 1975-76, when the democratic process was halted.

But it is through the democratic route of elections that the ruling caucus was dethroned and an alternative government installed. But that did not last long and the Congress party returned to power by winning back the confidence of the people.

Many in the world were apprehensive of the success of democracy in India. Their belief was further strengthened when several countries in the region, including Pakistan, failed as democracies and chose an authoritarian and militarist path in its stead. But this did not happen in India, and we have crossed more than half a century as a democracy. India has falsified all the prophecies of doom. It is the ballot, and not the bullet, that reigns supreme in India.

India after Independence :

After a long and difficult freedom struggle, India attained her independence from British rule in 1947. But this independence came with the partition of the country. A new state of Pakistan was created with portions of Western and Eastern India, taken away from the Indian map.

West Pakistan took away Western Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan; East Pakistan was created with the partition of Bengal into East and West, the latter remaining with India. Thus, there was a long corridor of India that separated East Pakistan from West Pakistan. That such a formation of the new state was non-pragmatic and unworkable was proven by later events.

In 1971, East Pakistan broke its ties with the Western wing and became the separate country of Bangladesh. The subcon­tinent, which was once a single country, was divided into three nations. Meanwhile, the state of Sikkim, which was a separate kingdom ruled by the Chogyal monarchy, joined the Indian Union in 1975.

Independence arrived in India not only with ‘multiplicity of heritages and legacies’, but also with the pangs of partition that caused dislocation of populations on both sides. Several Muslim families from regions other than those that went to Pakistan decided to opt for the nationality of the new religious state and to migrate there, and numerous Hindu families from both East and West Pakistan got uprooted and came to India as homeless refugees.

This movement of people was not peaceful. There was a lot of bloodshed, looting, rape of women, and merciless killing of innocent people. After the creation of Bangladesh, several Muslim families, which migrated from Bihar and other adjoining states to the Eastern wing of Pakistan, suffered from similar discrimination and marginalization. India has become a shelter for several Bangladeshis who have crossed the porous border illegally and settled in several cities of India.

Their arrival in Assam, for example, caused serious problems and prompted the natives to raise the demand for repatriation of the non-Assamese. Speakers of Bengali and followers of Islam cannot be easily classified foreigners in the pluricultural society of India. Vote-bank politics has also helped in blurring their identities.

India inherited the legacy of British rule – a system of admin­istration, an army, and a democratic form of government, based on the Government of India Act of 1935. Most important was the fact that our country retained the name India that is Bharat. We remain the mainland, while the other states are historically the breakaway groups.

The transition from a colonial country to an independent nation was not easy. Partition entailed division of resources, transfer of government personnel from one country to another, and reorientation of the bureaucracy.

As Paul R. Brass says:

“In some ways, it is possible to view Independence and the adoption in the early years after Independence of a new Constitution as another stage in the evolution of India toward representative government in a process that dates back to the Indian Councils Act of 1861 and continues through the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, the Montagu- Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, and the Government of India Act of 1935”.But the new Constitution, which was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949, and came into force on 26 January 1950, has some new features, providing a sharp break with the British colonial past.

It adopted the Westminster model of parliamentary government as against the mixed parliamentary-bureaucratic authoritarian system inherited from British India. The new Constitution included a chapter on Fundamental Rights, and also on Directive Principles, which were not there in the 1935 Act. The introduction of adult suffrage was also a new feature. The Indian polity became a mix of the unitary and federal forms of government.

The new leadership was equally interested in bringing about socio-economic reforms for which the model of a ‘socialistic pattern of society” was adopted. The contradiction thus intro­duced between civil liberties and governmental control has been a subject of political protests.

In addition to fundamental rights, the Constitution made special provisions for the oppressed castes and tribes by listing them in a Schedule and thus designating them as scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs). The British divided Indian society along religious lines by creating separate electorates, as part of their policy of ‘divide and rule’. But the new leadership of independent India discarded this colonial practice.

However, there was unanimity on giving special protection and privileges to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, who had allegedly suffered from discrimination at the hands of the upper caste Hindus, and who constitute the majority of India’s poor.

Designating the new state as secular was meant to convey the message that the country would not differentiate between people on the basis of religion, but allow each individual, as part of his/her fundamental right, to practice the religion of his/her choice.

This was to ensure that communalism would be contained. However, the history of the country since independence has been witness to several communal riots and the growth of political parties along religious lines.

Even the so-called secular parties contributed – perhaps unintentionally – to the prevailing communal hiatus. In their enthusiasm to protect the minority groups, the secular parties became in fact promoters of communal interests in the hope of creating vote-banks. It led to a reaction amongst the majority group of Hindus.

The role of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in promoting solidarity amongst the Hindus is seen in this political context. These non-political organizations lent their support to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh in the early days of independence, and later to its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The Indian polity in reality, and not as seen in constitutional terms, is characterized by a mix of tradition and modernity. The formal structure adopted in the Constitution has continually been modified by the social structure of Indian society, and by the personality profiles of India’s political leadership.

It is not the ideology, but the personality factors, that have led to the formation and dissolution of parties. Review of party manifestos issued during elections and the Common Minimum Programmes (CMPs) adopted by successive coalition governments suggests that there was little ideological distance between parties. Political distance is maintained despite ideological proximity.

The actually existing political structure has departed from the ideal as perceived by the founding fathers of our Constitution. Several amendments made to the Constitution tell that story, but only partially.

There is nothing unusual in this. All living societies continually change in response to the emerging new demands and by the behavior of its members in their different statuses and role relationships.

In the earlier phases, there were pressures from the rulers of princely states and owners of feudal estates seeking redefined roles as leaders in a functioning democracy. They entered politics by joining either the ruling Congress Party or the newly created Bharatiya Jan Sangh and the Swatantra Party (now defunct).

But as long as the nationalist leaders who took part in India’s freedom struggle were there to run the government, there was no threat to the Congress Party. The opposition remained in the minority, but was quite vocal in its criticism in Parliament and the state legisla­tures.

The vote politics that requires numbers led the ruling party and the dissident groups within it, as well as the parties in the opposition, to create vote-banks by invoking caste sentiments. Caste entered politics in the sense that there was, and is, politicization of caste. In this framework, even the minorities were seen as a ‘caste’ – the defining characteristic of endogamy applies to them as well.

If some political parties tried to woo the voters from a particular caste – Lodhis or Rajputs, or Brahmins others tried to woo the minority groups. One also notices a strange pattern of bringing together Muslims and the Hindu community of Yadavs, and other so-called Dalits.

While this grouping is based on sectarian considerations, it is called secular. But a coalition of castes from the Hindu and Jain and Sikh groups is decried as anti-secular. In retort, the latter call the former ‘pseudo-secular’.

In this process, words like secular and secularism have lost their originally intended meaning. All parties realize that no community or group can be neglected if one were to muster political support.

The secular parties cannot afford to neglect the Hindu vote, and the parties that are called anti-secular also have representatives of communities other than the Hindu. All parties, barring religion based organizations, claim to be secular.

Indian politics is characterized by an absence of ideology. Only lip service is paid to ideology. Parties are dominated by personalities. Leaders don’t leave and join parties on ideological grounds. Even the group of Marxists is divided into several parties. To quote Brass, “Indian politics has been characterized by an all-pervasive instrumentalism which washes away party manifestoes, rhetoric, and effective implementation of policies in an unending competition for power, status, and profit.”

The Congress party started as a movement that was joined by people from all sections; its sole aim was to oust the British and establish Swaraj. After the attainment of that aim, Mahatma Gandhi proposed dissolution of the Congress, but it was shot down.

The euphoria of independence was so overwhelming, and the leaders of the movement so respected by the common man, that the Congress party appeared to be the natural heir to the throne. Leaders defecting from the Congress party formed most other parties later.

Students of democracy know that its proper functioning requires an opposition. In the United States, for example, there are two parties – Democratic and Republican – between whom power alternates. But in India, continuance of the Congress rule with no threat of its replacement gave rise to, what came to be known as one-party dominant system.

People found this system similar to that of the Soviet state. This system fulfilled the requirement of the democratic process by creating internal dissen­sions within the Congress party itself.

These were referred to as the ‘ruling group’ and the ‘dissident group’, and power, particu­larly at the level of the states, alternated between these groups, but remained with the Congress. But India’s political situation is changing. This change is taking place on several frontiers. Let us briefly mention the major changes in Indian polity that have occurred since 1947.

Related Articles:

• Essay on Political Modernization in India
• Political Parties: Three Main Types of Political Parties in India

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75 Years of India's Independence: Post August 15 1947 Journey, Historic Events, Achievements & Milestones

75 years of india's independence: let’s look at india’s 75 years of journey post-independence from 15th august 1947 till now including major historic events, significant achievements, & milestones..

75 Years of India's Independence: Post 15 th August 1947, India’s journey has become a great example of an impressive growth story. The journey highlights India’s expansion ranging from agricultural production to nuclear and space technology, from affordable health care to world-class educational institutions, from Ayurveda to biotechnology, from giant steel plants to becoming an IT power, and having the third-largest start-up ecosystem in the world.

Know Your National Flag: Interesting and Amazing facts about India’s Tiranga 

75 Years of India’s Independence: Historic Events, Significant Achievements & Milestones

• Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,
• Mutual non-aggression,
• Mutual non-interference,
• Equality and mutual benefit, and
• Peaceful co-existence.”

On 25th June 1983, the Indian Cricket Team created history for the first time by winning the World Cup by defeating West Indies who had won the last two world cup. India’s Victory in 1983 is considered to be the landmark moment in Cricket History. 83 World cup was played in Lord's Stadium (England). For the first time, an Asian Nation-India reached the World Cup Final and this was the third consecutive World Cup final appearance for the West Indies.

Draupadi Murmu took oath as the 15th President of India on July 25, 2022. She contested against Yashwant Sinha, the joint opposition’s nominee for the top constitutional job. Draupadi Murmu is a tribal leader from Rairangpur in the Mayurbhanj district in Odisha

Check Draupadi Murmu Biography

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• Q1. In which year will India complete 75 years of independence? + 15th August 2022
• Q2. What is the name given to the celebration of India's 75 years of Independence by the Government? + 'Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav' is an initiative of the Government of India to celebrate and commemorate 75 years of independence of progressive India and the glorious history of its people, culture and achievements.
• Q3. When was Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav started? + The official journey of “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav” commences on 12th March 2021 which starts a 75-week countdown to our 75th anniversary of Independence and will end post a year on 15th August 2023.
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Development in India After Independence

Many think that India’s growth story since the 1947 was good. But several experts often opinion that the country’s development for the past six decades has been average. Despite the announcement of Five-Year Plans which focused on many sectors in order to speed up the pace of development, the result hasn’t been on expected lines. And, the country is taking its own time to climb up with the economic and social world.

Service Sector Growth

Telecom and software development had most of the growth in the nation’s services sector. A trend that started some twenty years back is now well in its prime. Several multinational companies continue to outsource their telecom and IT services to the country. In terms of employment, the services sector employs 24 % of the Indian workforce and this process of development started back in the 1980s. In the 1960s, the sector employed just 4.5% of the working population. According to the experts, the services sector accounted for 63% of Indian GDP (2008-09) and the numbers continues to grow.

Agriculture Sector Growth

Since Independence the growth in agriculture has been somewhat steady. The growth of the sector was about 1 percent per annum up to 1950’s. During the post-Independence era, the growth rate bumped about 2.6 percent per annum. Rapid expansion of farming lands and introduction of high-yielding varieties of crops were the major factors contributing to the growth in agricultural production. One of the significant effects of the growth was that it could well manage to end dependency on import of food grains. Despite the unpredictability of the monsoon, the sector has progressed both in terms of yield and structural changes. Other factors contributed to the growth include, good investment in research, land reforms, expansion of scope for lending facilities, and improvement in rural infrastructure. Besides, the country has also grown strong in the agri-biotech sector. A report from a leading financial institution had revealed that the agri-biotech sector has been growing at 30 percent since the last few years.

