India
is the Country of diversity. It is the beauty if diversity that makes
India a unique country in every aspect were it technical, scientific,
social, or environmental. Every Indian is worth of accomplishing
every task that can flourishes the economy of the nation. Even
history has proved that Indians are worth gems for world in the form
of the Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Satuyajit
Ray, Sam Pitroda and many to specify. It is proved that we Indians
has more innovativeness than many other public in the world. Then the
question stuck in our mind that according to current situation how
India will look in 2050? What will be its socioeconomic status,
science and technological development, living standard and other
related fields?
Though having busy roads,
tight schedule, population density, health hazards etc., we Indians
are still proud of our culture. in spite of serving MNC’s with
cheap labour, still being the biggest reason of success of our
culture that focus on Eco-friendliness, our actions that we though
indirectly indulge in serving humanity.
India has experienced
extraordinary population growth: between 2001 and 2011 India added
181 million people to the world, slightly less than the entire
population of Brazil. But 76 per cent of India’s population lives
on less than US$2 per day (at purchasing power parity rates). India
ranks at the bottom of the pyramid in per capita-level consumption
indicators not only in energy or electricity but in almost all other
relevant per capita-level consumption indicators, despite high rates
of growth in the last decade.
Much of India’s
population increase has occurred among the poorest socioeconomic
percentile. Relatively socioeconomically advanced Indian states had a
fertility rate of less than 2.1 in 2009 — less than the level
needed to maintain a stable population following infant mortality
standards in developed nations. But in poorer states like Bihar,
fertility rates were nearer to 4.0.
Does this growth mean
India can rely on the ‘demographic dividend’ to spur development?
This phenomenon, which refers to the period in which a large
proportion of a country’s population is of working age, is said to
have accounted for between one-fourth and two-fifths of East Asia’s
‘economic miracle’ as observed late last century.
But India is not East
Asia. Its population density is almost three times the average in
East Asia and more than eight times the world average of 45 people
per square kilometer. If India has anywhere near 1.69 billion people
in 2050, it will have more than 500 people per square kilometer.
Besides, in terms of infrastructure development India currently is
nowhere near where East Asian nations were before their boom. In
terms of soft to hard infrastructure, spanning education, healthcare,
roads, electricity, housing, employment growth and more, India is
visibly strained.
For example, India has
an installed energy capacity of little more than 200 gigawatts; China
has more than 1000 gigawatts and aims to generate 600 gigawatts of
clean electricity by 2020. To make matters worse, many of the newly
installed power stations in India face an acute shortage of coal, and
future supply is not guaranteed. China mines close to four billion
tons of coal per year, which has a negative effect on both local and
global air quality. At some stage, it is probably inevitable that
India will need much greater capacity than its present rate of mining
600 million tons of coal per year, which is also causing local and
global pollution levels to rise — parts of India face air quality
problems similar to those in China. On oil, India imports close to 80
per cent of its crude oil requirements, while it also runs an
unsustainable current account deficit of more than 5 per cent of its
GDP, and reserves for new energy sources like shale gas do not look
promising either.
India’s food supply is
in an even worse position. As a member of India’s Planning
Commission put it, ‘we have a problem and it can be starkly put in
the following way: around 2004–2005, our per capita food grains
production was back to the 1970s level’. In 2005–07, the average
Indian consumed only 2,300 calories per day — below the defined
poverty line in rural areas of 2,400 calories a day. The trend in
recent years is for Indians to eat even less.
So, for India, treating
lightly Malthusian predictions about food supply until 2050 or beyond
may not be prudent. Worldwide food prices have been on the rise to
unforeseen levels, and India too has been suffering from high food
inflation.
Even if India
manages to feed its burgeoning population, its growth may not be
ecologically sustainable. The global demand for water in 2050 is
projected to be more than 50 per cent of what it was in 2000, and
demand for food will double. On average, a thousand tons of water is
required to produce one ton of food grains. It’s not surprising,
then, that international disputes about water have increasingly been
replicated among states in India, where the Supreme Court is
frequently asked to intervene.
The probable answer is
that policy makers have failed miserably on all measurable counts. If
one compares India to China this becomes clear. While China’s
one-child policy has been criticized as against human dignity and
rights — and there is no denying that such measures should be
avoided as far as possible — the history of human civilization
teaches us that extreme situations call for extreme actions. There
will be ample time for multiple schools to have their postmortems on
the success and failure of the one-child policy, but it has helped
China to control its population by a possible 400 million people.
There are still millions of
people still surviving in India on income of less than one dollar a
day. India will never be consider developed country unless and until
the poverty, hunger and pain of the poor on the streets and those
living in the slums is curbed.
According to the wealth
report 2012 by Knight Frunk and Citi private bank, India will emerge
as the economic superpower in 2050, beating U.S. and china with a GDP
of $85.97 trillion and India will witness an economic growth of 8% by
2050.
There must be upward
mobility in economic terms and recognition is through performance and
results, and not through other metrics, which suit special interest
groups. Indian high-tech companies should create their own top
position in the world by identifying world and fulfilling those by
leveraging technologies. They should identify what services need to
be developed and delivered to meet the need of our underdeveloped
population to improve health-care, education and new economic models
to benefit backward sections of the society. The high-tech industry
is going through disruptive changes because of transition to cloud-
delivered services.
Thus an Optimistic view of
emerging India as a fully developed not only as a superpower nation
but also as a wholesome development in the fields of health,
education, business, urban and special emphasis on rural development
with a poverty free, slum free, high employment opportunity are the
thoughts and dreams that every Indian might be seeing. with the
efforts of all of us we will surely see our proud INDIA IN 2050 as a
prosperous, happy and overall developed nation.
