Logo

Essay on India is a Developing Country

Students are often asked to write an essay on India is a Developing Country in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on India is a Developing Country

Introduction.

India, located in South Asia, is often referred to as a developing country. This means it’s in a phase of economic and social transformation.

Economic Growth

India’s economy is growing rapidly. It’s a hub for information technology and has a booming service sector. However, agriculture still employs many people.

Social Development

India is making strides in education and healthcare. Yet, challenges like poverty and illiteracy persist, indicating a need for further development.

Despite challenges, India’s progress is commendable. With continued efforts, it’s poised to achieve more growth and development.

250 Words Essay on India is a Developing Country

India, officially known as the Republic of India, is often categorized as a developing nation. Despite being the world’s largest democracy and the seventh-largest country by land area, its economic, social, and political aspects are still in a state of evolution.

Economic Perspective

From an economic viewpoint, India is a mixed bag. It is the world’s fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP, thanks to its robust sectors like IT, telecommunications, textiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, steel, and aviation. However, it still grapples with issues like poverty, unemployment, and a significant informal economy.

Social Aspect

India’s social fabric is a rich tapestry of diverse cultures, languages, religions, and traditions. However, the country faces challenges such as illiteracy, gender inequality, and social discrimination. These issues, coupled with a high population density, make social development a complex task.

Political Landscape

India’s political structure is a federal parliamentary democratic republic, where the President is the head of state and the Prime Minister is the head of government. While the political system has been stable, corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency remain significant hurdles.

In conclusion, India is indeed a developing country, with a vast potential for growth and improvement. Its journey towards development is marked by both achievements and challenges. The nation’s future hinges on how effectively it can address its issues and capitalize on its strengths.

500 Words Essay on India is a Developing Country

India, a country rich in history, culture, and diversity, is classified as a developing nation by various global economic indicators. Despite being the world’s fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP, India is still grappling with numerous challenges that hinder its progress towards becoming a developed nation.

India’s Economic Landscape

India’s economy is a mixed bag of traditional agriculture, modern industries, and a multitude of services. The agricultural sector, although decreasing in its contribution to the GDP, still employs a significant portion of the population. The services sector, on the other hand, has seen a steady rise, contributing to over half of India’s GDP. The industrial sector, though growing, has yet to reach its potential due to issues like inadequate infrastructure and regulatory bottlenecks.

Challenges to Development

Despite impressive economic growth, India faces several critical challenges. Poverty and income inequality remain significant issues, with a large segment of the population living under the poverty line. Lack of access to quality education and healthcare, particularly in rural areas, further exacerbates these disparities.

Infrastructure development is another major challenge. Issues like inadequate transport facilities, inconsistent electricity supply, and lack of clean drinking water are prevalent, particularly in rural and underdeveloped regions.

The Demographic Dividend

India’s demographic profile presents both opportunities and challenges. With over 65% of its population under the age of 35, India has a vast pool of young, working-age individuals. This demographic dividend can propel economic growth if harnessed effectively. However, the lack of skills and opportunities, particularly in rural and semi-urban areas, could turn this potential asset into a liability.

Steps Towards Development

India is taking steps to address these challenges. The government has initiated several programs aimed at poverty alleviation, improving healthcare and education, and developing infrastructure. The ‘Make in India’ initiative is aimed at boosting the manufacturing sector and creating jobs. Similarly, the ‘Digital India’ initiative seeks to leverage technology to enhance governance and public services.

India’s journey from a developing to a developed nation is a complex process, requiring concerted efforts to address the numerous challenges it faces. However, with its vast resources, youthful population, and strategic initiatives, India has immense potential to transform its status from a developing to a developed nation. The journey may be long and arduous, but with consistent efforts and strategic planning, India can indeed realize its vision of becoming a global economic powerhouse.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

  • Essay on Illiteracy in India
  • Essay on Indian Festival
  • Essay on Human Rights in India

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

short essay on development of india

Image

The World Bank In India

With a population of more than 1.4 billion, India is the world’s largest democracy. Over the past decade, the country’s integration into the global economy has been accompanied by economic growth. India has now emerged as a global player.

AT A GLANCE

India is one of the fastest growing economies of the world and is poised to continue on this path, with aspirations to reach high middle income status by 2047, the centenary of Indian independence. It is also committed to ensuring that its continued growth path is equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change, and in line with its goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2070.

The growth of the past two decades has also led to India making remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty. Between 2011 and 2019, the country is estimated to have halved the share of the population living in extreme poverty - below $2.15 per person per day (2017 PPP) (World Bank Poverty and Inequality Portal and Macro Poverty Outlook, Spring 2023). In recent years, however, the pace of poverty reduction has slowed especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, but has since moderated in 2021-22.

Certain challenges persist. Inequality in consumption continues, with a Gini index of around 35 over the past two decades. Child malnutrition has remained high, with 35.5 percent of children under the age of 5 years being stunted, with the figure rising to 67 percent for children in the 6-59 months age group. Headline employment indicators have improved since 2020 but concerns remain about the quality of jobs created and the real growth in wages, as well as around the low participation of women in the laborforce.

India’s aspiration to achieve high income status by 2047 will need to be realized through a climate-resilient growth process that delivers broad-based gains to the bottom half of the population. Growth-oriented reforms will need to be accompanied by an expansion in good jobs that keeps pace with the number of labor market entrants. At the same time, gaps in economic participation will need to be addressed, including by bringing more women into the workforce.

The World Bank is partnering with the government in this effort by helping strengthen policies, institutions, and investments to create a better future for the country and its people through green, resilient, and inclusive development.

Economic Outlook

After real GDP contracted in FY20/21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, growth bounced back strongly in FY21/22, supported by accommodative monetary and fiscal policies and wide vaccine coverage. Consequently, in 2022, India emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, despite significant challenges in the global environment – including renewed disruptions of supply lines following the rise in geopolitical tensions, the synchronized tightening of global monetary policies, and inflationary pressures.

In FY22/23, India’s real GDP expanded at an estimated 6.9 percent. Growth was underpinned by robust domestic demand, strong investment activity bolstered by the government’s push for investment in infrastructure, and buoyant private consumption, particularly among higher income earners. The composition of domestic demand also changed, with government consumption being lower due to fiscal consolidation.

Since Q3 FY22/23, however, there have been signs of moderation, although the overall growth momentum remains robust. The persisting headwinds – rising borrowing costs, tightening financial conditions and ongoing inflationary pressures – are expected to weigh on India’s growth in FY23/24. Real GDP growth is likely to moderate to 6.3 percent in FY23/24 from the estimated 6.9 percent in FY22/23.

Both the general government fiscal deficit and public debt to GDP ratio increased sharply in FY20/21 and have been declining gradually since then, with the fiscal deficit falling from over 13 percent in FY20/21 to an estimated 9.4 percent in FY22/23. Public debt has fallen from over 87 percent of GDP to around 83 percent over the same period. The consolidation has largely been driven by an increase in revenues and a gradual withdrawal of pandemic-related stimulus measures. At the same time, the government has remained committed to increasing capital spending, particularly on infrastructure, to boost growth and competitiveness.

Last Updated: Sep 27, 2023

THE WORLD BANK GROUP AND INDIA

The World Bank Group’s (WBG) over seven decade-long partnership with India is strong and enduring. Since the first loan to Indian Railways in 1949, the WBG’s financing, analytical work, and advisory services have contributed to the country’s development. International Development Association – the WBG’s soft-lending arm created for developing countries like India - has supported activities that have had a considerable impact on universalizing primary education; empowering rural communities through a series of rural livelihoods projects; revolutionizing agriculture through support of the Green and White (milk) Revolutions; and helping to combat polio, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS.   In FY18, the relationship reached a major milestone when India became a low middle-income country and graduated from International Development Association financing.

COUNTRY PARTNERSHIP FRAMEWORK

The WBG’s present engagement with India is guided by its Country Partnership Framework for FY18-22 (CPF).  The CPF builds on the decades-long partnership and seeks to address the country’s development aspirations and priority needs identified in the Group’s  Systematic Country Diagnostic for India . It aims to work with India so that the country’s rapidly growing economy makes much more efficient use of resources; fosters inclusiveness by investing in human capital and generating more quality jobs; and develops strong public sector institutions that are capable of meeting the demands of a rising middle-class economy. The CPF’s approach combines a focus on ‘what’ the WBG will work on and ‘how’ it will engage India in the process.  What  will   the WBG work on?

  • Promoting resource-efficient growth , including in the rural, urban, and energy sectors as well addressing disaster risk management and air pollution;
  • Enhancing competitiveness and enabling job creation , including improving the business climate, access to finance, connectivity, logistics, skilling, and increasing female labor force participation;
  • Investing in human capital  through early childhood development, education, health, social protection, and rural water supply and sanitation. 

How  will the WBG amplify the impact of its work in India?

  • By leveraging the  private sector
  • By harnessing India’s  federalism
  • By strengthening  public institutions
  • By supporting  Lighthouse India  to foster knowledge exchanges within the country and between India and the rest of the world. 

In all its activities, the WBG will seek to address  climate change, gender gaps,  and the  challenges and opportunities afforded by technology .  

WORLD BANK GROUP PROGRAM

The World Bank’s lending program consists of 98 lending operations. Of the $21.4 billion in commitments, $19.3 billion is from IBRD, $2.0 billion is from IDA – the Bank’s soft lending arm - and $0.1 billion is from other sources, primarily grant funding from the Global Environment Fund. 

Roughly a little more than one third of these operations and around 40% of commitments are either for central or multi-state operations, while the remainder consists of state-specific operations in 26 of India’s 28 states. 

The four largest portfolios are  Agriculture  (15 operations totaling $3.1 billion in commitments),  Energy , (11 projects totaling $4.0 billion in commitments), Health, Nutrition & Population  (11 projects totaling $2.8 billion) and Transport  and Water (11 projects each totaling $2.5 billion respectively).

In FY23, the Bank approved 15 operations amounting to $4.37 billion.  Of this, $ 4.32 billion is lending from IBRD and $0.05 billion from IDA (recommitted from cancelled IDA programs). Around 15-18 projects are expected to be delivered in FY24, with total commitments in the range of $3.5 – 4 billion.

For the IFC, India is the biggest client country, accounting for over 10 percent of its global portfolio with a committed portfolio of US$6.5 billion as of June 30, 2023. IFC has more than 250+ active projects in sectors including infrastructure, health, energy, manufacturing, housing, technology, and finance. Since its first engagement in 1958, IFC has invested more than US$27 billion (including mobilization) in over 500 companies in India. India is the sixth largest shareholder in IFC, owning a 4.01 percent stake.

IBRD and IFC work together in several areas, most notably in energy, transport, water and health. The World Bank partnership has been particularly strong in raising financing for renewable energy initiatives, especially in supporting the Government of Madhya Pradesh in setting up the largest solar park project that provides solar power with a total capacity of 2.25 gigawatts at a record low cost, reducing carbon emissions by 3.8 million metric tons per year and powering 60% of the Delhi metro. Similarly, IFC and IBRD collaborated under the Government of India’s flagship Clean Ganga program, ‘ Namami Gange ,’ helping revamp sewage treatment plants using hybrid annuity-based PPP projects, treating 218 million liters of water per day in three cities, and contributing to the steady rejuvenation of the sacred river for millions. IFC led the PPP mandate, while IBRD loan facilitated payment guarantees to boost private sector participation in the sector.

The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) does not have exposure in India. MIGA has been working closely with the Ministry of Finance to provide credit enhancement solutions at the state-level and state-owned enterprise (SOE) level. This will enable state governments and SOEs to utilize long-term commercial financing, which can complement concessional lending provided by other multilaterals and development finance institutions.

The WBG has a wide-ranging program of Advisory Services & Analytics. The program informs policy debate, provides analytical underpinnings and learnings for operations and strategy, facilitates the scale up of innovative solutions, and helps to improve state capability. As of October 2021, some 18 analytical studies and 15 advisory activities were ongoing. Key areas of focus include  poverty and macroeconomic analysis ,  financial sector reform ,  enhancing human capital including universal health coverage  and  gender ,  air quality management , as well as  state capability and governance . 