Infrastructure Development

Allocation of huge funds and availability of electricity had triggered large scale expansion of infrastructure. The Indian road network has become one of the largest in the world with the total road length increasing from 0.399 million km in 1951 to 4.24 million km in 2014 (July 2014). Moreover, the total length of the country’s national highways has increased from 24,000 km (1947-69) to 92,851 km (2014). Governmental efforts have led to the expansion of the network of State highways and major district roads, which in turn has directly contributed to industrial growth. After almost seven decades, India has bagged the third place in the list of largest producers of electricity in Asia. It has increased its electricity generation capacity from 1,362 MW in 1947 to 1,13,506 MW in 2004. When it comes to rural electrification, the Indian government has managed to bring lights to 5,93,732 (2013) villages as compared to 3061 in 1950.

Education sector

India has somewhat managed to bring its education system at par with the global standard in some cases. A number of initiatives have been implemented to eradicate illiteracy. The number of schools witnessed a dramatic increase after 1950’s. The government had declared elementary education, a fundamental right for children in the age group of 6-14 years by passing the 86th amendment to the Constitution in 2002. At independence, India’s literacy rate was a paltry 12.2 % which increased to 74.04% in 2011. The Government launched a big initiative under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan programme in 2001 to ensure education for the children from 6 to 14 years.

Health care sector

Increase in life-expectancy is considered one of the major achievements in health care in India. For example, life expectancy was around 37 years in 1951, it almost doubled to 65 years by 2011. Besides, Infant Mortality (IM) has also declined with death rate coming down to half of what it was during the 1940-50s. Moreover, similar developments were noticed in maternal mortality rate also. After a long-drawn struggle, India has finally been declared a polio-free country. Malnutrition in children under five years came down to 44% in 2005-06 from 67% in 1980. The number of tuberculosis cases also got reduced to 185 per lakh people in 2009. Moreover, the cases of HIV-infected people are also witnessing a declining trend. Government had also increased public health spending which is about 6- 6.5 % of the GDP.

Scientific achievements

India has reached new heights in rocket science and space technologies. Ever since, the launch of its first satellite Aryabhatta in 1975. India has emerged as a growing power that has successfully launched several foreign satellites. Its first mission to Mars was launched in November 2013 which successfully reached the planet’s orbit on 24 September 2014. Besides, space technology, India is also aggressively pursuing both nuclear and missile programmes. BrahMos Missile (with the help of Russia) inducted into the defence system is the world's fastest cruise missile. After more than six decades of independence, India has reached the level of being self-dependent in the field of space and missile technology.

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75 Years After Independence, a Changing ‘Idea of India’

India’s liberal founders recede from view as its current leaders craft a new, less tolerant nation..

The evening before he was sworn in as newly independent India’s first prime minister 75 years ago on Aug. 15, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the Indian nation. There was immense curiosity around the world. Nehru’s address, which quickly became known as his “tryst with destiny” speech, is remarkable for its eloquence and his awareness of the task that lay ahead for his nation. At the time, the subcontinent was still undergoing a bloody partition, during which millions of people would die and tens of millions of lives would be uprooted.

Three-quarters of a century later, under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, the country’s narrative is undergoing its broadest shift since independence. India’s secular, liberal founders such as Nehru are increasingly lost from view—and blamed for the tragedy of Partition. Modi’s government wants to turn India into a more assertive, nationalistic, Hindu nation—where minorities exist but are expected to be subservient and grateful. As government officials, including Modi, increasingly mix Hinduism with politics, and as minorities, particularly Muslims, find increased restrictions against displaying their faith, India is fast becoming the country Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, warned about when he demanded a separate nation for British India’s Muslims.

At the time of independence, there was understandable apprehension in foreign capitals about what India might become. Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had never liked the idea of granting his country’s biggest colony its freedom, had ridiculed India as “a geographical term … no more a united nation than the equator.” When the British left India, it was divided into two nations—two wings of Pakistan to the west and east for the subcontinent’s Muslims and a much larger Hindu-majority nation that said it would be a secular democracy. India included not only regions directly administered by the British but also more than 500 princely states, large and small, whose rulers believed themselves to be sovereign. Many thought Balkanization was inevitable. India would remain the poster child of poverty, many insisted, particularly after the Nehru government opted for post-independence economic policies that professed socialism, vastly expanded state control of the economy, and did not succeed in promoting economic welfare while announcing plans to do so. Indeed, for many decades, the poor remained poor.

Much more recently, Singaporean elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew, too, dismissed India, insisting it is not a real country . “Instead,” he said, “it is 32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.” Reality, however, looks different: The multiethnic former Yugoslavia has broken up, the Soviet empire has splintered, and Pakistan has split into two. India, however, remains a unitary state, notwithstanding challenges such as the future of Kashmir.

India did bring together those princely states, and over three-quarters of a century, it has not only stayed united but emerged stronger, became self-sufficient in food, and turned into a much wealthier economic powerhouse. Crucially, India has continued to hold democratic elections, even if election campaign finance is opaque. It has a judiciary that’s independent in theory but rarely pronounces verdicts the government doesn’t like. The Army has not intervened in politics, even though retired generals fulminate in the media. The Indian media is free to criticize—but directs much of its criticism at the opposition while mostly sparing the government.

India has had major internal strife and fought wars. Today, its relations with most neighbors are fragile. Income inequality has widened. But New Delhi no longer needs help from foreign governments when facing emergencies such as natural disasters and no longer seeks concessional aid from rich countries.

India’s singular achievement since independence has been to remain a democracy that clings to its liberal, secular ethos. True, there were significant setbacks—most notably, the Emergency of 1975-1977, when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended key civil rights provisions, jailed opposition leaders and workers, and censored the press. But she held elections in 1977. When she lost, she stepped down without disputing the outcome, returning to power legitimately by winning the next elections in early 1980, following the collapse of the government that replaced her.

The world was impressed and inspired by Indian democracy and its astounding ability to hold together a vast geographic, ethnic, and religious tapestry. John Kenneth Galbraith, who later U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to India, called India a “functioning anarchy” in 1958. Many Indians bristled at the word “anarchy,” but Galbraith’s point was valid: Even in what appeared to him as anarchy, India functioned. Anarchies aren’t meant to function. To many outsiders, there seemed to be an Indian genius at work.

Because of India’s democratic exterior—and the socialist, nonaligned policies with which many of in the international liberal community sympathized—the world gave India a free pass for many of its flaws. India’s pernicious caste system that defined an entire swath of society as “untouchable” persisted despite laws banning the practice, and India was never subjected to the kind of campaigns that rightly targeted South Africa’s apartheid regime. Frequent outbreaks of sectarian violence killed hundreds and at times thousands, but India did not face sanctions. Its robust democratic norms—politicians challenging one another, newspapers exposing scandals, and the occasional resignations of politicians guilty of corruption or misdemeanors—strengthened India’s image, suggesting that the country was adhering to its remarkably progressive constitution. And that document was progressive indeed: From the moment of independence in 1947, every Indian of a certain age, regardless of sex, religion, caste, language, or social status, had the right to vote.

In spite of major crises—several wars, droughts, incompetent leadership, corruption, and internal strife, to say nothing of autarkic economic policies and growing inequality—India continued on its path of remaining a liberal, secular, democratic country. It was an oasis surrounded by authoritarian regimes, where generals took over when they didn’t like the elected civilian government, including Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The comparison to its neighbors further enhanced India’s reputation. How deserved that reputation was is a different question. One problem was the government’s ability to curb freedoms whenever it wanted under esoteric so-called national security laws, which independent India actually tightened, making its citizens’ freedoms more vulnerable than during colonial times. But India’s earlier governments played by known rules. The constitution India had adopted with independence was imbued with a liberal, secular, democratic ethos. Part of the reason India got a free pass for many horrible things was because the international community trusted India to get it right. And unlike other countries in the region, India did not export its problems, not least because its very large Muslim population wasn’t radicalized by the ideologies that were sweeping Islam from the Middle East to Southeast Asia.

Instead of being a multi-everything society that celebrates its diversity, India has become a majoritarian entity, fearful of its minorities and keen to subjugate them.

I recall a private conversation with a U.S. diplomat in what was still called Bombay, now Mumbai, in the late 1980s. By then, Eastern Europe was restless and in the process of shaking off the Soviet umbrella. One by one, Moscow’s satellite states were freeing themselves. Vaclav Havel, a writer I deeply admire, would soon become president of Czechoslovakia—and later the Czech Republic. (Disclosure: I am a jury member for the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation’s Disturbing the Peace Award given annually to a courageous writer.) The diplomat at whose home I was having dinner told me, quite frankly: “India’s free ride is going to end soon. Until a few years ago, there were a handful of democracies, and most were in the West. You were the exception. Now, with [protest leader Lech] Walesa in Poland, Havel in Czechoslovakia, the world is changing—there are going to be many more democracies. They will write liberal constitutions. Their new leaders have been close to the West. And India’s flaws—the communal riots, caste riots—will be far more visible.”

He was right. In 1990, I went to South Africa for the first time. Interviewing politicians across the political spectrum, I learned early on that the constitution they planned to write after the end of apartheid was going to be far more liberal than India’s. South African intellectuals and politicians such as Nadine Gordimer, Zach de Beer, Allister Sparks, Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, and many others I talked to admired India and its democracy, not least because of Mohandas Gandhi’s years in South Africa. As South Africans often tell Indian visitors, “You gave us Mr. Gandhi, we gave you the Mahatma,” and anyone who has followed Gandhi’s life would agree that South Africa strongly shaped the Indian leader’s views and political talents.

The “idea of India,” as political scientist Sunil Khilnani described the ethos of the nation’s early years, was assumed to be what every Indian believed in: democracy, liberalism, secularism, and a concern for the poor.

However, since 1925, an organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (abbreviated RSS, meaning “National Voluntary Union”) has sought to write a different narrative. Many of its early leaders have written approvingly or been unabashed admirers of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, admiring in particular Nazi Germany’s nationalism and ideas of racial purity. During the struggle for independence, the RSS vehemently opposed Gandhi’s and Nehru’s cooperation with Muslims. But for all their admiration of nationalism, no major RSS leader made a notable contribution to India’s struggle for independence. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a prominent icon of Hindu Mahasabha, another right-wing organization, was charged as co-conspirator in Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, though he was acquitted. Gandhi’s actual assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a member of Hindu Mahasabha and had previously been a member of the RSS.

India has banned the RSS three times—in 1948, after Gandhi was killed; in 1975, during the Emergency; and then again in 1992, after right-wing zealots destroyed a mosque in Ayodhya because they claimed it was built on a site where they believed Rama, the Hindu god-king, was born millennia ago. One of the RSS’s allied organizations is today’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which, since its inception in 1980, has steadily expanded its influence. Since the Indian electoral system follows the British first-past-the-post system, it’s enough for the BJP to get a plurality of votes, most recently 37 percent in 2019. The opposition vote is splintered, and the grand old party of India’s independence movement, the Indian National Congress, is struggling. Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, the BJP—under Modi’s charismatic leadership—has been in power without a majority of votes since 2014.

The eight years of BJP rule have changed India’s governing ethos—and what the “idea of India” means today. Instead of being a multi-everything society that celebrates its diversity, it has become a majoritarian entity, fearful of its minorities and keen to subjugate them. Hindus have lynched Muslims on the suspicion of possessing meat. The central government has used national security laws to arrest human rights defenders—including Christians and Muslims—who had been working for the poor, in many cases with no charges filed and bail denied. In the populous state of Uttar Pradesh, the BJP-run state government has razed the homes of Muslims who have challenged the government. Indian jails are filled not only with criminals awaiting trials but also with dissident human rights activists, journalists, writers, and others whose voices an older India might have celebrated.

Continuing to describe India as “the world’s largest democracy” is increasingly bizarre; it is merely the most populous country to hold elections.

The Modi administration is unabashed in promoting the Hindu faith over others. Modi ritually prostates himself before Hindu idols and participates in religious ceremonies on state business—when unveiling national monuments, for example. Under his government, India has become a Hindu country whose minorities must accept second-class status without equal rights and protections as citizens. State schools in many BJP-ruled states no longer offer meat to children at lunch out of a mistaken belief that Hinduism prohibits eating meat. Other Hindu nationalists have been running campaigns on social media singling out films with Muslim actors for boycotts. Hindi, a language spoken as their first language by less than half of India’s 1.4 billion people, is increasingly imposed on regions where it is neither spoken nor popular as a second language. Southern Indian states, where the BJP is generally weaker than in the north, often have superior literacy rates, greater female empowerment, and lower birth rates. In cities in southern and western India, such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad, the BJP vote is boosted by large numbers of job-seeking, Hindi-speaking, hard-to-assimilate migrants from BJP-ruled states. “India is like Europe,” the actor Mohan Agashe once told me. “A common civilization, but different local cultures.”

