India’s tricky path to industrialisation

A recent editorial in the Financial Times discusses the failed venture of Tata Motors to set up a manufacturing facility for the worlds cheapest car, the Tata Nano in West Bengal.

I wholeheartedly agree with the central notion of the article that if India is to prosper, industrialisation is the way to go. But suggesting that we follow China's lead and use force to grab land and suppress dissent and freedom of speech just in the name of national progress is ludicrous.

Agreed that half of China's population now lives in the urban area, but measuring progress by just having high tech industrialized cities, without providing the basic rights to individuals who live there is just myopic and lacking foresight. What good is the life of an individual when they have no opportunity to express any view that is contrary to the Party line. What good is all your luxurious city life, if at the first sign of dissent you are silenced and thrown into a dungeon.

That's where democracy comes into the picture. Had it not been for the farmers dissent, it would not have been revealed that the process of how the land was allocated is not fair. So this has provided a learning experience for the parties involved and the next time when such a deal happens, they will make sure that these learnings are applied when negotiating the deal and that will lead to a better outcome.

I agree that with the editorial that industrialisation is needed and is needed badly if India is to lift its teeming masses out of poverty. But doing it by suppressing freedom of speech and expression is the wrong way to go about it. And this is a delicate path which India has to walk, where it modernizes itself without giving up its democracy.