The Rediff Special/President K R Narayanan
'We have to give the youth of the country new opportunities, new
hopes and new challenges'
Fellow citizens, we have every reason to be proud of our
democracy. But we will have to strain our every nerve to purify our
political, administrative and electoral processes and to remove the
aberrations and distortions that have come into the functioning of
our democracy.
It is in the area of economic, technological and social
development that India, during the last fifty years, has had to
face formidable challenges. Here, though we have registered
significant successes, the fact of the matter is that we have not
been able to abolish poverty, ignorance and disease from among our
people.
The massive programmes that we have launched in these
fields have not yielded the desired fruits. But we ought not to
understimate our achievements. India is today a considerable
industrial and technological power of the world, and promises to be
an economic giant in the twenty first century.
The economic reforms
that we launched six years ago with the liberalisation and opening
up of our economy have reached a decisive stage. The country has
moved to a high trajectory of growth with a growth rate of 7 to 8
per cent of GNP envisaged for the next five years. This is a record-
breaking achievement. We have accomplished this by standing on the
shoulders of our basic policies of self-reliance and social justice.
In this context I would single out two broad parameters of progress
we have made. One is the revolution in the production of
food grains making the country self-sufficient in food and the
other, is the rise in the average expectation of life of an Indian
which more than doubled since Independence.
Notwithstanding all
these we have yet to provide for our people safe drinking water,
basic health facilities, electricity supply and other basic
necessities of daily life.
But obviously these rates of progress are not enough for us to
take pride in or to be complacent about. Other countries have gone
far ahead of us. We have to move faster without upsetting the
delicate and complicated balance of our society. We have to put
special emphasis on the development of infrastructure and on
investment. But we also have to devote more serious attention to the
question of equity and social justice thus releasing the energies
of nearly 75 per cent of our population for productive purposes.
We have to give the youth of the country new opportunities, new
hopes and new challenges. All these require hard work, discipline
and unity of purpose and faith in the future of the country.
India has always had a vision of the world and a message for the
world, it has played a crucial role in international relations and
has every right to be in the central organs of the United Nations
system. From the dawn of our civilisation we had believed the
world is one and humanity is a single family.
In dark and bitter days of the Cold War, it was this vision that Jawaharlal Nehru projected to the world through his policy of
non-alignment and peaceful co-existence. The Cold War is fortunately
over today partly due to the refusal of India and other non aligned
nations to join up with one or the other bloc and their efforts to
promote detente and reconciliation between the two.
A new pluralistic world order has now emerged but there are still signs
of the powerful developed nations trying to marginalise the weak
and developing countries which constitute two-thirds of the world.
And real disarmament and a world without arms remain a distant
dream.
In this context, India entertains her vision of the world
as an associate of free and independent nations in an
inter-dependent world. Let us on this fiftieth anniversary of our
Independence dedicate ourselves to the welfare and happiness of the
people of India, the peoples of Asia, and all humanity.
Jai hind
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