*FY23 means Financial Year from July 2022 - June 2023

WBG financing supported India’s achievement of numerous results over the past five years, highlights of which include:

Education : The World Bank’s approximately $2.7 billion support for education in India covers primary, secondary, and tertiary education, as well as skills development for its young population.  

The World Bank’s $250 million Skill India Mission Operation (SIMO) is backing Central and State government initiatives to skill young people—including the disadvantaged and vulnerable—to acquire the skills needed for a wide range of jobs that are in demand in the market. The project has trained almost 6 million young people, 34 percent of whom are women. Some 40 percent of the trainees were employed within six months of completing their course.

The World Bank also supports state government programs for reforms in primary and senior secondary education. School education projects in Andhra Pradesh , Chhattisgarh , Gujarat and Nagaland are helping strengthen foundational learning of the students, provide training and resources for the professional development of teachers, and use data-driven programs to  improve learning assessment systems for remedial education.

A new World Bank program - Multidisciplinary Education and Research Improvement in Technical Education Project   to be implemented in 14 States and Union Territories will support research and innovation in climate change and sustainable energy. The program is expected to benefit around 350,000 students. In Madhya Pradesh and Odisha , reforms in tertiary education have helped close to 2 million students from disadvantaged groups get access to quality higher education and skills, making them more employable.

Social Protection :

During the COVID-19 pandemic, World Bank support of $1.65 billion through two projects, Accelerating India’s COVID-19 Social Protection Response Program  and Creating a Coordinated and Responsive Indian Social Protection System  helped protect the poor and vulnerable through transfers in cash and kind. About 320 million vulnerable people received cash transfers into their bank accounts.  About 800 million people received additional food rations.

In Jharkhand , a market-driven skills training and secondary education program has helped set up about 13,000 strong community level clubs that provide skills and education to over one million adolescent girls and young women.

In West Bengal , an ongoing program is providing social protection services to poor and vulnerable groups, with a focus on strengthening institutions for delivering care to elderly persons and those with disabilities. The program is also working to increase female labor force participation. Digital transfers through the Jai Bangla Platform reached 3.1 million beneficiaries in the first half of 2023.  

The World Bank’s current health portfolio in India of around $2.8 billion includes both national and state-level projects:

A $1 billion COVID-19 Emergency Response Project helped the government strengthen health facilities in states, procure essential medical supplies – such as testing-equipment and kits, personal protective equipment, gloves, masks, and oxygen cylinders. It also helped insure 2.2 million frontline health workers. In addition, it helped expand health facilities dedicated to COVID-19, raising their number from 163 in March 2020 to more than 23,000 in June 2022.  Over 926 million COVID-19 tests were supported and 3,362 testing laboratories created.

An additional $1 billion in World Bank support is helping the government strengthen health service delivery . This includes all aspects of pandemic preparedness and response , improving real-time disease surveillance, better One Health coordination and enhancing  capacity for biosecurity.

World Bank is also supporting the National Tuberculosis (TB) Elimination Program to improve success rates of treatment, including of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). It is also scaling up direct transfer of cash benefits into the bank accounts of TB patients.

In Andhra Pradesh , Meghalaya , Mizoram , Nagaland , Tamil Nadu , and Uttarakhand ongoing programs focus on improving the quality of health care services, and strengthening the management of non-communicable diseases. In Uttarakhand, clusters of public health facilities, using a public private partnership (PPP) model, now have specialists available regularly, resulting in improved service delivery.  Digital health strategies for improved service delivery are being implemented in Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland and Tamil Nadu.

Rural Water Supply and Sanitation : Since 2000, World Bank projects have contributed over $2.8 billion in financing for rural water supply and sanitation. About 30 million people from over 30,000 villages—with populations ranging from 150 to 15,000—have gain better access to drinking water. About 167 million rural people have benefitted from improved sanitation. Many of the projects have helped promote women’s participation in discussions around changing age-old sanitation behaviors. Local institutions have been strengthened to improve operations and maintenance of water and sanitation infrastructure and upgrade service delivery.

Agriculture

World Bank-financed projects are promoting climate resilient agriculture in Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra Odisha and Tamil Nadu. The focus is on introducing climate smart technologies, using water more efficiently, adopting crop diversification for better soil health and using climate resilient seeds.  World Bank is also focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and using clean energy in post-harvest activities. Since 2016, World Bank-financed projects have brought around 1.7 million hectares of land under climate resilient agriculture.  Around 2 million farmers are adopting improved agriculture technologies.

Empowering Rural Women

Since 2003, World Bank has provided $2.2 billion in support of the Women’s Self-Help Group (SHG) movement in India through several state and national projects. Around 32 million rural women have been mobilized into 2.9 million SHGs.   Rural women have been trained and now earn their own livelihood as Pashu Sakhis (looking after animals), Bank Sakhis (helping rural people operate Bank accounts), or operating canteens at government hospitals and offices, and as masons building toilets.  These empowered women have also been encouraged to become entrepreneurs, running small businesses like poultry and goat farms, grocery shops, and cottage industries, and provided access to markets.   These entrepreneurial initiatives have helped the SHGs access commercial finance of over $14.5 billion.  These projects were also the genesis of the Government of India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM), which is world’s largest platform for women’s social and economic empowerment.  As of April 2023, the NRLM supports over 91 million women through 8.4 million SHGs.

of India's electricity is projected to be carried by Powergrid, India’s national power transmission agency by the end of 2012

India: Commitments by Fiscal Year (in millions of dollars)*

Around the bank group.

Find out what the Bank Group's branches are doing in India.

Image

STAY CONNECTED

Additional resources, country office contacts.

This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser. To learn more about cookies, click here .

Development of India After Independence Essay for Students

Development of India After Independence Essay: Here in this article you will get essay on the development of india after independence in 500, 300, 250, 200, 150, and 100 words to enhance your writing skill. India’s development since independence has been a journey of remarkable growth and progress. Economic reforms, agricultural advancements, and social initiatives have contributed to India’s rise as a global power.

The liberalization of the economy, the Green Revolution, and initiatives promoting education and women’s empowerment have driven positive change. Challenges remain, but India’s commitment to inclusive development and ongoing efforts ensure a promising future. Hence let’s learn the development of India after independence essays in different words count.

Table of Contents

Development of India After Independence Essay in English

India, a country with a rich cultural heritage and a diverse population, was independent of British colonial rule on August 15, 1947. This significant event marked the beginning of a new era for India, opening doors to opportunities and challenges in various sectors. The development of India after independence has been a topic of immense interest and debate. This essay will explore the key aspects of India’s development, ranging from economic growth and social reforms to technological advancements and political milestones.

Economic Development: From Rags to Riches

Economic reforms and liberalization.

After gaining independence, India faced the daunting task of addressing widespread poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. The government recognized the need for economic reforms and initiated several policies to promote industrialization and economic growth. One of the most significant milestones in India’s economic development was the liberalization of the economy in the 1990s.

Economic liberalization in India refers to the series of reforms aimed at opening up the Indian economy to foreign investment and reducing government regulations. These reforms resulted in increased foreign direct investment, improved infrastructure, and establishment of special economic zones.

Green Revolution: Transforming Agriculture

Agriculture has always been a crucial sector in India, employing a significant portion of the population. The Green Revolution, a series of agricultural initiatives implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, was pivotal in transforming India’s agricultural landscape. This movement focused on increasing crop productivity by using high-yielding varieties of seeds, advanced irrigation techniques, and modern farming practices.

The Green Revolution led to a significant increase in food production, making India self-sufficient in food grains. Adopting new technologies and agricultural practices improved yields, enhanced rural livelihoods, and reduced poverty.

Information Technology Boom: India as an IT Powerhouse

India’s emergence as a global IT powerhouse has been remarkable in its post-independence development journey. The country’s abundant pool of skilled technical professionals, coupled with favorable government policies, contributed to the growth of the information technology industry.

The Indian IT industry gained momentum in the 1990s when several multinational companies started outsourcing their IT services to Indian firms. This led to the establishment of numerous software development centers and created employment opportunities for millions of Indian professionals.

Today, India is renowned for its software services, IT consulting, and outsourcing business processes. The IT sector has played a vital role in India’s economic growth, contributing significantly to its GDP and export earnings.

Social Development: Empowering the Masses

Education for all: promoting literacy.

Education is one of the key focus areas of post-independence development in India. The government recognized the importance of education in empowering the masses and ensuring overall societal progress. Efforts were made to expand access to education, particularly primary education, to achieve the goal of universal literacy.

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan , a flagship program launched in 2001, aims to provide free and compulsory education for all children aged 6-14. This initiative was crucial in improving literacy rates and reducing the gender gap in education.

Women’s Empowerment: Breaking Barriers

Women’s empowerment has been a key aspect of India’s development after independence. The government and various non-governmental organizations have implemented several initiatives to promote gender equality and empower women economically, socially, and politically.

Efforts such as the  Beti Bachao Beti Padhao  campaign, which translates to “Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter,” focused on improving the status of girls in society and encouraging their education. Reservation policies have also been implemented to increase women’s representation in political bodies and public institutions.

Healthcare: A Focus on Public Health

Improving healthcare facilities and ensuring access to quality medical services have been significant priorities in India’s development after independence. The government has undertaken various initiatives to strengthen the healthcare infrastructure and provide affordable healthcare to all sections of society.

The  National Health Mission ,  launched in 2013 aimed to provide universal access to equitable, affordable, and quality healthcare services. This initiative has established primary health centers, vaccination campaigns, and awareness programs, resulting in improved health indicators and reduced mortality rates.

Political Milestones: Nurturing Democracy

The constitution: a testament to democracy.

India’s Constitution, adopted in January 26, 1950, is a remarkable achievement in the country’s post-independence journey. It is one of the world’s longest and most comprehensive constitutions, providing a robust framework for democratic governance.

The Constitution of India enshrines its citizens’ fundamental rights and freedoms, guarantees equality before the law, and establishes a representative and accountable government system. It has played a pivotal role in nurturing and safeguarding democracy.

Electoral Reforms: Strengthening Democracy

India’s democratic system relies on free and fair elections to ensure the representation of the people’s will. Several electoral reforms have been implemented to strengthen the democratic process and make it more inclusive and transparent.

Electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the 1990s revolutionized the electoral process, making it more efficient and reducing the scope for malpractices. The Election Commission of India, an independent constitutional authority, has been instrumental in conducting elections and ensuring their integrity.

Panchayati Raj: Grassroots Democracy

The Panchayati Raj system in India has been a significant milestone in decentralizing power and promoting grassroots democracy. It empowers local self-government institutions at the village, intermediate, and district levels, allowing them to decide on local governance matters.

Panchayati Raj institutions have been crucial in improving rural infrastructure, implementing welfare schemes, and enhancing citizen participation in decision-making processes. They have helped bridge the gap between the government and the people, ensuring effective and responsive governance at the grassroots level.

The development of India after independence has been a fascinating journey, marked by significant achievements and persistent challenges. India has made remarkable progress in various spheres, from economic reforms and social empowerment to political milestones and technological advancements.

However, there is still a long way to go in ensuring inclusive development, reducing inequalities, and addressing the aspirations of its vast population. The continued commitment of the government, civil society, and the people of India will be crucial in shaping the nation’s bright and prosperous future.

Development of India After Independence Essay in 500 Words

India, known for its rich cultural heritage and diversity, achieved independence from British colonial rule in August 15, 1947. This momentous occasion marked the beginning of a new era for India, bringing the promise of progress and development. In the following decades, India witnessed significant changes in various sectors, leading to its emergence as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. This essay explores the development of India after independence, highlighting key areas of growth and the challenges that accompanied them.

One of the primary areas of focus for post-independence India was economic development. The country inherited a struggling economy characterized by widespread poverty and underdevelopment. To address these challenges, the Indian government introduced a series of economic reforms and policies to promote industrialization and attract foreign investment. One of the landmark reforms was the liberalization of the economy in the 1990s, which opened doors to globalization and trade. The move was pivotal in transforming India into a major player in the global economy.

Developing India’s agricultural sector was another crucial aspect of post-independence growth. The Green Revolution, a series of agricultural initiatives implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, revolutionized farming practices and significantly increased crop yields. The introduction of high-yielding varieties of seeds, modern irrigation techniques, and improved farming practices resulted in a boost in agricultural productivity. This not only made India self-sufficient in food production but also contributed to poverty reduction and improved rural livelihoods.

