Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan made light of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambition to make India a developed nation by 2047, calling it "nonsense."
In an interview to Bloomberg, he said it is "nonsense" to talk about India being a developed economy if "so many of your kids don’t have a high school education” and the rate of drop-outs is high.
He further said the greatest mistake India can make is to believe the hype around the country's strong economic growth and observed that "we have got many more years of hard work to do to ensure the hype is real."
Rajan said politicians want people to believe that the hype is real because "they want you to believe that we have arrived.” It would be a “serious mistake for India to succumb to that," he noted.
He reiterated the need to create a more employable workforce and create jobs for the workforce that the country has. “We have a growing workforce, but it is a dividend only if they are employed in good jobs,” Rajan said.
Talking about the drop-out rate, he cited studies that show the declining learning ability of school children in the country. Only 20.5 per cent of grade three students could read a grade two text, he claimed.
He claimed that the government is focused more on prestige projects like chip manufacturing units instead of fixing the education ecosystem in the country. "I worry that we have become more fixated on prestige projects, which suggest more great nation ambition, such as chip manufacturing while leaving the underpinnings that will contribute to a sustainable chip manufacturing industry.”
