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India's Poverty, Agriculture and Social Development in a Global Context: Comparisons with Developing |
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This paper is a work in progress. It raises more questions and offers
more hypotheses than provides answers. Its objective is to take
advantage of this gathering of some of the best minds in and on India,
as well as solicit reactions from other India experts, to some basic
indicators of performance and their possible explanators. Its intention
is to set the stage for developing a better understanding of the
“levers” for accelerating India’s socioeconomic performance and help
India to truly join the ranks of “emerging economies”. Drawing on a
number of comparative data sources and research studies on various
aspects of development, the paper shows that despite improvements in
India’s performance over the last two decades, India lags far behind
many East Asian countries in growth and development, particularly
China, the country of the size and complexity comparable to India’s.
With widely differing performance over two decades the gap between the
two countries has increased substantially. While one can debate the
results of individual studies and specific indicators, the consistency
of results across many different sectors from many different data
sources and analysts leads to a clear conclusion that the growth and
development performance of other Asian countries, including China has
been superior. The question is why?
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