Furthermore, the development of India’s service sector, particularly the information technology (IT) industry, has been instrumental in its progress. India has emerged as a global IT powerhouse, offering various services, including software development, IT consulting, and business process outsourcing. The IT sector has become a major source of employment and foreign exchange earnings for the country, attracting multinational companies and driving innovation.

In addition to economic growth, India focused on social development after independence. Education has become a key priority, with efforts made to improve literacy rates and provide access to quality education for all. The government launched programs such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to achieve universal primary education. These initiatives helped increase literacy rates and reduce the gender gap in education, empowering individuals and fostering human capital development.

Women’s empowerment was another critical aspect of social development in post-independence India. The government and various organizations worked together to promote gender equality and enhance the status of women in society. Initiatives such as the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign aimed at improving girls’ welfare and education, while reservation policies ensured increased representation of women in political bodies and public institutions.

Healthcare has also received significant attention in the development process. The government implemented various programs and policies to improve healthcare infrastructure and provide accessible and affordable medical services to all citizens. The National Health Mission , launched in 2013, focuses on enhancing primary healthcare services, immunization, and maternal and child health. These efforts contributed to improved health indicators and a reduction in mortality rates.

While India has made significant strides in its development journey, challenges persist. Income inequality, regional disparities, and inadequate infrastructure in certain areas are among the issues that must be addressed. Moreover, sustainable development and environmental conservation have become key priorities in the face of rapid industrialization and urbanization.

In conclusion, the development of India after independence has been a remarkable journey of progress and transformation. The country’s economic growth, agricultural advancements, and social development initiatives have uplifted millions of lives. However, there is still work to be done to ensure inclusive and sustainable development for all. With continued efforts and the commitment of the government and its people, India has the potential to achieve even greater heights in the future.

Short Essay About Development of India After Independence in 250 / 300 Words

India’s development since independence has been a remarkable journey of growth and transformation. After gaining freedom from British colonial rule in 1947, the country embarked on a path of progress and development. In the economic sphere, India implemented various reforms and policies to promote industrialization and attract foreign investment. The liberalization of the economy in the 1990s played a crucial role in transforming India into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

The agricultural sector also witnessed significant advancements through the Green Revolution. Introducing high-yielding seeds, modern farming techniques, and improved irrigation systems led to a substantial increase in crop production. This ensured food security, improved rural livelihoods, and reduced poverty.

India’s service sector, particularly the IT industry, has emerged as a global powerhouse. The country has become a hub for software development, IT consulting, and business process outsourcing. The IT sector generated employment opportunities, contributed to foreign exchange earnings, and played a vital role in driving innovation and technological advancements.

In the social sphere, India focused on education and women’s empowerment. Efforts were made to improve literacy rates and provide quality education to all citizens. Programs like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan aim to achieve universal primary education and reduce the gender gap in education. The government also implemented initiatives to promote gender equality and empower women economically, socially, and politically.

Healthcare receives significant attention by implementing policies and programs to improve healthcare infrastructure and provide accessible and affordable medical services. The National Health Mission focuses on primary healthcare services, immunization, and maternal and child health. These efforts led to improved health indicators and reduced mortality rates.

Despite these achievements, challenges remain. Income inequality, regional disparities, and environmental sustainability are among the issues that must be addressed. However, India’s commitment to inclusive and sustainable development, along with continued efforts and initiatives, promises a brighter future.

In conclusion, India’s development after independence has been marked by economic growth, agricultural advancements, social reforms, and improvements in healthcare and education. The country has made significant progress but still faces challenges that must be overcome. With its vast potential and the determination of its people, India is poised to continue its development journey and become a global powerhouse in the years to come.

Essay on Development of India After Independence in 150 / 200 Words

The development of India after independence has been a remarkable journey of growth and progress. With a focus on economic, social, and educational advancement, India has made significant strides in various sectors. Economic reforms and policies have attracted foreign investment and propelled India’s economic growth, making it one of the fastest-growing economies globally.

The agricultural sector underwent a transformative phase with the Green Revolution, leading to increased crop yields and improved food security. The service sector, particularly the IT industry, emerged as a global leader, contributing to employment generation and technological innovation.

India’s commitment to social development is evident through initiatives to improve education, empower women, and enhance healthcare services. Efforts to achieve universal primary education, reduce gender disparities, and provide accessible and affordable healthcare have yielded positive outcomes.

While challenges such as income inequality and regional disparities persist, India’s development journey is a testament to its resilience and determination. With continued efforts and a focus on inclusive and sustainable development, India is poised to achieve even greater heights.

Also Read: 

  • Indian films to watch on Independence Day
  • Essay on Independence Day

FAQs on India’s Development After Independence Essay

1. what were the major challenges faced by india after independence.

Answer: After independence, India faced numerous challenges, such as widespread poverty, illiteracy, social inequalities, and the need for economic development. Building a unified nation from a diverse population with different languages, cultures, and religions was also a significant challenge.

2. How has India’s economy transformed since independence?

Answer: India’s economy has witnessed significant transformation since independence. From being primarily rural, it has evolved into a diverse and dynamic economy with a strong industrial and services sector. Economic reforms, liberalization, and technological advancements have been crucial in this transformation.

3. What role did Mahatma Gandhi play in India’s development after independence?

Answer: Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, played a pivotal role in India’s development after independence. His philosophy of non-violence, emphasis on rural development, and advocacy for social justice and equality laid the foundation for various initiatives in independent India.

4. How has India’s social fabric changed since independence?

Answer: India’s social fabric has witnessed significant changes since independence. Promoting education, women’s empowerment, and healthcare have contributed to improved social indicators. However, challenges such as caste-based discrimination, gender inequality, and regional disparities persist and require continuous attention.

5. What are the key sectors driving India’s economic growth today?

Answer: India’s economic growth is driven by various sectors, including information technology, manufacturing, services, agriculture, and healthcare. The IT sector, in particular, has emerged as a major contributor to GDP and employment generation.

6. What are the prospects for India’s development?

Answer: India’s development journey is ongoing, with several opportunities and challenges on the horizon. The country has the potential to harness its demographic dividend, invest in sustainable development, and leverage technological advancements for inclusive growth. However, addressing issues such as income inequality, environmental sustainability, and social disparities will be crucial for a sustainable and equitable future.

I hope you enjoy the development of India after the independence essay. If you need an essay on any topic, feel free to ask in comments. Happy Learning and good luck!!

  • Essay on Morning Walk
  • Essay on festivals of India

upsc-online-classes

Development in India After Independence

Many think that India’s growth story since the 1947 was good. But several experts often opinion that the country’s development for the past six decades has been average. Despite the announcement of Five-Year Plans which focused on many sectors in order to speed up the pace of development, the result hasn’t been on expected lines. And, the country is taking its own time to climb up with the economic and social world.

Service Sector Growth

Telecom and software development had most of the growth in the nation’s services sector. A trend that started some twenty years back is now well in its prime. Several multinational companies continue to outsource their telecom and IT services to the country. In terms of employment, the services sector employs 24 % of the Indian workforce and this process of development started back in the 1980s. In the 1960s, the sector employed just 4.5% of the working population. According to the experts, the services sector accounted for 63% of Indian GDP (2008-09) and the numbers continues to grow.

Agriculture Sector Growth

Since Independence the growth in agriculture has been somewhat steady. The growth of the sector was about 1 percent per annum up to 1950’s. During the post-Independence era, the growth rate bumped about 2.6 percent per annum. Rapid expansion of farming lands and introduction of high-yielding varieties of crops were the major factors contributing to the growth in agricultural production. One of the significant effects of the growth was that it could well manage to end dependency on import of food grains. Despite the unpredictability of the monsoon, the sector has progressed both in terms of yield and structural changes. Other factors contributed to the growth include, good investment in research, land reforms, expansion of scope for lending facilities, and improvement in rural infrastructure. Besides, the country has also grown strong in the agri-biotech sector. A report from a leading financial institution had revealed that the agri-biotech sector has been growing at 30 percent since the last few years.

Infrastructure Development

Allocation of huge funds and availability of electricity had triggered large scale expansion of infrastructure. The Indian road network has become one of the largest in the world with the total road length increasing from 0.399 million km in 1951 to 4.24 million km in 2014 (July 2014). Moreover, the total length of the country’s national highways has increased from 24,000 km (1947-69) to 92,851 km (2014). Governmental efforts have led to the expansion of the network of State highways and major district roads, which in turn has directly contributed to industrial growth. After almost seven decades, India has bagged the third place in the list of largest producers of electricity in Asia. It has increased its electricity generation capacity from 1,362 MW in 1947 to 1,13,506 MW in 2004. When it comes to rural electrification, the Indian government has managed to bring lights to 5,93,732 (2013) villages as compared to 3061 in 1950.

Education sector

India has somewhat managed to bring its education system at par with the global standard in some cases. A number of initiatives have been implemented to eradicate illiteracy. The number of schools witnessed a dramatic increase after 1950’s. The government had declared elementary education, a fundamental right for children in the age group of 6-14 years by passing the 86th amendment to the Constitution in 2002. At independence, India’s literacy rate was a paltry 12.2 % which increased to 74.04% in 2011. The Government launched a big initiative under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan programme in 2001 to ensure education for the children from 6 to 14 years.

Health care sector

Increase in life-expectancy is considered one of the major achievements in health care in India. For example, life expectancy was around 37 years in 1951, it almost doubled to 65 years by 2011. Besides, Infant Mortality (IM) has also declined with death rate coming down to half of what it was during the 1940-50s. Moreover, similar developments were noticed in maternal mortality rate also. After a long-drawn struggle, India has finally been declared a polio-free country. Malnutrition in children under five years came down to 44% in 2005-06 from 67% in 1980. The number of tuberculosis cases also got reduced to 185 per lakh people in 2009. Moreover, the cases of HIV-infected people are also witnessing a declining trend. Government had also increased public health spending which is about 6- 6.5 % of the GDP.

Scientific achievements

India has reached new heights in rocket science and space technologies. Ever since, the launch of its first satellite Aryabhatta in 1975. India has emerged as a growing power that has successfully launched several foreign satellites. Its first mission to Mars was launched in November 2013 which successfully reached the planet’s orbit on 24 September 2014. Besides, space technology, India is also aggressively pursuing both nuclear and missile programmes. BrahMos Missile (with the help of Russia) inducted into the defence system is the world's fastest cruise missile. After more than six decades of independence, India has reached the level of being self-dependent in the field of space and missile technology.

Read Essays on Development of Independent India

Achievements of india after independence essay

Development of independent india essay

Development of india after independence essay

Essay on development of india after independence

Essay on development of independent india

  • UPSC Final Results 2019 New
  • UPSC Mains Results 2022 [ New ]
  • Free CSAT Practice Test
  • Practice Prelims Test Series
  • UPSC Videos
  • UPSC Results
  • Prelims Question Papers
  • Prelims Marks Distribution
  • General Studies Notes [ Free ]
  • UPSC Prelims Syllabus
  • UPSC Mains Syllabus
  • UPSC Jobs List
  • UPSC Subjects
  • UPSC Age Limit
  • IAS Full form
  • Free UPSC Material
  • IAS Exam Book
  • How to prepare for prelims 2023
  • How to prepare for CSAT
  • UPSC Study Material
  • UPSC Interview Questions
  • UPSC IAS Exam Questions
  • Economic Survey 2020-21 Download
  • Union Budget 2020-21 Download
  • National Education Policy 2020 Download
  • Daily UPSC Current Affairs Quiz
  • Union Budget 2024-25 [ New ]  

Civil Service Essay Contest May - June 2024

  • Are elections free and fair in India?
  • Is employment is real issue in India as compared to other countries? What can we do to improve the situation?
  • Should we do away with reservation and open up to all as equal opportunity?

