Revisiting Development

Sustainable development is the way forward for India, which is in the midst of an economic downturn, ecological crises and stark human distress.

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These are hard times for the Indian economy. The country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has slowed to 5 per cent in the first quarter of FY20 (April-June 2019). The Q1 economic growth has been the lowest in the past 25 quarters or in the last six years.

In fact, the Indian economy has been in the slowdown mode for at least the past one year. Be it automobile, real estate, civil aviation, consumer durables or fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), plunging consumer demand has slowed down these sectors significantly.

Dwindling investment and weakening consumption demand have been pulling down the economic growth numbers quarter after quarter in the past one year. Moreover, the two factors have badly battered the jobs market, leading to huge job losses as well as a fewer, better job opportunities.

As the economy passes through a rough patch, it is time to reflect on the nature of this economic growth in the past few decades. Be it at the height of boom time of close to 10 per cent GDP growth or that of the current downturn of 5 per cent, there has always been concern over the nature of the economic growth. "A basic problem in India has been the single-minded focus of policy-makers on GDP growth without looking at the quality or pattern of that growth or considering quality employment as a goal in its own right," notes Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Unfortunately, most often, the economy has grown at the cost of the environment, leaving a trail of ecological disaster. Similarly, the growth has been anything but equitable, pushing a large swathe of the country's population into deprivation.

Ecological disasters