It is that distinction that bothers the BJP, whose long-term aim is to mold India into a unitary state with a single identity and following a single faith. Former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai once told me he considered this vision as ridiculous because, in his view, Hinduism is a faith with many interpretations, many gods, and many paths toward spiritual salvation, and not the singular narrative the nationalists are making it out to be. But, for better or worse, that’s the direction the BJP is headed. Like other strongly ideological parties—communists come to mind—the BJP’s aim is not the next election but the next generation.

In Modi, India’s Hindu nationalists have found a leader who galvanizes the population, even though he was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat when one of the worst massacres in independent India took place in 2002, and his government was severely castigated by human rights groups at the time. Many have forgotten that Modi was banned from entering the United States until he became prime minister in 2014. That the BJP’s vision vastly diminishes India is hardly a concern for its supporters. If it succeeds, India will be reshaped into something very much different from what Nehru described in the 1940s: “[India] was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.”

Continuing to describe India as “the world’s largest democracy” is increasingly bizarre. Today, India is merely the most populous country to hold elections. It has the form of democracy but has lost the content. Since Modi came to power, India’s ranking in the United Nations Development Program’s human development indicators has stagnated. In its annual review of political freedoms around the world, Freedom House no longer categorizes India as “free.” India is the only nominal democracy among the 10 worst jailers of writers and journalists, according to PEN America; according to Reporters Without Borders, India has become one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to work.

Modi operates like a master performer with a keen eye for exceptional photo-ops. Never mind that many of his policies are whimsical—like the sudden demonetization of the currency in 2016—or woefully inadequate, such as India’s response to the pandemic or to the country’s widening inequality. There are 200 million Indian Muslims—and currently not a single one in Modi’s cabinet.

Of course, India remains a hugely important country. During one of my conversations with Lee when I was a reporter in Singapore, he told me his biggest worry was turmoil in China. But have we thought about what might happen if instead of China, it’s India that disintegrates? If poorly educated, Hindi-speaking northern India increasingly imposes its retrograde values on a more educated, prosperous south, there will be trouble ahead. Going back to a social order before British rule (if it ever existed at all)—requiring moral codes that restrict women, enforcing religious practices, legislating bizarre vegetarian dietary practices, and requiring everyone to speak a single language, believe in one faith, and support one ideology—then Indian unity, preserved for the past 75 years, could begin to unravel. As any glance at a history book makes clear, that is unlikely to be a pleasant process.

An outwardly democratic India may seem like a good counternarrative to an autocratic China. But India has been an unreliable ally of the West and is looking increasingly odious. Look no further than India’s votes at the United Nations abstaining from condemning Russia’s unlawful and brutal invasion of Ukraine.

To regain the moral ascendancy India had at independence, the country needs a makeover. India needs to return to its origins—the “idea of India” and the spirit that its sole Nobel laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, celebrated in his poetry . Even democratically constituted nations can be gripped by madness, as Europe’s bloody 20th century shows. India is a great adventure and fantastic experiment, but its current leadership is turning it into a mere shadow of what Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore imagined. That failure of imagination is the ultimate tragedy as India now turns 75.

Correction, Aug. 15, 2022: A previous version of this article misstated the jurisdictions Narendra Modi was barred from entering before becoming prime minister.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York. He reported from Southeast Asia in the 1990s, including on the fall of Suharto in Jakarta. He is the author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy , and he is working on a book about the Gujaratis.

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India Since Independence: Essays on Transformation and Permanence

Azim premji university, april 2024.

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The Azim Premji University has been encouraging the expression of diverse and disparate views on a variety of subjects in the past too. Over the last two decades of its existence, the Azim Premji Foundation under which the University operates has been consistently focusing on its vision of contributing towards a more just, equitable, humane, and sustainable society through extensive on-the-groundwork across the country as well as through its partners. In this context we may venture to say that the present collection of essays is an expression of that focus, while encouraging views and counterviews on various perspectives on the national endeavour, with the goal of working towards the Foundation’s vision.

Amidst the Corona crisis of 2020 to 2022 , another compendium of essays entitled Understanding Post-Covid- 19 Challenges in India had been published in March 2022 . The essays in that collection too had looked at certain key domains such as Health, School Education, Impact of Covid on vulnerable groups, urban development, the systems of recording deaths etc. While that collection tried to document how the nation navigated through a short period of the toughest challenge, this collection tries to offer a snapshot of more than 75  years of history since Independence.

It is hoped that this collection of essays will encourage its readers to think about the myriad activities that India as a nation has undertaken in its unending search for building a better society, the complexities that it has to encounter and the challenges that it has had to overcome, in trying to achieve that objective. The essays here are collected over a year’s time following the 75 th year of Independence, and as such some of the essays might not have captured the latest developments in the themes that they focus on. The readers’ responses are welcome.

India’s achievements after 75 years of Independence

India's achievements after 75 years of Independence: Article talks about the progress India has made in the last 75 years in the field of economic growth, scientific innovations and in other fields.

Table of Contents

India’s achievements after 75 Years of India’s Independence:  India’s achivement after August 15th, 1947, has become a prime illustration of a remarkable growth tale. The journey demonstrates India’s development in areas such as agricultural production, nuclear and space technology, world-class educational institutions, Ayurveda, biotechnology, giant steel plants, and becoming a leader in information technology, as well as having the third-largest start-up ecosystem in the world.

India’s achievements after 75 years of Independence: Historic Events, Significant Achievements & Milestones

As India marks its 75th year of independence, let’s examine the historical occurrences, notable accomplishments, and noteworthy milestones that occurred during this time:

15 th  August 1947: India’s Independence Day

India became independent from British rule on August 15, 1947. On August 14, 1947, just before the clock struck twelve, our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, gave the renowned “Tryst with Destiny” speech to the Indian Constituent Assembly in the Parliament. On August 15 in Delhi’s Red Fort, Pandit Nehru raised the Indian National Flag over the Lahori Gate.

26 th  January 1950: India became a Republic Country

The Indian Constituent Assembly ratified the Constitution on November 26, 1949. Later, on January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution went into effect. The Dominion of India became the Republic of India when the Constitution of India took the place of the Government of India Act 1935 as the primary law governing the nation. The Indian Constitution is the country’s highest law. Every year, India celebrates its Republic Day on January 26.

1951: India’s First Five-year Plan was launched

In 1951, Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister, gave the First Five-Year Plan to the Indian Parliament. The Harrod-Domar model, with a few modifications, served as the foundation for the First Five-Year Plan, which concentrated primarily on the growth of the primary sector. Agricultural growth served as the first five-year plan’s guiding principle. The major goal was to find solutions to the various issues that the nation’s division had created. The objective of this strategy was to rebuild the nation once it gained independence.

1952: India witnessed the first Lok Sabha Election

India held general elections from October 25, 1951, to February 21, 1952. These were the first Lok Sabha elections held following the country’s independence in August 1947. On May 13, 1952, this Lok Sabha’s first session officially opened. There were 489 seats in the Lok Sabha overall, and 17.3 crore people were eligible to vote. 364 seats were won by the Indian National Congress (INC). The first Lok Sabha was dissolved on April 4, 1957, after serving its entire five-year term. Jawaharlal Nehru became India’s first prime minister to be chosen democratically.

1953: Air India was nationalized

Nine airlines—Air India, Air Services of India, Airways (India), Bharat Airways, Deccan Airways, Himalayan Aviation, Indian National Airways, Kalinga Airlines, and Air India International—were nationalised by Nehru under the Air Corporations Act of 1953 and placed under the control of two PSEs, Indian Airlines and Air India International.

1954: India and China signed the Panchsheel

In the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India signed on April 29, 1954, the two governments first formally stated the Panchsheel, or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, stating in its preamble that they “have resolved to enter into the present Agreement based on the following principles: –

• Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,
• Mutual non-aggression,
• Mutual non-interference,
• Equality and mutual benefit, and
• Peaceful co-existence.”

1955: State Bank of India (SBI) was founded

The State Bank of India was established on July 1st, 1955. In 1955, the Indian government nationalised the Imperial Bank of India, changing the bank’s name to State Bank of India and giving the Reserve Bank of India a 60% ownership interest.

1957: The decimalization of the rupee

On April 1, 1957, ten years after gaining independence from the British, Indian coins became decimal. In September 1955, the Indian Coinage Act was revised to include the decimal system.  A circular from the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India stated, “Government accounting with effect from April 1, 1957 is to be maintained in terms of rupees and naye paise instead of rupees, annas, and pies,” in April 1956, after the modified Act became law. Therefore, all challans supporting funds submitted for payment of government dues must be represented in the new coinage. All withdrawal bills must be specified in terms of rupees and naye paise as well.

1960: Green Revolution Began

Norman Borlaug started the Green Revolution movement in the 1960s. He is referred to as the “Father of the Green Revolution” globally. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 as a result of his work creating high-yielding wheat varieties (HYVs).

1961: Liberation of Goa

The Republic of India’s process of annexing Estado da India, the former Portuguese Indian territory of Goa, Daman, and Diu, known as the Annexation of Goa, began with an armed intervention by the Indian Armed Forces in December 1961. This event is known as the “Liberation of Goa” in India.

1962: India-China War

In October and November of 1962, China and India fought a war known as the Sino-Indian War. The conflict was mostly sparked by a contested Himalayan border. On November 20, 1962, China announced a cease-fire and its withdrawal to its alleged “Line of Actual Control,” which marked the end of the war”.

1963: India’s first-ever rocket launch

The launch of the first sounding rocket from Thumba near Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala on 21 November 1963, marked the beginning of the Indian Space Programme. Sounding rockets made it possible to probe the atmosphere in situ using rocket-borne instrumentation. This was the first milestone in modern India’s space odyssey. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai and his then accomplice Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam were the brainchild of this achievement.

1965: Indo-Pakistani War

The Second Kashmir War, also known as the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, was the result of clashes between Pakistan and India between April 1965 and September 1965. Operation Gibraltar, a Pakistani operation intended to infiltrate troops into Jammu and Kashmir and spark an uprising against Indian sovereignty, was the direct cause of the conflict and brought it to a head. Indian troops crossed the line of the cease-fire on 15 August. The United Nations Security Council unanimously approved a resolution on September 20 calling for a 48-hour unconditional ceasefire between the two countries. Pakistan accepted the demand on September 23 while India did so right away.

1966: Indira Gandi Became First Female PM of India

Following Shastri’s unexpected passing in January 1966, Indira Gandhi was appointed Congress Party leader and subsequently became prime minister as part of a deal between the party’s right and left wings. However, the right wing of the party, led by the former minister of finance Morarji Desai, consistently opposed her leadership.

1969: Formation of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)

In order to advance planetary exploration and space science research while advancing national development, ISRO was established in 1969. The Indian space program’s founding fathers, scientist Vikram Sarabhai and India’s first prime minister Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, who founded INCOSPAR (Indian National Committee for Space Research) in 1962, are credited with creating ISRO, which succeeded INCOSPAR.

1970: White Revolution Began

Operation Flood, the largest dairy development programme ever initiated on January 13th, 1970, was an important undertaking for India’s National Dairy Development Board.

1971: India-Pakistan War

The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 was a military conflict between India and Pakistan that took place in East Pakistan from 3 December 1971 till Dacca (Dhaka) fell on 16 December 1971 as part of the Bangladesh Liberation War.

1975: The Emergency was imposed

India’s “Emergency” was a 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 during which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a national state of emergency. The Emergency was formally declared by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed under Article 352 of the Constitution as a result of the ongoing “internal disturbance” and lasted from June 25, 1975, to March 21, 1977, when it was lifted. The majority of Indira Gandhi’s political rivals were put behind bars, elections were annulled, civil freedoms were suspended, and the press was restricted. During that time, many human rights were broken. One of the most contentious eras in independent India’s history is the Emergency.

1982: Colour television began its journey in India

When it began airing national programming in 1982, DD officially became a national broadcaster. Colour TVs were released in Indian markets the same year. The first colour television broadcast was the Independence Day parade on August 15, 1982, which was followed by the Asian Games in Delhi.