Civil Service Essay Contest (March 2024)

  • Changing trends in the female workforce, how it can be harnessed for better growth. Views : 386
  • Is the caste barrier breaking due to increased love marriages in India? Views : 1854

short essay on development of india

Top Civil Service Coaching Centers

  • IAS Coaching in Delhi
  • IAS Coaching in Mumbai
  • IAS Coaching in Chennai
  • IAS Coaching in Bangalore
  • IAS Coaching in Hyderabad
  • UPSC Syllabus
  • IAS Full Form
  • UPSC Post List
  • UPSC Subject List
  • UPSC Prelims Syllabus Pdf
  • UPSC Notes Pdf in English
  • IAS Exam Preparation
  • Union Budget 2024 - 2025

Current Affairs Analysis

short essay on development of india

About Civil Service India

Civil Service India is a website dedicated to the Civil Services Exam conducted by UPSC. It guides you through the entire gambit of the IAS exam starting with notification, eligibility, syllabus, tips, quiz, notes and current affairs. A team of dedicated professionals are at work to help you!

Stay updated with Us

Phone : +91 96000 32187 / +91 94456 88445

Email : [email protected]

Apps for Civil Services Preparation

  • AsianStudies.org
  • Annual Conference
  • EAA Articles
  • 2025 Annual Conference March 13-16, 2025
  • AAS Community Forum Log In and Participate

Education About Asia: Online Archives

The history of economic development in india since independence, the background.

The task that the democratically elected leaders of newly independent India embarked on in the early 1950s was not for the faint of heart. It was to lift living standards of a people accounting for one-seventh of the world’s population who earned an average income that was one-fifteenth of the average American income of the time. 1 Three-fourths of the Indian people were engaged in agriculture working with primitive tools and techniques, as either destitute landless laborers, highly insecure tenants-at-will, or small-plot holders eking out subsistence living from their meager plots. The literacy rate stood at 14 percent, and the average life expectancy was thirty-two years.

How successful has the country been in fulfilling the task over sixty years later? The charts in this article, using World Bank data, show how some of the country’s development indicators have changed in the last half-century. The country has experienced an increase in per capita income—especially since the 1980s—as well as reductions in poverty and infant mortality rates. These improvements are not insignificant and mark a sharp break from the near stagnation that the country experienced during British rule. But a comparison with the later superior performance of China and South Korea, countries with a comparable level of development in the 1950s, reveals that India’s performance remains below its potential. How did that come about? This essay provides an account of India’s strategy of economic development, its achievements, shortfalls, and future challenges.

The Initial Strategy

The government in the 1950s adopted a very particular strategy of economic development: rapid industrialization by implementing centrally prepared five-year plans that involved raising a massive amount of resources and investing them in the creation of large industrial state-owned enterprises (SOEs). 2 The industries chosen were those producing basic and heavy industrial goods such as steel, chemicals, machines and tools, locomotives, and power. Industrialization was pursued because leaders believed, based in part on the beliefs of some economists, that the industrial sector offers the greatest scope of growth in production. It was not that the Indian agricultural sector offered no scope for growth. Crop yields in India were quite low compared to other countries, and the recent famine in 1943 had underscored the need to increase food production. Still, Indian leaders did not want to make agriculture the mainstay of their strategy. The preeminence of agriculture they believed was characteristic of a backward economy, and growth in agriculture eventually runs up against the problem of insufficient demand. There is only so much, after all, that people are willing to eat.

Investments in the creation of public enterprises were chosen because one goal of the government was to establish a “socialistic pattern of society,” i.e., using democratic methods to bring large swathes of the country’s productive resources under public ownership. Industries producing basic and heavy goods were chosen for investment over consumer goods because the government wanted to reduce the country’s reliance on imports of basic and heavy industrial goods in line with their belief in the goodness of national self-reliance. “To import from abroad is to be slaves of foreign countries,” the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once declared. 3 The production of consumer goods such as clothing, furniture, personal care products, and similar goods was left to small privately run cottage industry firms that had the added advantage of being labor-intensive and therefore a potential generator of mass employment.

Chart of Percent of People living on less than $1.25 a day

Another strategy could have been to rely on private enterprise for industrial development while the government focused its resources on investments in infrastructure, public health, and education—sectors that are not served well by the private sector. Though leaders were cognizant of the dynamism of the private sector and the existence of India’s vibrant entrepreneurial class, they rejected the strategy that involved a prominent role for the private sector out of a commitment to establishing the socialistic pattern of society that they believed was morally superior. As things eventually turned out, the country came around in the 1990s to adopting this previously rejected strategy.

In order to assure the success of the government’s chosen strategy in the 1950s, complementary measures were put in place. Most industries were given significant trade protection so that their growth was not hampered by competition from more efficient foreign producers. An industrial licensing system was set up to ensure that private enterprises would not expand beyond the bounds that national planners had set for them. The system required all private firms beyond a certain small size to obtain a license whenever they wanted to expand capacity, produce new products, change their input mix, import inputs, or relocate plants. The system put the activities of the private sector under significant control of the government. Pundits and students of political economy who were not socialists derisively nicknamed this stifling system “the license Raj,” comparing this economic format of oppression to the political control of the imperialist British Raj.

Their strategy of increasing agricultural production was based on plans to reform agrarian institutions. According to the thinking of the planners, the poor performance of Indian agriculture was due to the fact that tillers did not own the land they worked, so they had little incentive to make land improvements that would increase long-term productivity. The government planned to implement legislation to redistribute land from large landlords to actual tillers and improve the terms under which tenant cultivators leased land from the landowners. The government also planned to organize small farmers into cooperative societies so that their resources could be pooled in order to buy modern tools and implements and the strength of their numbers could be used to obtain higher crop prices. In addition to increasing agricultural production, such reforms were also expected to alleviate the poverty of the huge class of peasants.

The Initial Results

Industrialization was a moderate success. The newly created public enterprises, albeit after major cost overruns and several delays, turned out steel, chemicals, and other products that were generally associated with developed countries. A British colonial official in the early twentieth century once scoffed that he would be willing to eat all the steel than the Indians would produce. 4 If alive in 1960, he would have eaten 6,300 tons of steel. 5

Still, by the late 1950s several problems resulting from the planners’ chosen strategy of economic development were coming to the fore, and such problems intensified in the 1960s and the 1970s. Many SOEs were run on political rather than economic considerations, so they produced losses that drained government resources rather than—as the planners had hoped—augmenting them. The SOEs could also not be counted on to generate mass employment due to their capital and skill rather than labor-intensive character. Several enterprises were overstaffed and faced insufficient demand for what they produced, forcing them to render idle some of their capacity. The case of the Haldia fertilizer plant is an extreme but illustrative example. The plant was set up in the 1970s and employed 1,500 people. The workers and managers showed up regularly, kept the machine facilities clean and in working condition, and often received annual bonuses and overtime. They lived in a nearby spanking-new township built specially for them, one that had excellent roads, schools, and homes. There was only one thing missing. Because of numerous problems, the plant never produced even an ounce of fertilizer. Yet the government kept Haldia’s lights on for twenty-one years. 6

One government method for financing expenditures was the creation of new money, which resulted in significant inflation.

Chart of Literacy Rate

The plans for the reform of agrarian institutions did not pan out. The push for land redistribution ran into political opposition and clashed with the requirements of due process, so as little as 5 percent of the land was actually redistributed. The creation of agricultural cooperatives also did not materialize due to difficulties of organization and lack of enthusiasm on the ground. Agricultural production barely kept pace with population growth, and the country’s food security remained precarious. The drawback of prioritizing industry over agriculture for public investments became glaringly apparent when the country experienced a food crisis in the mid-1960s, necessitating urgent large-scale imports of subsidized grain from the United States. The crisis undermined the government’s claim that its strategy of prioritizing industry over agriculture for public investment would increase national self-reliance.

The drawback of prioritizing industry over agriculture for public investments became glaringly apparent when the country experienced a food crisis in the mid-1960s, necessitating urgent large-scale imports of subsidized grain from the United States.

Under the fixed exchange rate regime that existed in the country, high inflation in the 1960s reduced the country’s exports while increasing its imports, resulting in a shortage of foreign exchange. The shortage was exacerbated by the food imports made necessary by a drought and a war with Pakistan. Foreign exchange became one of the items the government had to resort to rationing. The reverberations were felt throughout the economy. Several new factories lay idle for want of foreign exchange to import some necessary inputs, while others hoarded foreign exchange to starve their competitors or earn a premium in the black market. Holding foreign exchange without a license became an offense punishable by jail time. Ultimately, the rupee had to be devalued, which generated further disruptions in the economic lives of most people.

Meanwhile, the industrial licensing system, designed to ensure that the private sector operated according to the five-year plans, became a source of much inefficiency and corruption. The micromanagement of the private sector called for much more knowledge and technical ability than government bureaucrats possessed. The system descended into a mechanism for rewarding political supporters of the rulers, which undermined the confidence of the people in the integrity of their governmental institutions.

Perhaps the most unfortunate legacy of prioritizing industry at the expense of other alternatives for investment was that scarce public resources were diverted away from health and education. The meager resources expended on these in India stand in marked contrast to the plentiful attention paid to them in China and other Asian countries. Seventy years after independence, India has still to catch up on these fronts; one-half of its children are malnourished, one-half of women are illiterate, and twothirds of its people lack basic sanitation. As a result, a large fraction of Indians today are unable to directly take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the country’s recent tilt toward a market economy and globalization.

The Change in Strategies

In response to the food crisis of the mid-1960s, the government changed its agricultural strategy. Rather than holding out for the reform of agrarian institutions, it began to guarantee higher crop prices to farmers and utilize subsidies to promote use of modern inputs such as chemical fertilizers and high-yielding varieties of grain developed in other parts of the world. The resulting surge of production—the so-called “green revolution” of the late 1960s—made the country self-sufficient in food grains. The strategy was controversial because it increased economic disparities among the farmers. For the greatest chance of success, the government had to focus its strategy on the irrigated sections—the very parts of the country that were already doing relatively well. The uptake of subsidized inputs was also the highest among large landowners, owing to their greater education, creditworthiness, and the ability to bear the risk posed by adopting new methods. The strategy did not do much to alleviate the economic condition of the agrarian poor, other than providing the indirect benefit of living in a country with better overall food security that has not since experienced famine. Micronutrient deficiencies (not caloric) such as anemia are today a bigger problem among the poor, and the country’s health indicators lag behind those of other countries with comparable levels of income.

The strategy toward industry, however, turned more interventionist after 1965. Elaboration of all the reasons for this need not detain us here; there is a strong case that the interventionist turn was a cynical ploy by new Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for consolidating her power in response to certain political developments. The new policy stance displayed a suspicion of large firms and a preference for the small. The licensing system imposed additional restrictions on the activities of large firms, curtailing their growth. Under a policy that was one of a kind, consumer goods such as apparel, footwear, furniture, sporting goods, office supplies, leather goods, and kitchen appliances were reserved by law for production by small firms. Foreign firms were asked to dilute their ownership stake in their Indian subsidiaries and in response, multinationals such as IBM and Coca-Cola closed their operations and left the country.

To the extent that the success of the large firms was due to their superior technical or organizational capacity, the curtailment of their growth meant that such capacity remained underutilized. Delays and arbitrariness in the issuing of industrial licenses resulted in supply bottlenecks and shortages of many consumer goods. For example, in the 1970s, there was an eight-year waiting list for people wanting to buy a scooter, the preferred vehicle for middle-class Indians.

Thirty-five years after independence, India’s leadership had yet to achieve, to any significant degree, its pledge of lifting living standards.

The reservation of consumer goods for small enterprises meant that the benefits of economies of scale were forgone, resulting in the production of poor-quality and high-priced goods that foreigners shunned and domestic consumers had no choice but to accept. Meanwhile, countries such as South Korea and Taiwan were growing rich by exporting this very category of goods. It was during this time that Indians developed a craze for foreign products, the imports of which were restricted, and the term “imported” became synonymous with “high-quality.” The result of such policies was economic stagnation. The country’s per capita income grew by an average of less than 1 percent a year between 1966 and 1980, a rate that was too low to make a dent in the country’s massive poverty. Thirty-five years after independence, India’s leadership had yet to achieve, to any significant degree, its pledge of lifting living standards.

