Many more years need to transform this hype into reality
BBN Bureau
Mumbai: There is “hype” surrounding India’s growth despite major structural problems, and the grave mistake being made is simply believing the hype without comprehending the economy’s underlying issues, stated noted economist and former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, Raghuram Rajan.
According to Rajan, the foremost challenge facing the government elected after the current general election is to focus on education and skill improvement for the country’s workforce. Without accomplishing this, he emphasized, India would fail to harness the advantage of having half of its 1.4 billion population in the young demographic, with more than half of the Indian populace being under 30 years old.
Raghuram Rajan emphasized in an interview that India must labor for many more years to transform this hype into reality. “It would be a grave mistake for India to succumb to the hype,” he added.
Dismissing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambition to make India a developed country by 2047, the former RBI chief criticized the goal as “nonsense” considering the high rates of children without a high school education and prevalent drop-out rates.
“We have a growing workforce, but it is only a dividend if they are employed in good jobs,” he remarked. “And that is, to my mind, the potential tragedy that we face. India needs to first enhance the employability of its workforce and, secondly, create jobs for the existing workforce,” he added.
Rajan cited studies revealing that the pandemic had caused a decline in the learning ability of Indian schoolchildren to pre-2012 levels, with only 20.5 percent of grade three students capable of reading a grade two text. He also highlighted that literacy rates in India lag behind those of other Asian countries like Vietnam.
“That is the kind of statistic that should genuinely concern us,” he emphasized, warning that the deficiency in human capital would persist for decades.