1983: India won the cricket World Cup for the first time

The Indian Cricket Team made history on June 25, 1983, when it defeated the two-time defending champion West Indies to win the World Cup. The turning point in cricket history is widely regarded as being India’s victory in 1983. The 1983 World Cup was held in England’s Lord’s Stadium. India reached the World Cup Final for the first time, and the West Indies were competing in their third straight World Cup final.

1987: Goa became one of the States of India

Goa became a state on May 30, 1987, and was divided into North Goa and South Goa as a result (Daman and Diu got their own union territory). The first Chief Minister of Goa, Daman, and Diu is Dayanand Bandodkar. On May 30, 1987, Goa became the 25th state of India.

1988: The SEBI was established

The Government established the Securities and Exchange Board of India on April 12, 1988, as a non-statutory body to handle all issues pertaining to the growth and regulation of the securities market, investor protection, and to provide guidance to the Government on all of these issues.

1989: Agni Missile was successfully launched

Liberalisation, Privatisation, and Globalisation were the three pillars of the new economic strategy of 1991. A severe balance of payments crisis that occurred in the same year served as the immediate catalyst for India’s economic reforms in 1991. India’s balance of payments issue first showed signals in late 1990 when its foreign exchange reserves started to decline.

1995: Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Limited was founded

On May 3, 1995, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) was established in partnership by the governments of Delhi and India under the leadership of Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda[19].

1998: India conducted Pokhran-II tests

Twenty-four years after Pokhran-I, on May 11 and 13, 1998, the Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) carried out five more nuclear tests at the Pokhran range, called “Pokhran-II.” Dr. R. Chidambaram, the Director of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), and Dr. Abdul Kalam, the Chief Scientific Advisor and Director of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), served as the principal coordinators for this test planning.

1999: Kargil War

The Kargil War, commonly referred to as the Kargil conflict, was an armed battle that took place between India and Pakistan in the Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir as well as other locations along the Line of Control from May to July 1999. By proclaiming victory over Pakistan in the Kargil war on July 26, 1999, India celebrated the successful conclusion of “Operation Vijay” and put an end to the three-month conflict along the Line of Control. Since then, the day has been recognised as “Kargil Vijay Diwas.”.

2000: Jharkhand became India’s 26th state

On November 15, 2000, Jharkhand was separated from Bihar’s 18 districts to form its own state. Later, six additional districts were created by rearranging the existing ones.

2007: First Woman President of India

Pratibha Patil, an Indian politician and attorney, presided over India as its first female president from 2007 until 2012.

2008: Chandrayaan-1 launched

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched Chandrayaan-1 on October 22, 2008, the nation’s first lunar probe under the Chandrayaan programme. India’s space programme received a big boost from the expedition as our nation created its own technologies to study the Moon.

2010: Education became a fundamental right of children

On August 4, 2009, the Indian Parliament passed the Right to Education Act (RTE), also known as the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act. In accordance with Article 21A of the Indian Constitution, it outlines the specifics of the significance of free and mandatory education for children in India between the ages of 6 and 14. India became one of the nations in the world to declare education to be a fundamental right when the Act went into effect on April 1, 2010.

2015: NITI Aayog was formed

The NITI Aayog, the country’s top public policy think tank and the nodal organisation charged with fostering cooperative federalism and accelerating economic development by involving state governments in the formulation of economic policy, was established on January 1, 2015.

2017: GST was launched by the Indian government

The GST, or Goods and Services Tax, was introduced by the Indian government and President of India at midnight on July 1, 2017. It was commemorated by a historic midnight session of both Houses of Parliament (June 30-July 1), which met in the Central Hall and was attended by prominent figures from the business and entertainment industries.

2020: COVID-19 Pandemic and India’s lockdown

India experienced the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, and as a result of the ensuing lockdown, residents were confined to their houses. The story of lockdown started on the evening of March 24, 2020, when the Indian government imposed a 21-day statewide lockdown, restricting the movement of the whole populace in an effort to stop the pandemic from spreading. It came following a 14-hour voluntary public curfew on March 22 and the implementation of a number of rules in the areas of the nation affected by COVID-19.

2022: India gets its first tribal President

On July 25, 2022, Draupadi Murmu took the oath of office as India’s fifteenth president. She ran against Yashwant Sinha, the candidate for the top constitutional position put up by the unified opposition. Tribal leader Draupadi Murmu hails from Rairangpur in the Odisha district of Mayurbhanj.

Important Facts on India’s Achievement after Independence

Below is a brief list of some of India’s notable post-independence accomplishments:

• The Indian Railways were founded in the year 1951.
• With over 7000 stations, India’s rail system is the largest and busiest in the world.
• India had its first general election in 1951.
• The Apsara nuclear reactor, which was created in 1956, was Asia’s first nuclear reactor.
• On the moon, Chandrayaan 1 was established in 2008.
• Sir M Visvesvaraya, the pioneer of Indian economic planning, contributed to the development of the most effective form of the Indian economy.

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India's achievements after 75 years of Independence FAQs

What did india achieved after 75 years of independence.

In 1974, India conducted “Smiling Buddha”, its first nuclear test, making its place on the list of five nuclear-powered nations. This is one of the biggest achievements of India since 1947. Today, India has the 2nd largest military force and largest voluntary army in the world.

What we achieved in 75 years?

In the last seven-and-a-half decades, India achieved remarkable development in agriculture, heavy industry, irrigation, energy production, nuclear power capability, space technology, biotechnology, telecommunication, oceanography and science education and research.

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The history of economic development in india since independence, the background.

The task that the democratically elected leaders of newly independent India embarked on in the early 1950s was not for the faint of heart. It was to lift living standards of a people accounting for one-seventh of the world’s population who earned an average income that was one-fifteenth of the average American income of the time. 1 Three-fourths of the Indian people were engaged in agriculture working with primitive tools and techniques, as either destitute landless laborers, highly insecure tenants-at-will, or small-plot holders eking out subsistence living from their meager plots. The literacy rate stood at 14 percent, and the average life expectancy was thirty-two years.

How successful has the country been in fulfilling the task over sixty years later? The charts in this article, using World Bank data, show how some of the country’s development indicators have changed in the last half-century. The country has experienced an increase in per capita income—especially since the 1980s—as well as reductions in poverty and infant mortality rates. These improvements are not insignificant and mark a sharp break from the near stagnation that the country experienced during British rule. But a comparison with the later superior performance of China and South Korea, countries with a comparable level of development in the 1950s, reveals that India’s performance remains below its potential. How did that come about? This essay provides an account of India’s strategy of economic development, its achievements, shortfalls, and future challenges.

The Initial Strategy

The government in the 1950s adopted a very particular strategy of economic development: rapid industrialization by implementing centrally prepared five-year plans that involved raising a massive amount of resources and investing them in the creation of large industrial state-owned enterprises (SOEs). 2 The industries chosen were those producing basic and heavy industrial goods such as steel, chemicals, machines and tools, locomotives, and power. Industrialization was pursued because leaders believed, based in part on the beliefs of some economists, that the industrial sector offers the greatest scope of growth in production. It was not that the Indian agricultural sector offered no scope for growth. Crop yields in India were quite low compared to other countries, and the recent famine in 1943 had underscored the need to increase food production. Still, Indian leaders did not want to make agriculture the mainstay of their strategy. The preeminence of agriculture they believed was characteristic of a backward economy, and growth in agriculture eventually runs up against the problem of insufficient demand. There is only so much, after all, that people are willing to eat.

Investments in the creation of public enterprises were chosen because one goal of the government was to establish a “socialistic pattern of society,” i.e., using democratic methods to bring large swathes of the country’s productive resources under public ownership. Industries producing basic and heavy goods were chosen for investment over consumer goods because the government wanted to reduce the country’s reliance on imports of basic and heavy industrial goods in line with their belief in the goodness of national self-reliance. “To import from abroad is to be slaves of foreign countries,” the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once declared. 3 The production of consumer goods such as clothing, furniture, personal care products, and similar goods was left to small privately run cottage industry firms that had the added advantage of being labor-intensive and therefore a potential generator of mass employment.

Another strategy could have been to rely on private enterprise for industrial development while the government focused its resources on investments in infrastructure, public health, and education—sectors that are not served well by the private sector. Though leaders were cognizant of the dynamism of the private sector and the existence of India’s vibrant entrepreneurial class, they rejected the strategy that involved a prominent role for the private sector out of a commitment to establishing the socialistic pattern of society that they believed was morally superior. As things eventually turned out, the country came around in the 1990s to adopting this previously rejected strategy.

In order to assure the success of the government’s chosen strategy in the 1950s, complementary measures were put in place. Most industries were given significant trade protection so that their growth was not hampered by competition from more efficient foreign producers. An industrial licensing system was set up to ensure that private enterprises would not expand beyond the bounds that national planners had set for them. The system required all private firms beyond a certain small size to obtain a license whenever they wanted to expand capacity, produce new products, change their input mix, import inputs, or relocate plants. The system put the activities of the private sector under significant control of the government. Pundits and students of political economy who were not socialists derisively nicknamed this stifling system “the license Raj,” comparing this economic format of oppression to the political control of the imperialist British Raj.

Their strategy of increasing agricultural production was based on plans to reform agrarian institutions. According to the thinking of the planners, the poor performance of Indian agriculture was due to the fact that tillers did not own the land they worked, so they had little incentive to make land improvements that would increase long-term productivity. The government planned to implement legislation to redistribute land from large landlords to actual tillers and improve the terms under which tenant cultivators leased land from the landowners. The government also planned to organize small farmers into cooperative societies so that their resources could be pooled in order to buy modern tools and implements and the strength of their numbers could be used to obtain higher crop prices. In addition to increasing agricultural production, such reforms were also expected to alleviate the poverty of the huge class of peasants.

The Initial Results

Industrialization was a moderate success. The newly created public enterprises, albeit after major cost overruns and several delays, turned out steel, chemicals, and other products that were generally associated with developed countries. A British colonial official in the early twentieth century once scoffed that he would be willing to eat all the steel than the Indians would produce. 4 If alive in 1960, he would have eaten 6,300 tons of steel. 5

Still, by the late 1950s several problems resulting from the planners’ chosen strategy of economic development were coming to the fore, and such problems intensified in the 1960s and the 1970s. Many SOEs were run on political rather than economic considerations, so they produced losses that drained government resources rather than—as the planners had hoped—augmenting them. The SOEs could also not be counted on to generate mass employment due to their capital and skill rather than labor-intensive character. Several enterprises were overstaffed and faced insufficient demand for what they produced, forcing them to render idle some of their capacity. The case of the Haldia fertilizer plant is an extreme but illustrative example. The plant was set up in the 1970s and employed 1,500 people. The workers and managers showed up regularly, kept the machine facilities clean and in working condition, and often received annual bonuses and overtime. They lived in a nearby spanking-new township built specially for them, one that had excellent roads, schools, and homes. There was only one thing missing. Because of numerous problems, the plant never produced even an ounce of fertilizer. Yet the government kept Haldia’s lights on for twenty-one years. 6

One government method for financing expenditures was the creation of new money, which resulted in significant inflation.

The plans for the reform of agrarian institutions did not pan out. The push for land redistribution ran into political opposition and clashed with the requirements of due process, so as little as 5 percent of the land was actually redistributed. The creation of agricultural cooperatives also did not materialize due to difficulties of organization and lack of enthusiasm on the ground. Agricultural production barely kept pace with population growth, and the country’s food security remained precarious. The drawback of prioritizing industry over agriculture for public investments became glaringly apparent when the country experienced a food crisis in the mid-1960s, necessitating urgent large-scale imports of subsidized grain from the United States. The crisis undermined the government’s claim that its strategy of prioritizing industry over agriculture for public investment would increase national self-reliance.

The drawback of prioritizing industry over agriculture for public investments became glaringly apparent when the country experienced a food crisis in the mid-1960s, necessitating urgent large-scale imports of subsidized grain from the United States.