Also, years of rhetoric about creating rapid development had heightened people’s expectations for their quality of living. Economic stagnation, combined with high inflation caused by the government’s printing of massive amounts of money, bred political unrest and popular agitation, to which Indira Gandhi responded by declaring a national emergency in 1975. Taking advantage of the suspension of democratic procedures and requirements of due process brought on by the emergency, the Prime Minister attempted strict interventions that included rapid land redistribution and forced sterilization as a part of population control. The programs were poorly administered, contributed to incidents of human rights violations, failed to improve the economic situation, and caused a number of unintended consequences. For example, the government’s attempts to liquidate debts of poor farmers led to the virtual drying up of informal sources of credit and the banks were not up to the task of picking up the slack. The chaos generated by the haphazard and poorly administered interventions generated a popular backlash and tainted in many minds the whole interventionist approach to economic development.

By the 1980s, a substantial number of influential people had come around to the conclusion that the government did not have the political and administrative capacity to successfully run a controlled economy that delivered on economic growth. Gandhi, chastened by the political defeats that followed her earlier attempts to impose strict controls, acquiesced to relaxing some of them. Her Cambridge-educated son, Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded her as Prime Minister, enacted further liberalization. Certain industries and business activities were exempted from licensing requirements. Such measures helped to cause robust industrial growth in the late 1980s.

The About Turn

When a foreign exchange shortage threatened a crisis again in 1991, the government made a clear break with past policies. By then, the intellectual consensus in favor of state-led, import-substituting development strategies had greatly weakened. The breakup of the Soviet Union had substantially discredited central planning, and the export-led success of East Asian countries had thrown into light the drawbacks of an inward-looking model of development. Also, cultural changes in India, consisting of a deemphasis of asceticism and a greater acceptance of the pursuit of material gain, had made extensive economic controls untenable. 7 At the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provided rescue during the foreign exchange crisis, but also of its own accord, the government announced major economic reforms. It dismantled the license Raj almost overnight, slashed tax rates and import duties, removed controls on prices and entry of new firms, put up several SOEs for sale, and rolled out the welcome mat for foreign investors. Rather than socialism, the guiding principles of policy now were liberalization, privatization, and globalization.

The country’s share in world trade increased from 0.4 percent on the eve of the reforms to 1.5 percent in 2006, and foreign exchange shortages, once a chronic headache for policymakers, have now been replaced by reserves upward of US $350 billion . . .

The economy responded with a surge in growth, which averaged 6.3 percent annually in the 1990s and the early 2000s, a rate double that of earlier time frames. Shortages disappeared. On the eve of the reforms, the public telecom monopoly had installed five million landlines in the entire country and there was a seven-year waiting list to get a new line. In 2004, private cellular companies were signing up new customers at the rate of five million per month. The number of people who lived below the poverty line decreased between 1993 and 2009 from 50 percent of total population to 34 percent. The exact estimates vary depending on the poverty line used, but even alternative estimates indicate a post-1991 decline of poverty that is more rapid than at any other time since independence. The country’s share in world trade increased from 0.4 percent on the eve of the reforms to 1.5 percent in 2006, and foreign exchange shortages, once a chronic headache for policymakers, have now been replaced by reserves upward of US $350 billion—prompting debates about what to do with the “excess reserves.” 8

Several significant economic challenges remain for India. The economy has polarized into a highly productive, modern, and globally integrated formal sector, employing about 10 percent of the labor force, and a low-productivity sector consisting of agriculture and urban informal activities, engaging 90 percent of the labor force. The sectors that have experienced the most growth are services and capital-intensive manufacturing. It is illustrative that IT and pharmaceuticals are the two sectors of the economy with international renown. Such industries tend to be urban and employ mainly skilled workers. Yet to come India’s way are millions of lowskill manufacturing jobs that have allowed the poor in East Asian countries to climb into the middle class. Companies are loath to set up labor-intensive manufacturing because Indian labor laws are some of the most restrictive in the world. For example, a manufacturing unit hiring more than 100 workers cannot lay off any of them without seeking government permission, which is rarely granted. 9 Liberalization of labor laws tends to run into fierce political opposition. The second reason for the dearth of manufacturing jobs is that the country’s infrastructure is relatively deficient, and so companies increasingly practicing just-in-time inventory management do not find it cost-effective to include India in their global supply chains. 10

The provision of public services in India is appallingly poor. Government schools and clinics are underfunded and inadequately supervised, and their workers display low morale and high absenteeism. Yet such public institutions are rarely held accountable for their performance. 11 The middle class has largely opted out of the system in favor of private health care, schools, and transportation so there is little political pressure from them to improve the system. Most middle-class Indians now even own a power generator to cope with everyday power cuts. The poor take the brunt of the derelict public services. Two million children die in India every year from easily preventable diseases, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and immunization rates in India are amongst the lowest in the world. Air pollution levels in urban areas pose a severe public health crisis. According to a survey by the World Health Organization (WHO), thirteen out of the twenty most polluted cities in the world are Indian. 12 The country still relies heavily on inexpensive coal to generate power and has shown very little willingness to move toward alternative energy sources.

Given the current policies and state of governance in India, it is hard to see an obvious path into the middle class for the multitudes still remaining in poverty. Global demand for low-wage, low-skill labor to sew T-shirts or assemble TVs is not what it used to be, because production is now becoming increasingly mechanized and some of it is being “reshored” back to the rich countries. For several hundred million poor people in delicate health and with little education, the country will have to find a way to overcome the technical, institutional, and economic barriers to developing the capabilities necessary for functioning in a twenty-first-century economy. It is not a task for the faint-hearted.

Share this:

  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

1. The figure is calculated from the estimated per capita income of the two countries. See The Madisson-Project (2013) database at http://tinyurl.com/pvqeuay.

2. Francine Frankel provides a detailed study of how such a strategy came to be chosen is in India’s Political Economy: 1947-2004 , 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

3. Arvind Panagariya, India: An Emerging Giant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25.

4. Wolfgang Messner, Working with India (Berlin: Springer Publishing, 2009), 49.

5. The tonnage statistic comes from the Handbook of World Steel Statistics (1978), published by the International Iron and Steel Institute.

6. This and many other cases of economic dysfunctions of the era are recounted by a former CEO and public intellectual, Gurcharan Das, in his memoirs, India Unbound: From Independence to Information Age (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000).

7. For an elaboration, see Nimish Adhia, “The Role of Ideological Change in India’s Economic Liberalization,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 44, issue C (2013): 103– 111.

8. Panagariya provides a detailed academic reference on Indian economic policies and their effects in India: An Emerging Giant .

9. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya give a fuller account of Indian labor laws in India’s Tryst with Destiny (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).

10. Robyn Meredith well describes the twenty-first-century multinational supply chains in chapter 5 of her book, “The Disassembly Line,” in The Elephant and the Dragon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

11. Good accounts of the lives of India’s poor and the causes of the dysfunction in the country’s public services are given by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen in An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee in Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).

12. “Thirteen of the Twenty Most Polluted Cities in the World Are Indian,” Quartz India , last modified December 7, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/nyekwwk .

  • Latest News
  • Join or Renew
  • Education About Asia
  • Education About Asia Articles
  • Asia Shorts Book Series
  • Asia Past & Present
  • Key Issues in Asian Studies
  • Journal of Asian Studies
  • The Bibliography of Asian Studies
  • AAS-Gale Fellowship
  • Council Grants
  • Book Prizes
  • Graduate Student Paper Prizes
  • Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies Award
  • First Book Subvention Program
  • External Grants & Fellowships
  • AAS Career Center
  • Asian Studies Programs & Centers
  • Study Abroad Programs
  • Language Database
  • Conferences & Events
  • #AsiaNow Blog

Throughout May, AAS is celebrating Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Read more

InfinityLearn logo

Development of India After Independence Essay

short essay on development of india

Table of Contents

Development of India After Independence Essay: India’s journey after gaining independence in 1947 has been nothing short of remarkable. The nation has made significant strides in various sectors, propelling itself towards economic growth, technological advancement, and social development. India’s development journey after independence has been a saga of growth, progress, and change. The nation, once struggling with poverty and colonial legacy, embarked on a path of economic and social transformation. Over the decades, India has achieved remarkable milestones, including technological advancements, improved healthcare, and increased literacy rates. While challenges persist, India’s journey reflects its resilience, diversity, and determination to build a prosperous and inclusive future. In this article, we’ll provide sample essays of varying lengths to illustrate its progress.

Fill Out the Form for Expert Academic Guidance!

Please indicate your interest Live Classes Books Test Series Self Learning

Verify OTP Code (required)

I agree to the terms and conditions and privacy policy .

Fill complete details

Target Exam ---

Whether you need a 100-word overview or a more detailed 500-word essay on the topic “Development of India After Independence”, we’ve got your back. Refer to the sample essays given below.

Development of India After Independence Essay 1: 100 Words

India gained independence from British rule on August 15, 1947, and since then, there has been a noteworthy development in various sectors. The country witnessed massive advancements in science and technology, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. The establishment of prestigious institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Space Research Organisation propelled India into becoming a global hub for technological innovation. Additionally, initiatives such as the Green Revolution brought about a paradigm shift in agriculture, leading to increased food production. Despite economic and social challenges, India’s progress after independence demonstrates the immense potential and resilience of its people.

Development of India After Independence Essay 2: 250 Words

The development of India after gaining independence in 1947 has been marked by significant achievements and transformative changes. At the time of independence, India faced numerous challenges, including widespread poverty, illiteracy, and inadequate infrastructure. However, the nation embarked on a journey of progress and development that has since witnessed remarkable milestones.

One of the key pillars of India’s development has been economic growth. The country implemented economic reforms in the 1990s, liberalizing various sectors and fostering entrepreneurship. This led to a surge in economic activity, attracting foreign investments, and propelling India into the ranks of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

India’s technological advancement has been another noteworthy achievement. The country’s IT industry has gained global recognition, and India has become a hub for software services and innovation. This technological prowess has not only boosted the economy but also enhanced India’s global standing.

Furthermore, India has made strides in improving healthcare and education. Initiatives like the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan have expanded healthcare access and increased literacy rates across the country. These efforts have had a positive impact on the overall quality of life for millions of Indians.

In conclusion, India’s development journey after independence is a testament to its resilience, diversity, and commitment to progress. While challenges remain, the nation has achieved significant growth in various sectors, positioning itself as a global economic and technological powerhouse.

Take free test

Development of India After Independence Essay 3: 300 Words

India’s post-independence development has been a story of remarkable progress and transformation. After gaining independence in 1947, India faced numerous challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, and a fragile economy. However, the nation embarked on a journey of development that has witnessed significant milestones.

Economic growth has been a cornerstone of India’s progress. The nation adopted economic reforms in the 1990s, opening up its markets and attracting foreign investments. This led to robust economic expansion, making India one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. The IT and services sector, in particular, flourished, earning India a reputation as a global technology hub.

India’s technological advancements have also been a notable achievement. The country’s IT industry has grown exponentially, with Indian professionals contributing to innovation and software development on a global scale. This technological prowess has not only boosted the economy but has also strengthened India’s position in the global arena.

Improvements in healthcare and education have played a pivotal role in India’s development. Initiatives such as the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan have expanded access to healthcare and education in rural and remote areas. These efforts have resulted in increased literacy rates and improved healthcare outcomes, enhancing the quality of life for millions of Indians.

Additionally, India has made strides in infrastructure development, urbanization, and social inclusion. The nation has launched ambitious projects like “Make in India” and “Digital India,” aiming to boost manufacturing, innovation, and connectivity.

In conclusion, India’s journey of development after independence reflects its resilience, diversity, and commitment to progress. While challenges persist, the nation has made significant strides in various sectors, positioning itself as a global economic and technological powerhouse with a focus on inclusive growth and development.

Development of India After Independence Essay 4: 500 Words

India gained its independence from British rule on August 15, 1947, after a long and arduous struggle. With newfound freedom, the country faced numerous challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, and social inequality. However, over the years, India has made significant strides in its development and has emerged as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. This essay will discuss the development of India after independence in various aspects such as the economy, education, healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, and technology.

One of the greatest achievements of post-independence India has been its economic growth. The country adopted a mixed economy model, combining elements of socialism and capitalism, and implemented several reforms to promote industrialization and foreign investment. As a result, India’s GDP has increased significantly, and poverty rates have declined.

The establishment of the Green Revolution in the 1960s revolutionized agriculture, making India self-sufficient in food production. Moreover, the liberalization policies of the 1990s opened up the economy to the global market, attracting foreign investments and boosting exports. Today, India is one of the largest economies in the world and continues to experience rapid growth.

