Freedom @75 - India Then And Now

On its 75th Independence anniversary, India can celebrate the substantial reduction of poverty and the uptick in economic growth. But it faces a tough task to become a developed country by India@100

- Raj Chengappa

Independence. The etymology of the word is telling. It is derived from the medieval French word ‘dependre’, which means ‘hanging from’, with the Latin ‘in’ prefix standing for ‘not’. The whole word thus came to mean “not hanging from”. It is apt to describe how India broke free of the 200-year-old British colonial yoke, which had pushed the country towards an extreme state of dependence and subjugation.

When the East India Company gained dominance over the subcontinent around 1750, India’s economy accounted for 24.5 per cent of the world’s manufacturing output and United Kingdom’s only 1.9 per cent. In another century and a half, the British economy, on the back of exploiting India’s vast resources, came to account for 18.5 per cent of the world’s share and India’s was reduced to 1.7 per cent. So, with apologies to Jawaharlal Nehru, at the stroke of the midnight hour on August 15, 1947, when the world slept, India awoke not just to life and freedom but as one of the poorest countries in the world. Having missed the industrial revolution, agriculture remained the country’s main vocation, and the focus of the country’s leaders for the first few decades remained lifting people out of the morass of hunger, disease and deprivation.