Under the fixed exchange rate regime that existed in the country, high inflation in the 1960s reduced the country’s exports while increasing its imports, resulting in a shortage of foreign exchange. The shortage was exacerbated by the food imports made necessary by a drought and a war with Pakistan. Foreign exchange became one of the items the government had to resort to rationing. The reverberations were felt throughout the economy. Several new factories lay idle for want of foreign exchange to import some necessary inputs, while others hoarded foreign exchange to starve their competitors or earn a premium in the black market. Holding foreign exchange without a license became an offense punishable by jail time. Ultimately, the rupee had to be devalued, which generated further disruptions in the economic lives of most people.

Meanwhile, the industrial licensing system, designed to ensure that the private sector operated according to the five-year plans, became a source of much inefficiency and corruption. The micromanagement of the private sector called for much more knowledge and technical ability than government bureaucrats possessed. The system descended into a mechanism for rewarding political supporters of the rulers, which undermined the confidence of the people in the integrity of their governmental institutions.

Perhaps the most unfortunate legacy of prioritizing industry at the expense of other alternatives for investment was that scarce public resources were diverted away from health and education. The meager resources expended on these in India stand in marked contrast to the plentiful attention paid to them in China and other Asian countries. Seventy years after independence, India has still to catch up on these fronts; one-half of its children are malnourished, one-half of women are illiterate, and twothirds of its people lack basic sanitation. As a result, a large fraction of Indians today are unable to directly take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the country’s recent tilt toward a market economy and globalization.

The Change in Strategies

In response to the food crisis of the mid-1960s, the government changed its agricultural strategy. Rather than holding out for the reform of agrarian institutions, it began to guarantee higher crop prices to farmers and utilize subsidies to promote use of modern inputs such as chemical fertilizers and high-yielding varieties of grain developed in other parts of the world. The resulting surge of production—the so-called “green revolution” of the late 1960s—made the country self-sufficient in food grains. The strategy was controversial because it increased economic disparities among the farmers. For the greatest chance of success, the government had to focus its strategy on the irrigated sections—the very parts of the country that were already doing relatively well. The uptake of subsidized inputs was also the highest among large landowners, owing to their greater education, creditworthiness, and the ability to bear the risk posed by adopting new methods. The strategy did not do much to alleviate the economic condition of the agrarian poor, other than providing the indirect benefit of living in a country with better overall food security that has not since experienced famine. Micronutrient deficiencies (not caloric) such as anemia are today a bigger problem among the poor, and the country’s health indicators lag behind those of other countries with comparable levels of income.

The strategy toward industry, however, turned more interventionist after 1965. Elaboration of all the reasons for this need not detain us here; there is a strong case that the interventionist turn was a cynical ploy by new Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for consolidating her power in response to certain political developments. The new policy stance displayed a suspicion of large firms and a preference for the small. The licensing system imposed additional restrictions on the activities of large firms, curtailing their growth. Under a policy that was one of a kind, consumer goods such as apparel, footwear, furniture, sporting goods, office supplies, leather goods, and kitchen appliances were reserved by law for production by small firms. Foreign firms were asked to dilute their ownership stake in their Indian subsidiaries and in response, multinationals such as IBM and Coca-Cola closed their operations and left the country.

To the extent that the success of the large firms was due to their superior technical or organizational capacity, the curtailment of their growth meant that such capacity remained underutilized. Delays and arbitrariness in the issuing of industrial licenses resulted in supply bottlenecks and shortages of many consumer goods. For example, in the 1970s, there was an eight-year waiting list for people wanting to buy a scooter, the preferred vehicle for middle-class Indians.

Thirty-five years after independence, India’s leadership had yet to achieve, to any significant degree, its pledge of lifting living standards.

The reservation of consumer goods for small enterprises meant that the benefits of economies of scale were forgone, resulting in the production of poor-quality and high-priced goods that foreigners shunned and domestic consumers had no choice but to accept. Meanwhile, countries such as South Korea and Taiwan were growing rich by exporting this very category of goods. It was during this time that Indians developed a craze for foreign products, the imports of which were restricted, and the term “imported” became synonymous with “high-quality.” The result of such policies was economic stagnation. The country’s per capita income grew by an average of less than 1 percent a year between 1966 and 1980, a rate that was too low to make a dent in the country’s massive poverty. Thirty-five years after independence, India’s leadership had yet to achieve, to any significant degree, its pledge of lifting living standards.

Also, years of rhetoric about creating rapid development had heightened people’s expectations for their quality of living. Economic stagnation, combined with high inflation caused by the government’s printing of massive amounts of money, bred political unrest and popular agitation, to which Indira Gandhi responded by declaring a national emergency in 1975. Taking advantage of the suspension of democratic procedures and requirements of due process brought on by the emergency, the Prime Minister attempted strict interventions that included rapid land redistribution and forced sterilization as a part of population control. The programs were poorly administered, contributed to incidents of human rights violations, failed to improve the economic situation, and caused a number of unintended consequences. For example, the government’s attempts to liquidate debts of poor farmers led to the virtual drying up of informal sources of credit and the banks were not up to the task of picking up the slack. The chaos generated by the haphazard and poorly administered interventions generated a popular backlash and tainted in many minds the whole interventionist approach to economic development.

By the 1980s, a substantial number of influential people had come around to the conclusion that the government did not have the political and administrative capacity to successfully run a controlled economy that delivered on economic growth. Gandhi, chastened by the political defeats that followed her earlier attempts to impose strict controls, acquiesced to relaxing some of them. Her Cambridge-educated son, Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded her as Prime Minister, enacted further liberalization. Certain industries and business activities were exempted from licensing requirements. Such measures helped to cause robust industrial growth in the late 1980s.

The About Turn

When a foreign exchange shortage threatened a crisis again in 1991, the government made a clear break with past policies. By then, the intellectual consensus in favor of state-led, import-substituting development strategies had greatly weakened. The breakup of the Soviet Union had substantially discredited central planning, and the export-led success of East Asian countries had thrown into light the drawbacks of an inward-looking model of development. Also, cultural changes in India, consisting of a deemphasis of asceticism and a greater acceptance of the pursuit of material gain, had made extensive economic controls untenable. 7 At the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provided rescue during the foreign exchange crisis, but also of its own accord, the government announced major economic reforms. It dismantled the license Raj almost overnight, slashed tax rates and import duties, removed controls on prices and entry of new firms, put up several SOEs for sale, and rolled out the welcome mat for foreign investors. Rather than socialism, the guiding principles of policy now were liberalization, privatization, and globalization.

The country’s share in world trade increased from 0.4 percent on the eve of the reforms to 1.5 percent in 2006, and foreign exchange shortages, once a chronic headache for policymakers, have now been replaced by reserves upward of US $350 billion . . .

The economy responded with a surge in growth, which averaged 6.3 percent annually in the 1990s and the early 2000s, a rate double that of earlier time frames. Shortages disappeared. On the eve of the reforms, the public telecom monopoly had installed five million landlines in the entire country and there was a seven-year waiting list to get a new line. In 2004, private cellular companies were signing up new customers at the rate of five million per month. The number of people who lived below the poverty line decreased between 1993 and 2009 from 50 percent of total population to 34 percent. The exact estimates vary depending on the poverty line used, but even alternative estimates indicate a post-1991 decline of poverty that is more rapid than at any other time since independence. The country’s share in world trade increased from 0.4 percent on the eve of the reforms to 1.5 percent in 2006, and foreign exchange shortages, once a chronic headache for policymakers, have now been replaced by reserves upward of US $350 billion—prompting debates about what to do with the “excess reserves.” 8

Several significant economic challenges remain for India. The economy has polarized into a highly productive, modern, and globally integrated formal sector, employing about 10 percent of the labor force, and a low-productivity sector consisting of agriculture and urban informal activities, engaging 90 percent of the labor force. The sectors that have experienced the most growth are services and capital-intensive manufacturing. It is illustrative that IT and pharmaceuticals are the two sectors of the economy with international renown. Such industries tend to be urban and employ mainly skilled workers. Yet to come India’s way are millions of lowskill manufacturing jobs that have allowed the poor in East Asian countries to climb into the middle class. Companies are loath to set up labor-intensive manufacturing because Indian labor laws are some of the most restrictive in the world. For example, a manufacturing unit hiring more than 100 workers cannot lay off any of them without seeking government permission, which is rarely granted. 9 Liberalization of labor laws tends to run into fierce political opposition. The second reason for the dearth of manufacturing jobs is that the country’s infrastructure is relatively deficient, and so companies increasingly practicing just-in-time inventory management do not find it cost-effective to include India in their global supply chains. 10

The provision of public services in India is appallingly poor. Government schools and clinics are underfunded and inadequately supervised, and their workers display low morale and high absenteeism. Yet such public institutions are rarely held accountable for their performance. 11 The middle class has largely opted out of the system in favor of private health care, schools, and transportation so there is little political pressure from them to improve the system. Most middle-class Indians now even own a power generator to cope with everyday power cuts. The poor take the brunt of the derelict public services. Two million children die in India every year from easily preventable diseases, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and immunization rates in India are amongst the lowest in the world. Air pollution levels in urban areas pose a severe public health crisis. According to a survey by the World Health Organization (WHO), thirteen out of the twenty most polluted cities in the world are Indian. 12 The country still relies heavily on inexpensive coal to generate power and has shown very little willingness to move toward alternative energy sources.

Given the current policies and state of governance in India, it is hard to see an obvious path into the middle class for the multitudes still remaining in poverty. Global demand for low-wage, low-skill labor to sew T-shirts or assemble TVs is not what it used to be, because production is now becoming increasingly mechanized and some of it is being “reshored” back to the rich countries. For several hundred million poor people in delicate health and with little education, the country will have to find a way to overcome the technical, institutional, and economic barriers to developing the capabilities necessary for functioning in a twenty-first-century economy. It is not a task for the faint-hearted.

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1. The figure is calculated from the estimated per capita income of the two countries. See The Madisson-Project (2013) database at http://tinyurl.com/pvqeuay.

2. Francine Frankel provides a detailed study of how such a strategy came to be chosen is in India’s Political Economy: 1947-2004 , 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

3. Arvind Panagariya, India: An Emerging Giant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25.

4. Wolfgang Messner, Working with India (Berlin: Springer Publishing, 2009), 49.

5. The tonnage statistic comes from the Handbook of World Steel Statistics (1978), published by the International Iron and Steel Institute.

6. This and many other cases of economic dysfunctions of the era are recounted by a former CEO and public intellectual, Gurcharan Das, in his memoirs, India Unbound: From Independence to Information Age (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000).

7. For an elaboration, see Nimish Adhia, “The Role of Ideological Change in India’s Economic Liberalization,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 44, issue C (2013): 103– 111.

8. Panagariya provides a detailed academic reference on Indian economic policies and their effects in India: An Emerging Giant .

9. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya give a fuller account of Indian labor laws in India’s Tryst with Destiny (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).

10. Robyn Meredith well describes the twenty-first-century multinational supply chains in chapter 5 of her book, “The Disassembly Line,” in The Elephant and the Dragon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

11. Good accounts of the lives of India’s poor and the causes of the dysfunction in the country’s public services are given by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen in An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee in Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).

12. “Thirteen of the Twenty Most Polluted Cities in the World Are Indian,” Quartz India , last modified December 7, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/nyekwwk .

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India Since Independence - Essay, UPSC MAINS | Course for UPPSC Preparation - UPPSC (UP) PDF Download

India Since Independence

(1) Opening    —    The vision of a democratic, civil libertarian and secular India.

(2) Body    —    Colonialism left India divided and underdeveloped.

    —    The building and sustenance of a democratic and civil libertarian policy.

    —    Developed a strong centre.

    —    Independent Foreign Policy.

    —    Weakness of the Indian Polity.    

    —    Deterioration of political parties.

    —    Land reforms, agriculture, industries, machines.

    —    Self-sufficiency in so-many fields.

    —    Science and technology.

    —    Failure in the economic realm

(3) Closing    —    Plenty of ground to have faith in a brighter future for our people.

Seventy years back, when India became free after nearly two centuries of colonial domination, the Indian, people set out to realise the vision that had inspired generations of freedom fighters. This was the vision of a democratic, civil libertarian and secular India built on the foundations of an independent and self-reliant modern economy, a just and egalitarian society and an independent foreign policy.

