Are we a nation of under-achievers?
As a prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in 2014 criticised the previous UPA regime for making India a country of “under-achievers”. Ten years after his own stewardship, it hasn’t changed much .To set the record straight, India has been both ‘underperformer’ and ‘under-achiever’; the first relates to potential and the second to goals. We, therefore, use them interchangeably in this context.
A recent global study (Lowy Institute, 2024) validates this inference. It puts India next only to USA and China in terms of CNP (Comprehensive National Power) in Asia while at the same time calling India a ‘patchy power’ that is performing ‘less well than would be expected based on its size and available resources’. It means that as a nation we are not extracting commensurate benefits from our endogenous capability, embracing every dimension of human endeavour.
What it tells us is that many of our shortcomings and shortfalls, failures and falling shorts could have been avoided, if not meaningfully mitigated, if we as a society were able to organise and synergise, motivate and mobilise ourselves more effectively than we have done.
While the locus of action is internal, its effect is external by way of global competitiveness. How well or ill a country is doing these days is not only how good or bad it is at home but also a derivative of how it comes out in relation to the rest of the world. It is true whether the arena is academics or economics, hard science or social science, enlightenment ort entertainment, literature or sports.
The last one, more than ever, has come to symbolise a nation’s yen for excellence. The standard bearer of global sports has been Olympics since the modern version began on 1896. In this format, India comes out 57th in the all-time table, with just 10 gold medals, 8 of which were for Hockey alone, the last in 1980. It is specially sobering in in relation to China’s for instance. For example, at Paris we won just six medals, including one silver and no gold, our poorest record since 2000; China won 40 gold, 27 silver, and 24 bronze medals, its best performance ever at an overseas Olympic Game.
We are ‘under-performers’ in other sports too. In Tennis, the only Indian to have ever played in a singles grand slam event was in 1960. Most shocking, a nation of 1.4 billion people has never qualified to play the worlds’ greatest sporting event— FIFA world cup soccer. A snapshot of how far behind we are is that the nation that defeated and knocked out India from qualifying for the 2026 edition was Oman!
Perhaps, most modifying of them all is that the tag of ‘most underachieving team in the world’ is being stamped by close observers of the game to Indian cricket, dubbed as a ‘religion’. This kind of juxtaposition makes one wonder if we are upgrading cricket or demoting religion! Many cricket lovers might be outraged but, overall, our achievements have been ‘patchy’, put in the parlance of having plentiful money, wide ‘pool of players’ and sky-high popularity. Given this immense ‘comparative advantage’, we won too few trophies and lost in too many finals. We should have been as ‘dominant’ as we were once in Hockey.
Even outside sports, India’s achievements give us not much to crow about. A good indicator is Nobel Prize. Since its inception only five Indian nationals have won a Nobel prize including Mother Theresa. In science that last one was 1930 and in Literature in 1913. Even in regard to another cricket-like national obsession, movies, India is the world’s largest filmmaking nation, with more cinema-goers than the United States, China and Japan combined; our performance hasn’t been not much better. No Indian movie directed by an Indian and made in India has won an Oscar for Best Film. Although both Nobel Prize and much less Oscar are not flawless, they are still a benchmark to assess our national standing in these areas.
While ‘under-performance’ is to perform below one’s potential, another more damaging manifest is what we may call ‘perverse performance.’ Although we don’t realize that odium has come to apply to something as vital and ‘bread-and-butter matter – economy. That may sound peevish in the context of all the hoopla and hubris about India becoming the fastest growing and fifth biggest economy and calling that may sound churlish. Overtaking countries like our colonial master Britain is sweet revenge. But the bitter pill we have to gulp is that, after 77 years of life as a free country, a majority of our fellow people still do not have the access and means to rise up to their innate potential, both cerebral and physical, by dint of their blood, sweat and tears. What it tells us is that our much-touted growth in GDP has come at an unacceptable cost. That is largely because we have adopted a growth and development strategy designed for a different context and unsuited to our advantages. That must change if our economic ‘performance’ is not to remain pyrrhic and perverse.
Ultimately for India to measure up to its full promise it must be able to take full promise it must be able to optimise its comparative advantages and overcomes its disadvantages. A prime example is our human capital, which is much more than macroeconomic abstraction. For a nation these are the sum of its people’s living, breathing capabilities.
Remarkably, over 1 billion individuals in India belong to the working-age population, showcasing the country’s immense potential and human capital. Projections indicate that by 2030, India will achieve its lowest dependency ratio in history, standing at a mere 31.2 per cent. Regrettably India has failed to transform this awesome ‘comparative advantage’ into cutting age ‘comparative edge’. ‘Domestically’, the much-talked-about ‘demographic dividend’ and youth power remain untapped. One reason is that India spends too little on critical components of human capital development like health (1.26 per cent of its GDP), and education (3 per cent) and even these modest amounts are skewed in their spread.
India cannot expect to attain anywhere close to its optimal potential if most of citizens cannot afford healthy food, and if it carries the dubious distinction of having the highest undernourished in any country in the world. These are not only morally offensive but also have material consequences. They lead to decreased work productivity, which affects the nation’s overall economic output.
How does one make some sense of this apparently dismal scenario? Do all these details and data substantiate the criticism that India is an under-performing nation? Is it a case of not missing the wood for the tree? Is it constitutional, contextual or cultural? Or, is it genetic?
While modern India hasn’t shown much hunger for high achievement in the competitive arena, pre-modern India had to its credit, in the words of Amartya Sen, an ‘extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy’. And, even more to the point, many Indians away from India have demonstrated their might and mettle in an equally expansive ambit. That eliminates genetics as a possible cause. What else it might well be? We are back to square one. If our ancient ancestors once and our modern-day compatriots abroad now can so nimbly circumvent the trap of under-achievement, why are we so inept?
It is something to peg on to ponder over, to catalyze a candid national conversation. That itself could act as a trigger for a national catharsis which we badly need.
(Writer is a retired IAS officer of 1958 batch)