Education has also been a priority for post-independence India. The government has implemented various initiatives to increase literacy rates and improve the quality of education. The Right to Education Act, passed in 2009, made education a fundamental right for all children between the ages of six and fourteen.

The expansion of the education system has resulted in a significant increase in literacy rates, which have more than doubled since independence. Moreover, India has established numerous prestigious educational institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, which are globally recognized for their excellence in education.

Healthcare has also witnessed remarkable progress in post-independence India. The government has implemented several schemes and programs to improve access to healthcare services, particularly for marginalized communities. The introduction of the National Rural Health Mission in 2005 aimed to provide quality healthcare services in rural areas, which have historically lacked adequate medical facilities.

Additionally, the government has launched initiatives such as Ayushman Bharat, a national health protection scheme that provides health insurance to over 500 million people, further widening access to healthcare services. These efforts have resulted in improved healthcare outcomes, including a decline in infant mortality rates and an increase in life expectancy.

The development of agriculture has played a crucial role in India’s progress after independence. The Green Revolution, as mentioned earlier, helped the country achieve self-sufficiency in food production and ensure food security for its population.

The government has continued to implement various policies and schemes to support farmers, such as providing subsidies, promoting organic farming, and investing in irrigation facilities. These measures have led to increased agricultural productivity and income levels, contributing to rural development and poverty reduction.

Infrastructure development has been another focus of post-independence India. The government has invested heavily in the construction of roads, railways, airports, and ports, in both urban and rural areas. This has not only facilitated connectivity and transportation but has also attracted investments and boosted economic growth.

Additionally, initiatives like the Smart Cities Mission and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana have aimed to improve the quality of life in urban areas by providing better housing, sanitation facilities, and utilities.

Lastly, the rapid advancements in technology have played a crucial role in India’s development after independence. The country has emerged as a global leader in the information technology and software services sector.

The establishment of technology parks and the promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation have fostered a thriving startup ecosystem. This has not only boosted economic growth but has also created employment opportunities for millions of Indians.

In conclusion, India has made significant strides in various aspects of development after gaining independence. The country has witnessed economic growth, increased access to education and healthcare, enhanced agricultural productivity, improved infrastructure, and advancements in technology. While challenges remain, such as poverty, inequality, and environmental issues, the progress made so far indicates a promising future for India’s continued development.

FAQs on Development of India After Independence Essay

How has india developed after gaining independence.

India has made significant progress in economic growth, technological advancement, healthcare, education, and infrastructure development since gaining independence in 1947.

What are the key milestones in India's development journey post-independence?

Key milestones include economic reforms, IT sector growth, improved healthcare and education, and infrastructure development.

How did economic reforms impact India's development after independence?

Economic reforms in the 1990s opened up India's markets, attracting foreign investments and propelling the nation into one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

What role did the IT industry play in India's development?

India's IT industry achieved global recognition, contributing to technological advancements and bolstering the nation's economy.

How has healthcare and education improved in India post-independence?

Initiatives like the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan have expanded access to healthcare and education, leading to increased literacy rates and improved healthcare outcomes.

What are some recent development initiatives in India?

Recent initiatives include Make in India and Digital India, which focus on boosting manufacturing, innovation, and connectivity.

What challenges does India still face in its development journey?

Challenges include poverty alleviation, infrastructure development, environmental sustainability, and addressing social inequalities.

Related content

Call Infinity Learn

Talk to our academic expert!

Language --- English Hindi Marathi Tamil Telugu Malayalam

Get access to free Mock Test and Master Class

Register to Get Free Mock Test and Study Material

Offer Ends in 5:00

ForumIAS Blog

India as a Developed Nation – Explained, pointwise

ForumIAS announcing GS Foundation Program for UPSC CSE 2025-26 from 27th May. Click Here for more information.

  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 What is a developed nation?
  • 3 Why is India classified as a developing country?
  • 4 Why is India still a developing nation?
  • 5 What have been India’s achievements since Independence?
  • 6 How much gap is to be covered to make India a Developed Country by 2047?
  • 7 What steps are required to make India a Developed Country?
  • 8 Conclusion

Introduction

In his Independence Day speech on August 15, 2022, the Prime Minister of India said, “ We must work towards turning India into a developed nation by 2047. ” The PM spoke about India’s achievements and challenges while rolling out the 25-year goal to make India a developed nation by 100th year of Independence . India is still classified as a developing country and the gap to be plugged to become a developed country is still very wide. Hence, achieving this target will not be easy. Nevertheless, this is an ambitious and worthy target. And to achieve this ambition, very dedicated and focused efforts would be required from all t he stakeholders, the Government and citizens, the public institutions as well as the private sector, from the policymaking to its flawless execution.

What is a developed nation?

Although, India is world’s sixth largest economy with a GDP of ~US$ 3 trillion, it is classified as a developing nation . 

There is no all-agreed definition of a developed country . More than a strict definition, a developed country differs from a developing one in categorisation used by international institutions e.g.,  the United Nations uses the World Bank’s categorisation based on Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (in current US dollars). It classifies countries into low (Income < US$ 1,086), lower-middle (Income between US$ 1,086-4,255), upper-middle (Income between US$ 4,256-13,205) and high-income countries (Income > US$ 13,205). The low and middle-income countries are referred to as developing countries , and the high-income economies as developed nations.

Classification of Countries by Income India as Developed Country UPSC

Source: Indian Express

* (Atlas Method: The World Bank’s official estimates of the size of economies are based on GNI converted to current U.S. dollars using the World Bank Atlas method. The Atlas method smoothes exchange rate fluctuations by using a three year moving average , price-adjusted conversion factor ) .

Apart from the income criterion, there are other broad parameters based on which distinction is made. A developed nation is industrialized , has a high quality of life , a developed economy and advanced technological infrastructure relative to less industrialized nations. Developed countries perform well on key economic criteria:

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) : Countries with a high GDP and per capita income (the amount of money earned per person) are considered developed.

Level of industrialisation : Countries in which the tertiary and quaternary sectors of industry dominate are described as developed. Developed countries generally have more advanced post-industrial economies, meaning the service sector provides more wealth than the industrial sector .

The Tertiary Sector includes companies that provide services such as financial, retail, legal, business processes etc. Quaternary sectors include knowledge-based activities such as information technology, research, and development, as well as consulting services and education. 

Other criteria are the scale of infrastructure, the general standard of living, and the Human Development Index (HDI) .

Why is India classified as a developing country?

First , the World Bank currently categorizes India as a lower-middle income economy . On per capita income, India is behind even Bangladesh . China’s per capita income is 5.5 times that of India, and the UK’s is almost 33 times.

Second , there has been substantial progress in infrastructure development in the last 75 years but still millions in villages even now go hungry and are devoid of schools, hospitals, roads and other such basic facilities. 

Third , the level of infrastructure in urban areas is poor. Most Indian cities have vast slum areas indicative of poverty. There is inadequate piped clean drinking water system, sewerage network or waste treatment facilities. Urban transport infrastructure is unable to cope up with rising vehicles. Urban flooding has become a common phenomena.

Fourth , India performs poorly with respect to social indicators in comparison to developed nations e.g., the infant mortality rate (the number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births) has reduced from 76 in 1996 to 27 in 2020, but it was still over four times the OECD average of 6. Less than 33% of India’s population had received tertiary education, compared to 77% in the OECD economies. India’s female labor force participation declined in the last 25 years, whereas it increased in OECD countries. 

India’s Human Development Index Score at present is 0.645 (UNDP 2020 Report) and is ranked at 131. Most developed nations have HDI Score > 0.85 (top 40 countries).

Human Development Index trend India as Developed Nation UPSC

India’s per capita energy consumption is much below developed countries.

Energy Consumption in Developed Countries UPSC

Source: Business Standard

Why is India still a developing nation?

First , the British colonial rule drained Indian economy for almost 200 years. According to some estimates, India’s share in the world economy declined from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India at Independence, inherited a very weak economy with poor industrial base, under-developed agriculture and poor quality of human resource (18% literacy).

Second , the speed of development has not been as good as it should have been to leapfrog into the developed nations bracket. The reasons include: (a) India has the second largest population in the world that is mostly poor . This places a huge financial burden on the government finances; (b) High levels of corruption and inadequate technological advancement have also slowed down India’s growth story; (c) Almost ~ 50% of the people are still engaged in the primary sector (agriculture etc.) whose income generation potential is low. Vast potentials in the secondary (industry) and tertiary (services) also are yet to be realized. Economists argue that failure to undertake reforms in agriculture (like China did in 1970s-80s) prevented structural transformation of Indian economy (higher proportion of tertiary and secondary sector in employment); (d) The pace of economic growth for the most part since Independence hovered around 3%. This pace of economic growth was too slow to pull large proportion of population out of poverty. 

What have been India’s achievements since Independence?

Development Parameters Since Independence UPSC

Source: Mint

How much gap is to be covered to make India a Developed Country by 2047?

Income Growth to make India a Developed Country UPSC

To catch up with the OECD economies, India will need to increase its infrastructure considerably e.g., India had only 30 colleges per 100,000 people in 2019-20, and AISHE data shows that enrolments per college declined compared to 2015-16. So to reach OECD level of 77% tertiary education level is huge task.

India’s life expectancy at birth would have to improve faster than it did in the last 25 years to reach OECD levels. At the current pace, it would fall short of OECD economies—India added nine years to life expectancy for both males and females between 1995 and 2020.

Life Expectance OECD UPSC

Similarly, India’s IMR is expected to be above OECD Level, though the gap would have been plugged to a large extent by 2047.

IMR of Developed OECD Nations UPSC

Hence, the biggest challenge in achieving the target by 2047 is that the gap with repect to the developed countries is too big.

What steps are required to make India a Developed Country?

First , India must undertake reforms for structural transformation of the economy. There is need to create employment opportunities in the secondary (industrial) and tertiary (service) sectors in order to raise income levels and reduce the burden of population on agriculture. The transformation is necessary to reap the demographic dividend.

Second , the delivery standard of Government services , especially in health and education need radical improvement. The Government must increase public expenditure on health and education and bring it at par with the developed economies (as % of the GDP).

Third , there is a need for a strong action to curb corruption . This would ensure that Government benefits reach the intended beneficiaries and leakages are minimized. Similarly a check on tax evasion will ensure an increase in Government’s tax revenues, which will improve room for spending on welfare sector.

Fourth , the urban local governance must be transformed. The urban planning process needs an overhaul in order to ensure sustainable and inclusive urbanization .

Fifth , to make India a developed nation, the deep rooted inequalities in Indian society must be eliminated , especially gender inequalities. It is an ongoing transformation. In lots of aspects, the situation has improved considerably since Independence e.g., in the recently concluded Commonwealth Games, 40% of India’s medallists were women. Yet, there is need to eliminate injustices on the basis of gender, caste, religion, region etc. in order to create a just and inclusive society .

In essence, making India a developed nation by 2047 is a big challenge. While policies and their effective implementation will be the primary levers to achieve this goal, ensuring unity, and thus, a unified purpose, should be the first step towards ‘Mission 2047’. Many commentators had written India off in 1947; yet India not only survived, but thrived in many dimensions. The same spirit is needed now to realize India’s full potential and make it a developed country.

Syllabus : GS III, Indian Economy and issues related to growth and development.

Source : Indian Express , Economic Times , Business Standard , Mint

Print Friendly and PDF

Type your email…

Search Articles

Latest articles.

  • UPSC Prelims Marathon 18th May – Government Schemes – 2024
  • 10 PM UPSC Current Affairs Quiz 17 May, 2024
  • 9 PM UPSC Current Affairs Articles 17 May, 2024
  • The rapid growth of the biopharmaceutical industry
  • Key provisions of India’s Digital Competition Bill, 2024
  • Impact of AI for drug development process
  • The issue of Proportional Benefits
  • Registered and Recognized Political Parties
  • India-Maldives Relations
  • Issues Associated with Regulatory Fees

Prelims 2024 Current Affairs

  • Art and Culture
  • Indian Economy
  • Science and Technology
  • Environment  & Ecology
  • International Relations
  • Polity &  Nation
  • Important Bills and Acts
  • International Organizations
  • Index, Reports and Summits
  • Government Schemes and Programs
  • Miscellaneous
  • Species in news

Blog

Essay on India

Here we have shared the Essay on India in detail so you can use it in your exam or assignment of 150, 250, 400, 500, or 1000 words.