Before we take a look of different areas of our endeavour, let us take a hurried look at the nature of India's colonial experience. Colonialism left India divided and underdeveloped. India was fully integrated into the world capitalist economy in a subordinate, colonial position which was symbolised by the extreme poverty of the Indian people. There was a decline of 24 per cent in the per capital availability of foodgrains in the 30 years between 1911 and 1941. The average age of an Indian in 1947 was 32 years. Million of Indians died of starvation whenever a major drought occurred. Diseases like cholera, small pox and malaria devastated the land. And nearly 5 per cent of India's national income was transferred unilaterally to Britain.

By the very nature of things, the wresting of political power from the colonical state was an event, the accomplishing of economic and cultural independence and development had to be a prolonged process. Moreover, while the ideological basis for economic and cultural independence was laid by the movement for freedom, its realization in concrete terms would require hard and continuous efforts.

First of all, it is clear that the post-colonical 

ndian state has been politically independent and not under the direct or indirect domination or influence of one or more imperialist countries, Indian polity has been based on parliamentary democracy, adult franchise, a full range of civil liberties, an independent judicial system and competing political parties and groups including factions within the ruling party. The building and sustenance of a democratic and civil libertarian polity is a major achievement of independent India. We have already sustained this polity for 53 years this is an achievement which is unequalled by any 19th century European nation-state except Britain.

Though a federation, India has developed a strong centre. This too has enhanced India's capacity to withstand foreign pressure. Desegregate state power would have made it easier for foreign interests to establish holds in one part of the country or the other.

Political democracy has also meant that the regime functions within a reformist socio-economic framework. Though not radically restructuring the internal socio-economic orders, the Indian state has undertaken many measures of reform which have affected almost every section of society. The extent of reform in different periods has, of course, depended on the type and degree of popular mobilization behind them.

One of India's greatest achievement has been the capacity to follow an independent foreign policy of non-alignment and peace and internationals in favour of anti-colonial national liberation movements and equitable economic relations between nations have won India the regard of people all over the world. India's foreign policy has stood the test of time, served our national interest in the political and economic field and imparted a certain stability to Indian polity.

The basic weakness of the Indian polity has been at the level of people's participation in the democratic process. This participation though real, has been often confined to elections or occasional popular movements. We have failed to create structures and institutions through which the common masses can make their voice heard in an effective and continuous manner. Moreover, corruption and money power continuously prevent the democratic processes and institutions.

A very sad and negative development has been the gradual deterioration of political parties, which are after all a basic pillar of a democratic political order.

Even so, while these negative features may be taken as warning signals, they need not take away from pride in our massive achievement we are one of the freest political societies in the world today. Moreover, the vast majority of Indians have learnt to value democracy and civil liberties and their right to vote.

Despite the partition of India in 1947, Indians set out to build a compact nation around the principle of unity in diversity. The path has not been very easy. Every few years disruptive and divisive forces emerge and grow and threaten the process of national making and nation-building. But, through trial and error, the Indian people have succeeded in controlling and rebuffing these forces. Still, there is no doubt that communalism, casteism and regionalism have posed and continue to pose a constant threat to the nation.

This is particularly true of communalism today. Despite the partition of India, the Indian people and the national leaders did not accept the validity of communal ideology and enshrined secularism in the Indian Constitution and insisted that religion must be divorced from politics, that the state must be separated from all religions and religion must be treated as a private matter of the individual. Moreover, despite many ideological and political weaknesses, the predominant sectors of political life in India have remained committed to secularism.

Independent India set out to overcome its colonical under-development on the basis of modern industry and technology and scientific agriculture. India was to develop as an integral part of world economy but it was no longer to be subordinated to foreign economic interests or to the economies of the advanced capitalist countries. These objectives could be achieved, it was felt by the founding father of the republic, only on the basis of planning and massive reliance on the public sector. Simultaneously with economic development, planning was to be geared to the gradual elimination of poverty and the promotion of equity and social justice.

India has great deal of achievement in the realization of these objectives. It has avoided the neo-colonial trap and developed an independent economy whose structure and growth are autonomously determined and are no longer subjected to the needs and diktats of another society and economy.

Immediately, after independence, during the 1950s, a massive programme of land reforms abolishing zamindars and other intermediaries was undertaken, leading to the virtual disappearance of landlordism, though it still prevails in several pockets in the country, especially in Bihar. Today, agriculture is characterised by the existence of a vast number of petty peasant proprietors and agricultural labourers topped by a large stroke of rich peasants and a smaller number of capitalist farmers.

Despite its many structural weaknesses, Indian agriculture has succeeded in reversing the negative production trend of pre-independence years. Agricultural production has increased at an annual rate of growth of 2.54 per cent from 1950 to 1984 and nearly 3.5 per cent from 1985 to 1989. Thus India has become self-sufficient in foodgrains and agricultural raw materials, though oil seeds and pulses have remained weak points. GDP from Agriculture in India averaged 4052.74 INR billion from 2011 until 2018.

In the colonial period, the industrial base of the Indian economy was very weak. Moreover, the emphasis was on labour intensive low-technology produces. There was near-complete absence of capital goods and machine industries and total dependence on imports of machine tools and machinery. Since independence, Indian industry has grown physically as well as undergone basic structural transformation. The contribution of the industrial sector towards national income is rising continuously. Its share was 16.1 p.c. in GDP in 1950-51 to more than 26 per cent now. Another important feature of Indian economy is that nearly all the basic industrial, transport, power, commercial and financial sectors of the economy are under Indian control— whether public sector or private sector. India is also largely self-sufficient in defence production.

India possesses a large though not sufficient trained scientific, and technical manpower. The number of its engineering graduates has gone up since 1950.  However, India continued to lag far behind in the field of science and technology and is still basically dependent for advanced technology on the outside world.

Our main failure in the economic realm lies basically in income distribution or sharing of the material production is involved. Our society is grossly unequal, unjust, and inequitable in terms of per cent of our population, who live below the poverty line brings shame to every sensitive Indian. The urban slums are a standing of the inhuman character of our society. Our environment is deteriorating daily even in the villages. We have failed to build a work culture which could sustain a modern industrial and agricultural economy.

There is, of course, some progress even in terms of economic welfare. Sheer starvation is rare today. Epidemics like small pox and plague hav e been eliminated and cholera and malaria controlled.  Drought and famine no longer take millions of lives. Death rate has been halved and the average age is now nearly 70 years. 

But gross inequality is still the norm. The cost of development has been borne by the poor while most of the benefits  have been garnered by the middle and upper classes in urban areas and the rich peasants and capitalist farmers in the rural areas. Majority do not have a proper water supply.

In the social sphere too, we have a certain achievement to our credit. Building on the work of the freedom struggle, our Constitution abolished discrimination on grounds of caste, sex or religion. While we have failed to provide minimum education to our people- over 40 per cent Indians are still illiterate, women and suppressed castes have made significant gains in access to those limited educational opportunities. Unfortunately, our society is still caste-ridden and caste oppression and discrimination alround. The dalits or persons belonging to suppressed castes have been learning to stand up and fight back. All in all, the record of the seventy years of independence provides us with plenty of ground to have faith in a brighter future for our people. It also beckons us to fight hard against the prevailing poverty, inequality and social oppressions.

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75 years of Independence: Five major achievements that made India a global soft power

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How India Has Changed Since Independence

How India Has Changed Since Independence – In this blog article, the author discusses the progress India has made since independence , including things like economic development and social progress .

Write an article on “India’s Progress Since Independence”

Ans. India’s Progress Since Independence

 India has paced with the times. It has made herculean efforts to change its old and discredited image. Till the 1970s, India was considered to be a land of famines, droughts, beggars and snake charmers. But in the last three or four decades, it has made tremendous progress. India’s economic and industrial might has been universally recognised. Now India is being counted as one of the fastest emerging economies of the world. In the 1960s, we had to depend on the mercy of the Western countries to survive. But now we are self-sufficient in food. India has emerged as the second-largest paddy producer in the world. It is the second-largest sugar producer as well. Mechanization of agriculture and the Green Revolution has led to the self-sufficiency despite the rapid increase in population. With an emphasis on Horticulture, India has emerged as the largest producer of fruits and the second-largest producer of vegetables. The White Revolution has made India the largest producer of milk. The Indian pharma industry ranks 4th in the world. India has made rapid strides in defence preparedness. India’s progress in the industry is really breathtaking. India’s progress in space technology only matches with the advanced nations of the world. India is on the move. It will attain new heights in future.  Disaster management programmes have not proved up to the mark and up to the task. The Government and the concerned agencies should provide comprehensive aids and help to the survivors, particularly the children. They must provide nutritious food, clothes, shelters and medical aids to them. All efforts should be made to wipe out the scars left by these disasters.

Download the above article in PDF (Printable)

Progress of india essay       .

Since independence in 1947, India has made significant progress in terms of economic development, social welfare, and international stature. The country has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, with an annual growth rate of 7.5% in 2016. This remarkable progress is the result of a concerted effort by the Indian government and people to promote innovation and entrepreneurship, expand education and healthcare services, build infrastructure, and strengthen relations with regional and global partners. The years since independence have seen dramatic changes in India’s economy, society, and politics. In the early years after Independence, the country faced immense challenges in rebuilding its shattered infrastructure and restoring economic stability. However, through hard work and determination, the Indian government was able to achieve rapid growth and transform India into one of the world’s leading economies. Since 1991, India has been a member of the United Nations (UN), serving on numerous committees and expert bodies. The country has also played a leading role in several international organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). India has also been a vocal advocate for democracy and human rights around the world, playing a crucial role in promoting dialogues between different cultures and civil societies. Overall, India has made significant progress in terms of both economic development and social welfare since independence. The country’s impressive growth rate shows no signs of slowing down any time soon, which is testament to the hard work and determination

India’s Progress since Independence Article

Since independence, India has made tremendous progress in terms of economic development and social welfare. The country has made great strides in the areas of education, healthcare, agriculture, industry, and infrastructure. Despite various challenges faced by the country, India has remained one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. The country’s GDP grew at an annual rate of 7.5% between FY 2006 and FY 2012 and is expected to grow at a rate of 7.8% in FY 2013. The country’s growth is driven by strong domestic consumption and investment as well as exports. In 2012, India became the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. In terms of social welfare, India has made significant progress in providing healthcare to its citizens. As of 2010, 93% of the population had access to sanitation facilities and 68% had access to safe drinking water. The country also has a robust social safety net that aids low-income families. In 2013, India ranked first in the world in terms of health spending as a percentage of GDP (5.3%). In terms of education, India has made significant progress since independence. As of 2011, there were more than 1.2 billion students enrolled in schools across the country. This is an increase from 854 million students enrolled in school in 1951. In terms of literacy rates, Indian children have surpassed their peers from other countries in terms of reading skills and are now ranked fourth globally behind China, Brazil      

Short Essay on India after Independence 

After India gained its independence from the British Empire in 1947, the country was faced with an immense task of rebuilding itself. While there were many challenges, such as poverty, illiteracy and a lack of infrastructure, the country ultimately managed to overcome these difficulties and become a thriving democracy. Today, India is one of the world’s most populous countries and is a major player in both the economic and political arenas. It has also achieved notable successes in fields such as science and technology, education and health care. In spite of these successes, there are still some areas of concern for India, such as poverty and inequality. Additionally, there are concerns about the country’s increasingly fragile environment. However, despite these challenges, India is continuing to make progress and is poised for even greater achievements in the future.

India after Independence Essay     

India is one of the world’s largest and most diverse countries. It has a longstanding history and culture, as well as a rich tradition of art, literature, and music. The country is home to a variety of languages and religions. Independence from Britain was achieved in 1947. At the time, India was divided into two parts: the Muslim-dominated East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the Hindu-dominated West Pakistan. In 1971, East Pakistan became independent as Bangladesh, while West Pakistan became part of present-day Pakistan. Since independence, India has undergone numerous changes. The economy has grown rapidly, and the country has become a major player on the global stage. India is also considered to be a rising power in the world economy. Despite these successes, there are also areas of concern in India today. Poverty remains widespread, and life for many people is still difficult. There are also concerns about the country’s growing religious intolerance and violence against minorities. Overall, however, India is an exciting place to live and visit. Its culture is rich and varied, its people are friendly and welcoming, and its economy is expanding rapidly.

