Vision for a Prosperous India - Gurcharan Das

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvLLuK8wYiE Duration: 361.9s

Gurcharan Das (00:07): It is true that we can’t even begin discussing a prosperity for India unless we have growth. So growth skeptics are basically idiots. The reality is, yes, we want that growth to be inclusive. We want to create formal jobs. But unless you have a growth rate between above eight, between 9%, you won’t get those things. And so it’s very easy to say, oh, but it’s jobless growth. Well, that’s rubbish. There’s no such thing as jobless growth. Jobless growth may be but certainly for a country like India. And even now when people say this is jobless growth, it’s it’s wrong. I mean, it’s not the kind of growth we wanted to bring Ached in. We wanted more jobs which come through exports, etcetera, more productive high productivity jobs. But so, you know, I’m saying these are the issues exactly that to make up your mind whether growth and equity go together or do they go separately. The best thing you can do for entrepreneurship is what you can do for the whole economy. One, you have to get rid of the labor legislation that we have on record. It’s the worst in the world. It positively discourages jobs. Secondly, land. So land, labor, and capital, are the three factors of production, today we have got them wrong. Those need to be fixed. So as long as you can make India an as a friendly place to do business, meaning keep raising the country’s rank, we brought it this government brought it from 142 to a 100. That’s a big jump. I think if you can take that up, we should be aspiring to be in the top 30 countries in the world. Now Modi had this target of 50. We’ll find out what the 2019 will show. Certainly, yes, I do still believe that India needs to get rid of this Inspector Raj. A lot of it is going away because everything is going online. And so the citizen and the official are not you know, you’re removing the official from the citizen interface. We’ve got to keep doing more of that. We have to keep improving the the enforcement of contracts, which is one of the worst in the world in India. So all these areas will help improve will ease the doing of business in India. That will do plus the labor, land reforms will make India a better place to do business. So if you do that, you automatically help entrepreneurs. That’s the mistake because nobody has sold the market in India, and that’s why the leaders can make this false trade off between growth and equity. It’s a false trade off because real equity real equity comes through jobs. It comes from the market, comes through economic growth. Yes. The economy is going to change. There’ll be new kinds of jobs. But I would say that India’s priority is still to deliver the basics of a good education. You know, the basics of a good education means to be able to ask questions with confidence, to be able to interrogate a text rather than mug up text, you know, the the the confidence to which comes from writing clearly, writing a paragraph clearly, communicating in five minutes clearly, these are the needs. And all the rest, one will learn through if we can if you can get the basics right and you can have the confidence to write and speak clearly, that’s the best thing that education can give you. Education is about making a life. It’s not only about making a living. And if you can learn to make a life, you have it for the rest of your life. And you have to change the attitude of people like the tax department who treat everybody like a criminal. You know? So I I I would say that just and and the tax department too. They’ve they’ve clipped their wings, you know, of the tax department. You can now online put your I mean, I paid my taxes online. I paid the I got the refund online. I never saw a taxman in the last three years.