On the historic occasion of India completing 75 years of freedom from colonial rule, Prime Minister Modi, in his Independence Day speech, laid out the path envisaged by him to take the country ahead in its march towards progress. There is much that remains to be done to fulfill the dream of the freedom fighters and a country envisioned by our forefathers, as laid out in the Constitution. Ambitiously aiming for a developed status for India by its centenary year of independence, he listed some key goals. Filtering out the jingoism from his utterances — that is by now predictably a tom-tomming of his government’s schemes and a strong bias against the regimes from 1947 to 2014 — an outline of the future strategy is visible. Not surprisingly, it rides majorly on the thrust of economic and education empowerment through the ‘Make-in-India initiative and the ‘New Education Policy, respectively. Fuelling them would be the new-age buzzwords of technology and digitization.
To achieve this end, the PM has rightly sought the helping hand of our demographic dividend: the youth, including those from smaller towns and villages. After all, with 66 percent of the population below the age of 35, India has the advantage of being home to the largest youth population in the world. The ‘paanch pran’ that he enumerates for the citizens is geared toward a society collectively aspiring to bring about change. The pledges include working for a developed India, abolishing slavery, taking pride in heritage, and adopting unity and a sense of duty. While these are commendable, a lot remains to be set right before the ground is conducive to fomenting such a spirit of unity in the increasingly polarised cultural and socio-economic set-up.
Significantly, in the bid to maximize the reaping of this large productive pool of people, Modi’s calculations foresee a critical role for women. This is heartwarming. For, it is an acknowledgment of the fact that even 75 years after the right to equality was given to the fair sex, it continues to be treated unfairly, with the society failing to unshackle itself from misogynist and patriarchal tendencies. At the same time, it is pregnant with the promise of opportunities on equal terms for women in every field.