Short Essay on India

India is a country with a rich history, culture, and heritage. It has a population of over 1.3 billion people and is the world’s second most populous country. India has been through many phases of development, from the traditional rural society to the modern industrialized economy. The development of India is due to its unique geographical location as well as its cultural heritage and traditions. India’s location on the subcontinent provides it with natural resources such as coal, oil, and gas, which have helped fuel its growth. The country’s early development was also aided by British colonialism, which promoted education and infrastructure development. Despite these successes, India still faces many challenges in terms of development. Some of the major issues include poverty, inequality, and corruption. However, there are also signs that India is making progress towards achieving greater economic stability and social justice.

Development of India Essay

After India gained independence from the British Empire in 1947, the country experienced a period of rapid economic and social growth. This development was due in part to the efforts of the Indian National Congress, which led the struggle for independence. The Congress was a coalition of numerous political parties and organizations that had emerged in the late 19th century to fight for Indian independence. The party was able to achieve its goals after years of negotiations with the British government. After independence, India faced many challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, and social disparities. However, the country also experienced significant progress in many areas, such as education, health care, agriculture, and industrialization. Despite these successes, there are still many challenges facing India today. One of the most pressing is the issue of poverty and inequality. Despite high rates of economic growth and increased access to education and healthcare, large portions of India remain impoverished. This is primarily due to socio-economic factors such as poor job opportunities and lack of social security. Another major challenge is environmental degradation. India has been struggling with increasing levels of pollution and climate change since the early 2000s. This problem is exacerbated by a lack of infrastructure and insufficient government policies to address environmental issues. Despite these challenges, India continues to make significant progress in many areas. The country has achieved impressive rates of economic growth, increased literacy rates, and reduced poverty levels over the past few decades.

1.How India is progressing? Answers: India is progressing rapidly and has a lot to offer in terms of growth, stability, and opportunities. The country is undergoing many changes that are both positive and negative, but overall, the trend is positive. There are many challenges that India faces, but with the right leadership and concerted effort these can be overcome.

2. How has India progressed after Independence? Answers: India has made tremendous progress since independence in 1947. Economic growth, social progress and political stability have all been impressive. The country now has a strong democracy and is a key global player. However, there is still much to be done and many challenges remain. India is now a land of opportunity for everyone who wants to make the most of their potential.

3. In what way do you think India has developed since Independence essay? Answers: Since Independence, India has undergone a lot of changes. The country has seen rapid growth in terms of its economy, as well as its social and political landscape. There has been a gradual shift from a centrally planned economy to a market-driven one, which has had a considerable impact on the way Indians live and work. Overall, I believe that India has developed significantly since Independence, and I think its future looks bright too.

4. How can India be a developed country? Answers: India is a developing country because it is not developed. Development means that a country moves from a state in which most people are poor to one in which most people are middle class or above. India has not yet reached that stage, and as a result, it is a developing country.

5. How does a nation progress? Answers: A nation progresses by trying to understand and learn from its past. By doing so, it can build a better future for itself. Historical events are important to learn from, as they provide lessons that can be used in the present. Examining the rise and fall of different nations can also help people understand how to succeed or fail in their own lives.

6. How India Got progress compared to other countries? Answers: When we compare India’s progress to other countries, it is evident that India has made the most progress in terms of the economic and social spheres. There have been remarkable advancements in education, health care, women’s empowerment, and other fields.

7. What is the status of India in the world? Answers: India is a country in the world. It is the 7th largest country in the world with a population of over 1.3 billion people. India has a diverse culture, and its economy is growing rapidly. India is important because it is a major player in the world, and it can  make a difference in the world.

8. What is the future of India? Answers: The future of India is very bright. With a population of over 1.3 billion people and the fastest growing economy in the world, India has a lot to offer. The country is still young and has a lot of opportunities for growth. If you are interested in learning more about the future of India, be sure to check out our blog!

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Development in India After Independence

India, which has now turned into a significant nation internationally has grown a ton since it got its freedom from the British East India Company rule. Yet, very much like all the other things, various individuals have various sentiments about it. While some think that it has seen huge development, others are of the view that the development is delayed when contrasted with what it ought to be. Regardless of these differentiating sees, the way that remains is that the India we see today is unique in relation to what it was during autonomy.

It has created regarding the foundation, schooling, medical care, science and innovation, and in practically any remaining areas. Yet, it is viewed as a non-industrial country. This infers that the nation is requiring some investment to find the created world. Allow us now to take a gander at the improvements that India has made in various areas in the beyond seventy years.

Indian Development After Independence

Table of Content

India after independence- achievements, significant developments in india after independence, two phases of economy, administration sector growth, development of the agriculture sector, foundation development, the first independence day of india, logical achievements.

After independence, Indian citizens have the right to vote for choosing the government into power. Important leaders who helped to secure independence was Mahatma Gandhi, who began the fight for independence since 1914. Mangal Pandey was the first freedom fighter from India who fought against British in 1857.

Some important developments in India after independence have been as follows:

• Indian Railways operate with about 7000 stations and was formed in 1951.
• First general elections in India was held in 1951 with Congress winning over majority.
• India developed Asia’s first nuclear reactor. Apsara nuclear reactor was developed in 1956.
• Chandrayan 1 came to be launched in 2008 to the moon.

A free India was granted a broke economy, broad ignorance, and stunning destitution. Contemporary financial specialists partition the historical backdrop of India’s monetary development into two stages – the initial 45 years after autonomy and very nearly thirty years of the unrestricted economy. The years going before the financial progression were predominantly set apart by cases wherein monetary improvement got deteriorated because of an absence of significant strategies.

The financial changes acted as the hero with the start of a strategy of progression and privatization. An adaptable modern permitting strategy and a casual FDI strategy began getting positive reactions from worldwide financial backers. Among the main considerations that drove India’s economic development following the financial changes of 1991 were expanded FDI, reception of data innovation, and expanded homegrown utilization.

A significant improvement in the country’s administration area has been noticeable in the telecom and data innovation areas. A pattern that began exactly twenty years back is currently well thriving. A few worldwide firms keep on re-appropriating their tele administrations and IT administrations to India, bringing about the development of ITES, BPO, and KPO organizations. The securing of mastery in data innovation has prompted the age of thousands of new positions, which thus expanded homegrown utilization, and normally, more unfamiliar direct speculations ended up satisfying the needs.

As of now, the administration area utilizes over 30% of the Indian labor force and this course of improvement began, thinking back in the 1980s. During the 60s, the area utilized just 4.5% of the functioning populace. As per the Economic Survey 2021-22, the administration area represented over half of the Indian GDP, and the figures are supposed to fill from now on.

Since the 1950s, the advancement in agribusiness has been fairly consistent. The area developed at around 1% per annum in the main portion of the twentieth hundred years. During the post-Independence time, the development rate bumped around 2.6 percent per annum. The central point of development in agrarian creation was the extension of cultivating regions and the presentation of high-yielding assortments of harvests. The area could figure out how to end its reliance on imported food grains. It has advanced both concerning yield and underlying changes.

Reliable interest in research, land changes, development of degrees for credit offices, and improvement in the provincial foundation were some other deciding variables that achieved an agrarian upset in the country. The nation has likewise developed further in the agri-biotech area. The Rabobank report uncovers that the agri-biotech area has been developing at 30% in a couple of years. The nation is likewise liable to turn into a significant maker of hereditarily changed/designed crops.

The Indian street network has become one of the biggest on the planet with the all-out street length expanding from 0.399 million km in 1951 to 4.70 million km starting around 2015. Also, the complete length of the country’s public thruways has expanded from 24,000 km (1947-69) to 1,37,625 km (2021). Legislative endeavors have prompted the extension of the organization of State parkways and significant local streets, which thus has straightforwardly added to modern development.

As India needs the ability to drive its development motor, it has set off a critical improvement in the accessibility of energy by embracing a multi-pronged methodology. After just about seventy years of Independence, India has arisen as the third biggest maker of power in Asia. It has expanded its power age limit from 1,362 MW in 1947 to 3,95,600 MW starting around 2022. By and large, the power age in India has expanded from 301 billion units (BUs) during 1992-93 to 400990.23 MW in 2022. With regards to provincial jolt, the Indian government has figured out how to carry lights to each of the 18,452 towns by April 28, 2018, when contrasted with 3061 every 1950.

Progress in Education Sector

Hauling itself out from far and wide ignorance, India has figured out how to carry its school system at standard with the worldwide norm. The number of schools saw a sensational increment during the post-freedom period. The Parliament made rudimentary training a major ideal for youngsters in the age gathering of 6-14 years by passing the 86th amendment to the Constitution in 2002. At freedom, India’s education rate was a miserable 12.2 % which expanded to 74.04% according to the 2011 evaluation.

Accomplishments in the Field of Healthcare

A reduction in death rates is viewed as one of the significant accomplishments that came in India’s direction in this area. While the future was close to 37 years in 1951, it nearly multiplied to 65 years by 2011. In 2022, it was expanded to 70.19 years. Comparative improvement was seen in the maternal death rate too. India’s maternal death rate likewise declined from 212 passings for every 100,000 live births in 2007 to 103 passings in 2017-19, according to a report by The Hindu.

First Independence Day in India took place in 1947. Jawahar Lal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, unfurled the tri-colour flag of India. Prime Minister of India hoists the tri-colour flag in Red Fort and first Independence Day of India is dedicated to brave men and women who laid their lives to free their motherland.

Autonomous India has taken certain steps on its street to logical turn of events. Its ability is being appeared in a steady increase of aggressive ventures. India invests wholeheartedly in its space programs, which started with the send-off of its most memorable satellite Aryabhatta in 1975. From that point forward, India has arisen as a space power that has effectively sent off unfamiliar satellites. Through Chandrayaan-1, India turned into the fourth country on the planet to establish its banner on the lunar surface in 2008. Its most memorable mission to Mars was sent off in November 2013 which effectively arrived at the planet’s circle on 24 September 2014. In June 2015, ISRO sent off 104 satellites (most noteworthy on the planet) from a solitary rocket through PSLV-C37.

India is additionally forcefully seeking both atomic and rocket programs. That has all the while expanded the country’s safeguard strength also. BrahMos drafted into the safeguarding framework is the world’s quickest voyage rocket that has been together evolved by India and Russia. After over sixty years of autonomy, India has now drawn nearer to being a free power to deal with in the field of atomic and rocket innovation.

A significant contribution to the economy and technological advancements and Indians are known for their hard work, dedication, and resilience in their contribution to the country. Indians have excelled in different fields since independence. In different fields like technology, sports, and others Indians have excelled.

Related Links

• Indian Economy on eve of Independence
• Indian Independence Act 1947
• Indian Freedom Movement

Frequently Asked Questions

How india has developed in 75 years.

Infrastructural development drastically improved in 75 years. There was advancement in the road network, rail lines, airports, and many other important types of developments in various other sectors, contributing to the economy of India.

What are the major developments in India?

The major developments in India are as follows: Historic Tax Reform Digitization Drive Institutional Reforms

How has India developed in the last 10 years?

India’s GDP Growth rate has increased in the last 10 years by an average growth rate of 6-7 percent.

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Essay on Independence Day (15 August) for Students and Children

500+ words essay on independence day.

One of the most memorable days in Indian history is 15th August. It’s the day on which the Indian sub-continent got independence after a long struggle. India only has three national festivals that are celebrated by the whole nation as one. One being the Independence Day (15th August) and the other two being Republic Day (26th January) and Gandhi Jayanti (2nd October). After independence, India became the largest democracy in the world. We fought very hard to get our independence from the Britishers. In this essay on Independence Day, we are going to discuss the history and importance of Independence Day.

History of Our Independence Day

For almost two centuries the Britishers ruled over us. And the citizen of the country suffered a lot due to these oppressors. British officials treat us like slaves until we manage to fight back against them.

We struggled for our independence but work tirelessly and selflessly under the guidance of our leaders Jawahar Lal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi , Chandra Shekhar Azad, and Bhagat Singh. Some of these leaders choose the path of violence while some choose non-violence. But the ultimate aim of these was to drive out the Britishers from the country. And on 15th August 1947, the long-awaited dream come true.

Why We Celebrate Independence Day?

To relive the moment and to enjoy the spirit of freedom and independence we celebrate Independence Day. Another reason is to remember the sacrifices and lives we have lost in this struggle. Besides, we celebrated it to remind us that this freedom that we enjoy is earned the hard way.