You can use this Essay on India in any assignment or project whether you are in school (class 10th or 12th), college, or preparing for answer writing in competitive exams. 

Topics covered in this article.

Essay on India in 150 words

Essay on india in 200-300 words, essay on india in 500-1000 words.

India, a diverse and culturally rich country located in South Asia, is renowned for its vibrant festivals, ancient heritage sites, and diverse landscapes. With a population of over 1.3 billion people, India is a melting pot of religions, languages, and ethnicities. It is a secular nation that upholds democracy and freedom. India has made significant contributions to art, literature, science, and philosophy. Despite challenges, it has achieved progress in various fields, including technology and economic growth. As the world’s largest democracy, India’s cultural richness, traditions, and hospitality attract tourists from around the world. With a young and dynamic workforce, India is emerging as a global player in innovation and entrepreneurship. India’s resilience, cultural heritage, and growing influence continue to captivate the world, making it an important player on the global stage.

India, known as the land of diversity, is a country of rich culture, history, and traditions. It is located in South Asia and is the seventh-largest country by land area. India is renowned for its vibrant festivals, ancient heritage sites, and diverse landscapes, ranging from the majestic Himalayas to the serene backwaters of Kerala.

With a population of over 1.3 billion people, India is a melting pot of different religions, languages, and ethnicities. It is a secular country that upholds the principles of democracy and freedom. India has made significant contributions to art, literature, science, and philosophy throughout history.

Despite its challenges, India has achieved notable progress in various fields, including technology, space exploration, and economic growth. It is the world’s largest democracy and has a parliamentary system of government. India’s cultural richness, traditions, and hospitality attract millions of tourists from around the world each year.

In recent years, India has emerged as a global player, contributing to the world economy, science, and technology. It is home to a young and dynamic workforce that is driving innovation and entrepreneurship.

In conclusion, India is a country that embraces diversity, celebrates its rich cultural heritage, and strives for progress. With its vast landscapes, ancient history, and vibrant culture, India continues to captivate the world. The resilience and spirit of its people, coupled with its growing influence, make India a significant player on the global stage.

Title: India – A Tapestry of Diversity, Heritage, and Progress

Introduction :

India, a nation located in South Asia, is a land of rich cultural heritage, diverse traditions, and breathtaking landscapes. With a population of over 1.3 billion people, India is known for its vibrant festivals, ancient history, and varied cuisines. This essay explores the multifaceted aspects of India, including its rich cultural tapestry, historical significance, economic growth, and contributions to the world. From the majestic Himalayas in the north to the serene backwaters of Kerala in the south, India’s beauty and diversity captivate the hearts of millions. Let us embark on a journey through the vibrant and enchanting land of India.

Cultural Heritage

India’s cultural heritage is as vast and diverse as its geographical expanse. It is a melting pot of religions, languages, and customs. The country is home to numerous religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Each religion has its own unique rituals, traditions, and festivals, contributing to the colorful tapestry of Indian culture. Festivals like Diwali, Eid, Holi, Christmas, and Durga Puja are celebrated with great enthusiasm and are a reflection of India’s religious diversity.

Historical Significance

India boasts a rich history that spans thousands of years. It has been the birthplace of several ancient civilizations, including the Indus Valley Civilization and the Maurya and Gupta Empires. The country has been the center of learning and trade for centuries, attracting scholars, explorers, and traders from around the world. The Mughal Empire, known for its architectural marvels like the Taj Mahal, left a lasting legacy on India’s history. The British colonial rule in India and the subsequent struggle for independence led by Mahatma Gandhi shaped the modern history of the nation.

Economic Growth

India has experienced significant economic growth in recent years. It is one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies and has become a prominent player on the global stage. The country has embraced economic liberalization, attracting foreign investments and fostering entrepreneurship. India’s information technology industry, pharmaceutical sector, and service industries have flourished, contributing to its economic prosperity. However, challenges such as poverty, income inequality, and unemployment persist, highlighting the need for inclusive growth and sustainable development.

Contributions to the World

India has made remarkable contributions to various fields, including science, literature, arts, and spirituality. Ancient Indian scholars made significant advancements in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Indian literature, such as the Vedas, Ramayana, and Mahabharata, continues to inspire and influence people worldwide. Indian art forms like classical music, dance, and cinema have gained international recognition for their richness and beauty. Spiritual traditions like yoga and meditation have transcended borders, offering tools for holistic well-being.

Unity in Diversity

India’s strength lies in its unity amidst diversity. Despite its linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, the people of India have come together as a nation. The Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, upholds the principles of democracy, secularism, and unity. The diverse fabric of Indian society is reflected in its official languages, Hindi and English, and the recognition of regional languages. India’s unity in diversity is celebrated through cultural exchange, interfaith dialogue, and the promotion of national integration.

Future Challenges and Opportunities

India faces a range of challenges, including poverty, environmental degradation, healthcare disparities, and social inequality. Addressing these challenges requires concerted efforts in education, healthcare, sustainable development, and social welfare. However, India also presents immense opportunities for progress. With a young and dynamic workforce, a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit, and a growing middle class, India has the potential to achieve inclusive growth, technological advancements, and social transformation.

Conclusion :

India, with its diverse cultures, historical significance, economic growth, and contributions to the world, stands as a shining example of unity in diversity. The nation’s cultural heritage, ancient history, and rapid development reflect its resilience and potential. As India continues its journey toward progress and prosperity, it must embrace sustainable development, address societal challenges, and build an inclusive and equitable society. India’s beauty, traditions, and people leave an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of those who explore its captivating tapestry.

Related Posts

Essential Elements of Valid Contract

Essential Elements of Valid Contract (Explained With Examples)

what is world population

What is World Population? Main Causes, Effects, Top 20 Countries

Essay on Economic Development in India

short essay on development of india

Here is an essay on ‘Economic Development in India’ for class 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on ‘Economic Development in India’ especially written for school and college students.

Essay # 1. Meaning of Economic Development (Traditional View) :

No distinction was drawn between economic growth and development in the beginning of the evolution of economics of development. However, since the seventies it has been thought necessary to distinguish between economic growth and economic development. There are two views even about the concept of economic development. The traditional view has been to interpret it in terms of planned changes in the structure of national product and the occupational pattern of labour force and also the institutional and technological changes that bring about such changes or accompany such changes.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

It may be noted that Kuznets in his study of Modern Eco­nomic Growth interpreted the process of modern economic growth which involves these structural changes. In this view during the process of economic growth share of agriculture in both national product and employment of labour force declines and that of industries and services increases. Vari­ous strategies of development which were suggested until ‘seventies’ generally focused on rapid industrialization so that structural transformation could be achieved.

For this purpose appropriate institutional and technological changes were recommended to bring about such structural changes. Thus C.P. Kindleberger writes, Economic growth means more output and economic development implies both more output and changes in the technical and institutional arrangements by which it is produced.

Thus, according to traditional view, economic development implies growth plus structural change. Structural change refers to changes in technological and institutional factors which cause shift of labour from agriculture to modern manufacturing and services sectors and also generate self-sustaining growth of output. An aspect of structural change which is of special mention is that during the process of economic development there occurs a shift of working population from low productivity employment in agriculture to the modern industrial and services sectors having higher levels of productivity of labour.

That is, during the process of economic development percentage share of working population in agriculture sharply falls whereas percentage shares of working population employed in modern industrial and services sectors substantially increase. Along with this change in sectoral distribution of labour force there occurs a change in sectoral composition of national in­come in which percentage contribution of agriculture to national income and declines and percentage contributions to national income of industrial and services sectors increase. This occurs due to the change in pattern of consumption of the people as economy grows and people’s income increases as well as due to the changes in levels of productivity in the different sectors of the economy.

It is worth mentioning that in this view causal references were made to the role of some social factors such as growth of literacy, education and good health in economic development but they were considered to be of secondary importance. On the whole, in this view of economic development which generally prevailed till seventies, development was considered to be an economic phenomenon in which benefits from growth in overall GNP or per capita GNP and the structural changes accompa­nying it would trickle down to the poor and unemployed. No separate or special attention was paid to eliminate mass poverty and unemployment and to reduce inequalities in income distribution.

Essay # 2. The Concept of Economic Development (Modern View) :

The experience of the developing countries during the sixties and seventies showed that whereas target rates of economic growth were in fact achieved trickle-down effect in the form of creation of more employment opportunities, rise in wages and improvement in income distribution did not operate. The problems of poverty, unemployment and income inequality further worsened instead of getting reduced during the process of growth in the nineteen fifties and sixties in the developing countries.

For instance, in India, Dandekar and Rath found that 40 per cent of rural population in India lived below the poverty line in 1968-69. Using somewhat different approach, B.S. Minhas estimated that 37 per cent of rural population in India lived below the poverty line in 1967-68. Similarly, the magnitude of poverty and unemployment and the extent of income inequalities also increased in many other developing countries.

Thus, due to the failure of traditional strategies of development in solving the problems of poverty, unemployment and inequality, it was realised in the seventies that the concept of development should be broadened so that it should signify that well-being of the people has increased. This led to the view that economic development should not be judged on the basis of growth in GNP alone. Therefore, when we regard the well-being of the masses as the ultimate objective of development, we have to see whether poverty and unemployment are decreasing and how the increases in gross national product or national income are being distributed among the population.

Economic devel­opment will take place in true terms only if the poor people are raised above the poverty line. Late Prof. Sukhamoy Chakravarty rightly writes, “The rate of growth strategy is by itself an inadequate device to deal with the problems of generating employment opportunities and for reducing economic disparities. Much depends on the composition of the growth process and how growth is financed and how benefits from growth process are distributed,”

It is worth mentioning that there is no guarantee that when there is increase in GNP, employment will also increase. It can happen that with the use of more capital-intensive technique while produc­tion may be increasing at a rapid rate, employment may be falling instead of rising.

According to the modern perception of economic development, rapid increase in GNP secured through displacing labour by machines and thus causing rise in unemployment and underemployment cannot be called true economic development.

Professor Dudley Seers makes the meaning of economic development according to the new perception in the following words-“The questions to ask about a country‘s development are therefore- What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all three of these have declined from high levels, then beyond doubt this has been a period of development for the country concerned. If one or two of these central problems have been growing worse, especially if all three have, it would be strange to call the result development even if per capita income doubled. ”

Recently, the concept of economic development has been further widened so that it now in­volves not only reduction in poverty, inequality and unemployment but also requires improvement in quality of life which includes cleaner environment, better education, good health and nutrition. Thus World Development Report 1991, published by the World Bank, asserts- “The challenge of develop­ment is to improve the quality of life, especially in the world’s poor countries, a better quality of life generally calls for higher incomes but it involves much more. It encompasses as ends in themselves better education, higher standards of health and nutrition, less poverty, a cleaner environment, more equality of opportunity.”

Thus the concept of economic development has been greatly broadened. Today economic development is interpreted as not only in more growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but also in terms of good quality of life which, according to Prof. Amartya Sen,’consists in enlargement of opportunities for people and freedom of human choices’.

This new concept of devel­opment includes achievement of freedom from servitude to ignorance and illiteracy. It also includes enjoyment of human rights. Thus United Nations ‘Human Development Report’ of 1994 in the writing of which Prof. Amartya Sen made a significant contribution, asserts, “Human beings are born with certain potential capabilities. The purpose of development is to create an environment in which all people can expand their capabilities, and opportunities can be enlarged for both present and future generations. Wealth is important for human life, but to concentrate on it exclusively is wrong for two reasons. First, accumulating wealth is not necessary for the fulfillment of some important human choices. Second, human choices extend far beyond economic well-being.”

On the basis of various ingredients of good quality of life and other criteria such as enlargement of human choices and freedom a human development index is prepared by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This human development index is considered as a better indicator of economic development index.

ADVERTISEMENTS: (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Essay # 3. The Objectives of Economic Development:

From the study of Sen’s capability approach to development and Goulet’s core values of development we are in a position to explain the objectives of development. The basic objective of development is broad-based improvement in the economic and social conditions of our people so as to achieve better quality of life for them.

