Missions Resources - Bibliography
India Unbound
Authors: Gurcharan Das
ISBN: 0385720742
Publisher: Anchor
Number of pages: 432
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
What is happening in India these days is nothing short of remarkable. It is not the rapid economic development alone: the mushrooming creation of wealth we are witnessing today is a long-term development made possible
by a summer’s worth of reforms made fifteen years ago by a courageous commerce
minister (who is now Prime Minister).
No, what is most remarkable about today’s developments, argues Gurcharan Das in his book India Unbound, is the profound democratization happening across the country at the grass-roots level. Wealth creation is becoming less disrespectable of a career choice, and a “Million Reformers,” as he calls them – small-scale entrepreneurs to forward-looking young people who are pursuing education to improve their social situation.
Gurcharan Das is a columnist for the Times of India, which makes him a sort of Thomas Friedman of India, except that Das probably has more readers, is arguably more influential, and is certainly a better writer. His essays are full of delicious prose, stunning in development, and far from formulaic. He writes for what is far and away the biggest newspaper in the world, and he counts among his readers many of India’s top leaders.
India Unbound tells the story of today’s rapid changes by telling the story of India’s life as an independent country, which period roughly corresponds with Das’ life. He recounts some of the wild violence of the partition period from his boyhood vantage point of looking out the front window.
Moving through the decades, he describes with no small amount of sadness, the ossification of the command-economy and state bureaucracy, which hobbled the world’s largest democracy in its early decades. In the name of India’s poor, Das argues, a senseless bureaucracy actively prevented economic development by squashing enterprise. His analysis has a ring of truth, in part because Das hardly shills for untrammeled capitalism. Still, logistical roadblock upon arbitrary tariff upon lingering caste prejudice against commerce combined to drive India’s best commercial minds into the Diaspora.
Still, there is a big elephant in the room that even Das can’t ignore. His occasional apologetics for caste suggest he doesn’t want to dig too deep into what other authors have called the most significant obstacle to India’s development. Like Thomas Friedman, whose “Golden Straightjacket” theory blithely papers over enormous ethnic and national tensions, so Gurcharan Das is surprisingly casual about religious and societal fissures in an enormously diverse country. Are the poor and the low-caste Indians benefiting from India’s development? Is hunger retreating?
India Unbound is a great book on a surging country, but should be read with some of these important questions in mind.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register