Apart from that, the celebration wakes up the patriot inside us. Along with celebration, the young generation is acquainted with the struggles of the people who lived at that time.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Activities on Independence Day

Although it’s a national holiday the people of the country celebrate it with great enthusiasm. Schools, offices, societies, and colleges celebrate this day by organizing various small and big events.

Every year at Red Fort the Prime Minister of India host the national flag. In the honor of the occasion, 21 gunshots are fired. This is the begging of the main event. This event is later on followed by an army parade.

The school and colleges organize cultural events, fancy dress competitions, speech, debate, and quiz competition.

Importance of Independence Day

Every Indian holds a different viewpoint about Indian Independence. For some, it’s a reminder of the long struggle while for youngsters it stands for the glory and honor of the country. Above all, we can see the feeling of patriotism across the country.

The Indian’s celebrate Independence Day with a feeling of nationalism and patriotism across the country. On this day every citizen echoes with festive feeling and pride in the diversity and unity of the people. It’s not only a celebration of Independence but also of the unity in diversity of the country.

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Why India’s Political Opposition Is So Weak

W hen more than two dozen opposition parties in India announced they would band together as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (or INDIA) last June, critics of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were hopeful they could pose a formidable challenge to the widely popular incumbent government. But weeks before voting in the country’s general election gets underway, the big-tent alliance is fractured from infighting, clashes, and competing interests. Worse still, a crackdown on the opposition by the Indian government has now reached what Amnesty describes as “a crisis point.”

“We are seeing a situation where opposition parties are very, very weakened as we approach elections,” says Anjali Bhardwaj, the founder of Satark Nagrik Sangathan, a Delhi-based citizens’ group working to promote transparency and accountability in government. “They have been attacked, their leaders are either under arrest or being seriously investigated, and their homes and offices are being raided.”

The latest—and perhaps most historic—blow to the opposition occurred on March 21, when Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), a federal economic law enforcement agency, for bribery in awarding liquor licenses to contractors in the national capital nearly two years prior—allegations that he denies. Several others connected to the case are also in jail on graft charges.

Kejriwal’s arrest sparked mass outrage in Delhi, with protestors taking to the streets to demand the release of one of the country’s most influential and outspoken critics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, or AAP, which currently controls state governments in the national capital region and Punjab, he is considered a thorn in the side of the government.

The buck doesn’t stop at Kejriwal and his party. India’s biggest and main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, has accused the government of hampering its ability to campaign by freezing its bank accounts over a tax dispute from 2018. That’s after Congress leader and party scion Rahul Gandhi was given a two-year jail sentence last March on defamation charges that were later suspended by the Indian Supreme Court. Gandhi united with other opposition party leaders to protest in the nation’s capital on Sunday, where he told the crowd that Modi was “trying match-fixing in this election.”

Though Kejriwal’s arrest is not exactly a surprise, it nevertheless raises eyebrows when one considers that Modi has little to fear in this election. The Indian leader has seen a surge in popularity following the Ram Temple inauguration in the city of Ayodhya earlier this year, a capstone for a powerful leader who has built a mass following on religious nationalism. A recent survey found that 78% of those polled approved of Modi. Pundits predict an easy win for the BJP.

“Mr. Modi is a popular leader who has garnered a lot of support amongst people in the Hindu majority,” contends Bhardwaj, “but we are also seeing a complete crackdown on political opposition and the capture of institutions.” The result is a situation where “someone who is portraying himself as a strong leader is popular, and then using the machinery to stay in power,” she says. 

With the election a mere 17 days away, all eyes are now on India’s opposition to see if it can successfully sound the alarm on the prospect of a constitutional crisis. The big question, says Bhardwaj, is “how free and fair the elections are likely to be with these kinds of challenges.”

Read More: India’s Income Inequality Is Now Worse Than Under British Rule, New Report Says

The weaponization of institutions

Political experts say the key reason behind the decline in India’s opposition is that many of the important institutions essential to the functioning of democracy—such as independent media or the judiciary—have been captured by those in power. 

For example, in the 2014 elections, corruption was a prominent theme in the BJP’s platform, helping create a wave against the incumbent Congress party at the time. “Thousands of people gathered on the streets in Delhi to protest against corruption, and it was reported very extensively by the mainstream media,” recalls Bhardwaj. 

But over the last decade, India’s mainstream media has largely come under the control of large corporations whose CEOs often rub shoulders with the prime minister. “Since mainstream media is effectively an echo chamber celebrating the Modi government, it is unsurprising that the opposition struggles,” says Maya Tudor, an associate professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.

Even when the media covers issues of importance to the Indian electorate, Bhardwaj says it fails to question the timing or manner in which certain events occur. For example, Kejriwal’s arrest has been portrayed in the mainstream media as though “the party in power is really serious about fighting corruption,” Bhardwaj says, while little attention has been given to the timing of the arrest, which occurred mere weeks before the election. 

Space for civil society has also shrunk through the use of various laws and institutions, leading to a chilling effect on protest. Police have quelled peaceful protests and thrown activists and dissidents into jail using draconian anti-terrorism laws. The courts have mostly refrained from granting bail to many of these individuals. 

Federal investigating bodies like the ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) have worked to strengthen the government's policies or actions by going after their critics. According to an investigation by the national outlet Indian Express , some 95% of the agencies’ investigations since 2014 have focused on the opposition. Under the previous government, that number was much lower, with 54% of ED and 60% of CBI investigations probing the opposition. 

As a result, Bhardwaj says that many of the issues that would “ordinarily bother voters and capture their imagination”—such as unemployment, inflation, corruption, or the incarceration of civil society leaders—“are not finding prominence” among the Indian public.

A united front, but fractured alliances

The BJP has denied political meddling to stifle the opposition, arguing that Congress is “conveniently blaming their irrelevance on ‘financial troubles.’” Yet, several opposition leaders mired in corruption investigations have usually seen those charges get dropped when they joined the ruling party. “All cases against them seem to go into cold storage,” says Bhardwaj.

The Wire, an Indian outlet, recently published a report that found at least 12 opposition leaders across Indian states joined the BJP while facing criminal charges in the past several months. This is also what happened with Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, who earlier this year jumped ship to the BJP just before the ED planned to arrest him on charges of money laundering.

There’s even a term coined for this phenomenon. “We have started referring to it as the ‘washing machine effect,’” says Bhardwaj, which has in turn lent credence to the idea that opposition leaders are more interested in power over political ideology in serving their electorate.

The INDIA alliance has made little headway in presenting itself as a united front in challenging Modi, thanks to factional infighting and conflicts in seat-sharing negotiations. The Congress Party, which dominated politics after India’s independence in 1947, has increasingly fielded its own candidates to fill seats in a majority of the states, alienating regional parties, many of whom were already at loggerheads with each other across state lines. This has also contributed to the loss of another critical figurehead, Mamata Banerjee—the head of the All India Trinamool Congress—who in January declared that her party would run independently. 

All this has amounted to, at best, a weak attempt to challenge Modi’s popularity. “Oppositions turn out incumbent governments most effectively when they coordinate a single opposition candidate per district and when they are ideologically unified,” says Tudor, whose research looks at what electoral conditions must be met to succeed in India’s elections. 

Put simply, “the opposition has not done a great job meeting these criteria,” she says.

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Raipur, Apr 8 (PTI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday hit out at the opposition Congress, saying it overlooked needs of the poor for decades since independence and never understood their pain.

Addressing a rally in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district, which will go to polls on April 19, he also said that the Congress’ manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections has the Muslim League imprint.

During the Congress regime, corruption had become the country’s identity, he said.

“Since independence, the Congress overlooked needs of the poor for decades and never understood their pain,” the PM said.

“People said what will happen to the poor during the COVID-19 pandemic, but I said I will give free vaccine and ration to them,” he said, adding that “due to my government’s efforts, 25 crore people have risen above the poverty line.” The prime minister said he had come to thank the people for supporting his government in the last 10 years.

“Crores of my countrymen, my mothers and sisters have become my raksha kavach (protective shield),” he said. PTI TKP VT GK

This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

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"BJP is most corrupt party since independence...": AAP leader Sanjay Singh

N ew Delhi [India], April 7 (ANI): Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh on Sunday said that the Bharatiya Janata Party is the most corrupt political party since the nation got independence, adding that its leaders should be investigated for committing "electoral bonds scam".

"You cannot trust them on anything. BJP is most corrupt party since independence. They are openly involved in corruption. In the BJP tenure, a total of off Rs 15 lakh crore of various businessmen has been written off. In their tenure, demonetisation scam, Hindenburg report which revealed another scam, electoral bond scam happened," Sanjay Singh told ANI.

Singh alleged that BJP gave away contracts worth Rs 3.8 lakh crore to various companies who donated it through electoral bond scheme.

"BJP leaders should be investigated for electoral bonds scam. ED, CBI, IT should investigate it. BJP got donations of thousands of crores, and they gave away contracts worth Rs 3.8 lakh crore to those business companies. It is the BJP which has done the liquor policy scam, now even money trail is found," he said.

Sharing his experience of his time at Tihar Jail for nearly six months, AAP Rajya Sabha MP said that his rights were similar to any other prisoner.

"The first 11 days (in jail) were tough but my rights were similar to that of a jailed person. During the first 11 days, I was not even getting those rights which other prisoners were getting. From 3 pm to 7pm, we were not allowed to go out. I was not allowed to go to badminton court," he said.

On the data revealed by jail administration that his weight was increased during jail time, Sanjay Singh said, "What is wrong if I gain weight?. I weighed 79 kg but my weight increased to 81.7 kg when I left (the jail). BJP is sending a good message for us that if AAP workers are sent to jail then they will focus on their health with full determination. What they want that we should die there only," he said.

The Supreme Court earlier this week granted bail to Aam Aadmi Party MP Sanjay Singh, who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) last October in an alleged money laundering case related to the Delhi liquor policy scam. He spent six months in jail.

Sanjay Singh was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on October 4, 2023, in the case.

Recently, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was also arrested and sent to judicial custody until April 15. Manish Sisodia is also in judicial custody in this case. (ANI)

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"BJP is most corrupt party since independence...": AAP leader Sanjay Singh

Aam aadmi party leader sanjay singh on sunday said that the bharatiya janata party is the most corrupt political party since the nation got independence, adding that its leaders should be investigated for committing "electoral bonds scam"..

Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh on Sunday said that the Bharatiya Janata Party is the most corrupt political party since the nation got independence, adding that its leaders should be investigated for committing "electoral bonds scam". "You cannot trust them on anything. BJP is most corrupt party since independence. They are openly involved in corruption. In the BJP tenure, a total of off Rs 15 lakh crore of various businessmen has been written off. In their tenure, demonetisation scam, Hindenburg report which revealed another scam, electoral bond scam happened," Sanjay Singh told ANI.

Singh alleged that BJP gave away contracts worth Rs 3.8 lakh crore to various companies who donated it through electoral bond scheme. "BJP leaders should be investigated for electoral bonds scam. ED, CBI, IT should investigate it. BJP got donations of thousands of crores, and they gave away contracts worth Rs 3.8 lakh crore to those business companies. It is the BJP which has done the liquor policy scam, now even money trail is found," he said.

Sharing his experience of his time at Tihar Jail for nearly six months, AAP Rajya Sabha MP said that his rights were similar to any other prisoner. "The first 11 days (in jail) were tough but my rights were similar to that of a jailed person. During the first 11 days, I was not even getting those rights which other prisoners were getting. From 3 pm to 7pm, we were not allowed to go out. I was not allowed to go to badminton court," he said.

On the data revealed by jail administration that his weight was increased during jail time, Sanjay Singh said, "What is wrong if I gain weight?. I weighed 79 kg but my weight increased to 81.7 kg when I left (the jail). BJP is sending a good message for us that if AAP workers are sent to jail then they will focus on their health with full determination. What they want that we should die there only," he said. The Supreme Court earlier this week granted bail to Aam Aadmi Party MP Sanjay Singh, who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) last October in an alleged money laundering case related to the Delhi liquor policy scam. He spent six months in jail.

Sanjay Singh was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on October 4, 2023, in the case. Recently, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was also arrested and sent to judicial custody until April 15. Manish Sisodia is also in judicial custody in this case. (ANI)

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