I have spent at least three months of my life sitting in a graduate class for development policy in south east asia. while it is very difficult to articulate what i learnt from the class or what i gained from it; i want to make some clarifications that come to mind after going through nearly 40 hours of discussion that have been nothing but inconclusive. since i am not an expert on development policy or on south east asia, none of my thoughts wander in those study areas.
i would like to present my understanding of my own country and my outlook towards its 'development'. i am not qualified to do an academic analysis of the situation in the country. the only authorization i have to talk about this outlook is that i have spent at least 22 years of my life in that country- though you should count only 5-6 effective years when i actively interacted with people or lets say opened my eyes to things other than myself.
I have not traveled extensively in India, but i can say I have seen the general facade of life as it goes in some urban and rural areas of the country with fair representation of developed cities, second tier towns, villages and mostly uninhabited deserts and mountains.
the most striking thing about India is that it is as diverse as a political entity could get. so first and foremost, any sweeping statement about the country is useless, misleading, deceptive, and groundless.
it is also a very dynamic entity where governments can topple within a matter of days and simple judgements can take years to pass.
you probably need to specify location and date (time of the day if you can) of the geography that you want to discuss and follow it up with the source of your perspective- not in the footnote/endnote style, but more like describing the situation you were in when you came to this conclusion.
(it is probably this desire for such clarifications that makes us so talkative and argumentative because many of us want to be understood in the right context; the rest of us just love to hear our own voices)
so whenever somebody says, 'for instance in India' or 'if you see the example of India' and does not provide specific information; has heard it from somebody who heard someone say that they had read it somewhere (most probably on someone's status message or tweet that was apparently a clip from one of the thousand news programs on TV and web sites). viral marketing at its best!
I hereby suggest that you pay no attention to such comments as they will never prove a point and are meant only to fill uncomfortable silences or self-sound checks.
having said that India is very diverse it is but natural that we have numerous arguments within ourselves for each activity/policy and so it takes a really long time to take decisions. it is impossible to please everyone with whatever any one decides to do.
every game effectively becomes a zero sum game.
I dont know how data is collected in other parts of the world, but I personally don't trust any statistics about India especially those that have been based on government sources.
In my opinion, all such statistics should have a much higher error margin and used only if necessary. sadly, nearly every policy in the country is based on this kind of quantitative data.
Averages are a good thing, but for India, weighted average are a necessity. unless you take into consideration the heterogeneity of the country, anything you do at any level is only going to cause more harm than good.
so the next time u look at GDP per capita figures, look for stats on percentile basis rather than the average- though i'm not sure where u can get authentic data for this.
I have written these thoughts at the end of my semester when i became indifferent to discussions. if i had made this attempt throughout the semester, i might have had more points to add.
