India needs a Prosperity Revolution

Why are we not 10 times richer? Why does our education system fail? Does a person born in a rural area really have a future?

The past few years, I have been spending a lot of time thinking why aren’t we Indians 10 times richer?

Once upon a time not long ago, Singapore, South Korea and China were all at the same income level as India. Today, we are at the bottom of the heap by a huge margin – with the average Singaporean 35 times richer than the average Indian. Why?

Why has our education system failed us? If you are young and not in the top 10,000 (of 2.5 crore others of your age), you will not get a good quality education in India. And if your parents haven’t saved up Rs 1 crore to send you to a college abroad, what is your future? And if you were born in rural India, your future could look even more bleak.

And let’s say you do get educated in India. What are the prospects of finding a good job? Where are the jobs? The private sector isn’t investing a whole lot. And if they are, they would rather invest in machine learning, artificial intelligence and robots. We are no less smarter than our American, German or Chinese counterparts. Why then is our future so much less bright?

We have two choices.

We can continue to discuss all the trivial issues of the world. We can discuss whether India needs a Ram Mandir or not. We can discuss whether we need more quotas in a terrible education system or in jobs as peons and sweepers. We can discuss who needs farm loans waivers.

Or we can discuss prosperity. When will we discuss how we can be rich? When will we get past the belief that poverty is not, and should never have been, our destiny?

Enough is enough. Incremental change isn’t going to cut it anymore. What India needs is a revolution. A political and economic revolution which destroys the world’s largest anti-prosperity machine that goes by the name of ‘Indian government’.

Only a new way of doing things and starting in a new direction can make every Indian ten times richer in the next ten years. And in the journey that we need to undertake, you are the only person who matters. I will write more about it in my future posts.