Important Objectives of Development:

1. To Achieve a Higher Rate of GDP Growth:

The first and foremost objective of development is to achieve a higher rate of GDP growth so as to raise the living standards of our people. Rapid growth of total GDP or per capita income is considered necessary because it ensures an expansion in the productive capacity of the economy without which broad based improvement in living standards of the people is not possible. However, it should be recognized that faster economic growth, though necessary, is not a sufficient condition for raising the living standards of our teeming millions. This is because one can easily imagine a growth process which may not be sufficiently inclusive to ensure a spread of benefits to the mass of our population.

There are three reasons why GDP growth is necessary for raising the living standards of the population. First, rapid growth of GDP ensures a higher expansion in total income and production which, if growth process is sufficiently inclusive, will make available a larger output of goods and services to be consumed by the people and thus raise their living standards.

Secondly, rapid economic growth generates more employment opportunities and income enhancing activities of the people, provided labour-saving technologies are not used for production of goods both in the industrial and agricultural sectors.

Third, higher GDP growth is important because it generates higher revenues for government which help to finance anti-poverty programmes started by the government.

2. To Eradicate Poverty and Unemployment:

The second important objective of development is to eradicate poverty. In Amartya Sen’s approach to development, poverty should be viewed as deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely as low income. The existence of poverty or deprivation of basic capabilities is reflected in hunger, significant undernourishment/ especially of children premature mortality, permanent morbidity, widespread illness, and lack of basic education and other failures. Though economic growth is necessary for elimination of poverty but is not a sufficient condition for it because it is related to income distribution in a society as well.

Related to issue of poverty is the question of unemployment which exists on a large scale in developing countries, especially in labour-surplus countries such as ours. Chronic and long-term unemployment exists in the developing economies because due to higher population growth relative to capital formation it has not been possible to absorb the increasing number of workers in productive employment resulting in large-scale unemployment in developing countries.

Gainful employment is the means of livelihood for the masses of the population. The growth of employment opportunities needs to be accelerated both in manufacturing and services sectors to provide employment to increasingly educated population which has high expectations and aspirations. Unemployment leads to the feelings of worthlessness and frustration among the youth leading to the increase in incidence of crime in the society.

3. To Expand The Freedoms Enjoyed by The People:

The other important objective of development, as has been explained in Amartya Sen’s approach to development and Goulet’s core values, is to expand the freedoms that people of a society enjoy. Growth of GDP or of individual incomes or industrialization or technological progress are merely means to expanding human freedoms but freedoms depend on other factors as well. As Sen Stresses viewing development as expansion of substantive freedoms directs attention to end or objective of development rather than means such as GDP growth or industrialization which play an important role in the process of development.

If the objective of expansion of freedoms is to be achieved, the various sources of unfreedom such as lack of public facilities of education and healthcare, denial of political liberty and basic civil rights (such as liberty to participate in public discussion) and denial of equal rights to women in the society have to be removed. It is worth mentioning here that some have supported the denial of political liberty and basic civil rights to the people on the ground that they promote economic growth.

However, Amartya Sen has rightly pointed out that there is little evidence that authoritarian politics actually helps economic growth. Indeed, empirical evidence very strongly suggests that economic growth is more a matter of friendly economic climate than of a harsher political system.

Essay # 4. Evolution of Economic Development:

The study of development economics as a separate discipline is relatively new as about 65 years ago in 1950s the study of the problem of economic development of poor developing countries did not constitute an important distinct branch of economics. This is despite the fact that classical economists such as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and Marx extensively dealt with the study of development of the economies. However, with the appearance of neoclassical economics propounded among others by Alfred Marshall and A.C. Pigou who were mainly concerned with explaining efficient allocation of resources in a free market economy, development economics dealing with the developing economies found no place in their works.

Believing in Say’s law of markets they assumed that full employment of resources would prevail in the economy and further that the working of price mechanism would ensure sufficient incentives to save and invest to bring about appropriate growth of GNP. It was generally believed that neoclassical economics applied to developed and developing countries alike. Therefore the need for a special theory to explain economic growth and development for developing countries was not felt. In the 1930s and 1940s, the economists led by J.M. Keynes remained occupied with the problem of involuntary unemployment and depression as severe depression causing huge unemployment took place in 1929-33 in the industrialized countries.

The renewed interest and public concern with the development of poor countries began only after the Second World War when the poverty of the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America posed a great challenge to the peace and progress of the world as a whole and also many underdeveloped countries got freedom from the colonial rule.

It was felt that Keynesian economics which was concerned with the short-run problem of depression caused by fall in aggregate effective demand did not apply to the underdeveloped economies which faced a long-run and chronic problem of unemployment and mass poverty due to deficiency of cooperating factors (such as capital) and low productivity of resources. It was therefore felt that there was need for a distinct and separate branch of special economic theory which explains perpetuation of underdevelopment and general poverty and also the adoption of appropriate development strategies to initiate and accelerate economic growth in the developing countries.

It was pointed out that the problems of poverty, underemployment of underdeveloped economies were quite different and required special analysis. Therefore, development economics which is concerned with the economic growth, capital accumulation and underemployment in the developing countries became a special and distinct discipline. During 1950s and 1960s development policies in underdeveloped countries required acceleration of economic growth and eradication of poverty and chronic underemployment.

For this, economists laid stress on capital accumulation, mobilization of surplus labour for growth and industrialization based on import-substitution through economic planning and with active role of the government. It was thought that due to market failures, development through free market, as emphasized by neoclassical economics, would neither achieve efficient allocation of scarce resources nor brings about desired GDP growth rate to remove poverty and employment. Since rate of domestic saving in these underdeveloped countries was inadequate to bring about a desired rate of growth, the need for foreign aid to supplement domestic saving was emphasized in early approaches to development based on application of Harrod-Domar growth model.

Furthermore, it was suggested in the early approaches to development in the 1950s and 1960s that since demand for primary products was inelastic by advanced industrialized countries, as explained by Prebisch, Singer and Myrdal, to accelerate growth through expansion of primary exports by developing countries would cause deterioration of terms of trade. This led to export pessimism, that is, little prospects of acceleration of growth through promotion of exports. Therefore, those economists who laid stress on limitations of development based on expansion of primary exports, advocated for import-substituting industrialization to promote economic growth and solve the problems of poverty and unemployment in developing countries.

Much of the thinking about development in this early period was how to break out of poverty trap or vicious circle of poverty or ‘low level equilibrium trap’. For this purpose Ragnar Nurkse put forward a balanced ‘growth strategy’ in which he suggested undertaking of simultaneous investment in a wide range of industries so that the workers employed in different industries could generate demand for each other’s products so as to ensure balanced growth by overcoming the problem of demand deficiency.

Hirschmanm, on the other hand, laid stress on the scarcity of decision-making enterprise and also emphasized forward and backward linkages of different industries and to take advantage of them he proposed ‘unbalanced growth strategy’ by concentrating investment in a few industries of strategic importance from the viewpoint of economic growth. Leibenstein and Nelson considered rapid population growth as a retarding factor of economic growth and recommended a certain ‘critical minimum effort’ in terms of investment so as to break out the low level equilibrium trap.

Besides, Arthur Lewis proposed a model of growth of a dual economy with surplus labour in which he emphasized industrialization of underdeveloped countries by mobilizing disguisedly unemployed labour in agriculture or subsistence sector and ploughing back of profits so earned for further capital accumulation and industrial growth. In India Mahalanobis growth model on which Second Five Year and Third Five Year Plans were based gave a high priority to basic heavy industries producing fixed capital goods (i.e., machines) and basic intermediate goods such as steel, fertilizers and emphasised impor-substituting industrialisation to accelerate rate of growth of the Indian economy.

Harrod-Domar model of growth based on Keynesian framework which dealt with the problem of steady growth was applied to the growth problem of developing countries. Harrod-Domar model suggested that growth depends on the rate of saving and capital-output ratio, (g=s/ν), where s represent ratio of saving to national income and ν is rate of growth of GDP).

Unlike the neoclassical economics which assumes smoothly working market mechanism, the early development economists adopted a more structural approach to development. They emphasise rigidities, lags, shortages and surpluses and low elasticities of demand and supply in developing countries. Prebisch and Singer have been prominent economists who laid stress on the limitations of development based on expansion of primary exports because of the adverse effects on terms of trade.

In the early 1970s there was realisation by economists that growth in terms of GDP, though a necessary condition is not a sufficient condition for the reduction of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Therefore, in the second phase of the evolution of development economics when the emphasis on growth of GNP was downgraded, the focus of analysis shifted directly to the removal of poverty, unemployment and inequality in the developing countries.

Mahboob ul Haq, an eminent economist of World Bank who along with Amartya Sen was pioneer in the development of the concept of Human Development Economics Index (HDI) wrote, “The problem of development must be defined as a selective attack on the worst forms of poverty. Development goals must be defined in terms of progressive reduction and eventual elimination of malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, squalor, unemployment and inequalities. We were taught to take care of our GNP because it would take care of poverty. Let us reverse this and take care of poverty because it will take care of the GNP. In other words, let us worry about the content of GNP even more than its rate of increase “.

Thus in the seventies, the reliance on GDP growth alone to solve the problems of poverty and unemployment was challenged. It was pointed out by several economists that benefits of growth were not trickling down to the poor and the number of people living below the poverty line had increased in developing countries. Even the meaning of economic development was questioned. It was suggested that economic development was not the same thing as economic growth.

According to the new view, economic development means not only the increase in GNP (or GNP per capita) bat also the reduction in poverty, unemployment and inequalities of incomes. A World Bank study titled ‘Redistribution with Growth laid stress on redistribution of incomes with reduction of poverty along with GDP growth for development to be meaningful. Besides, in the 1970s and 1980s ILO emphasised that for true development to take place basic human needs must be fulfilled. These basic human needs are food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and availability of drinking water. According to this, without these basic needs being met, development cannot be said to have taken place.

Another important change in the approach to development during 1970s and 1980s was a shift in the emphasis from industrialisation to agriculture. It was proposed that agriculture-led growth strategy would ensure higher growth rate, larger amount of employment generation without causing inflation. Further, during 1970s and 1980s role of human capital (i.e., education and health) instead of physical capital began to be emphasised for boosting economic development.

Besides, in view of the low labour intensity of technologies imported from abroad, the need for development of appropriate technologies suited to the factor endowments of developing countries was highlighted. In this connection, it was pointed out that a developing country should not blindly import foreign capital- intensive technologies but should use discretion as to what technology could or should be imported.

The most significant change in the thinking of development economists came during the decade of 1980s, especially in the mid-eighties. This change was resurgence of neoclassical economics which gives important role to private sector and market mechanism in the process of development.

It was felt that centralised planning and excess regulation and control over the private sector by the State and higher importance given to the public sector was obstructing growth due to its inefficiency in the use of resources. Besides, under the controlled regime, the twin crises of high fiscal deficit and external balance of payments crisis made the growth unsustainable. The policy framework of neoclassical economics such as liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation was suggested by prominent economists, I.M.D. Little, Jagdish Bhagwati, Bela Balarsa who were the advisors to the World Bank and IMF argued that free markets and greater role of private sector (including foreign investors) would ensure efficiency by encouraging competition.

Thus the advocates of the adoption of policy framework of neoclassical economics emphasised government failures to obstruct rapid development. Similar to the neoclassical economists’ approach to development Dr. Manmohan Singh who initiated economic reforms in India in 1991 in his first budget speech as Finance Minister on July 24, 1991, said, “Over-centralisation and excessive bureaucratisation of economic process have proved to be counterproductive. We need to expand the scope and the area of operations of market forces. A reformed price system can be a superior instrument of resource allocation and qualitative control”.

Further, advocating for the adoption of export orientation of development strategy instead of import-substituting industrialisation can be redefined as “the vision of self-reliant economy as one which can meet all its requirements through exports without undue dependence on artificial external sops such as foreign aid.”

As a step towards economic reforms the neoclassical economics recommended the removal of price distortion introduced by government controls and getting all prices right to achieve efficient resource allocation. As Gerald Meier writes, “Markets, prices and incentives became central. Inward- looking strategies of development were to give way to liberalisation of foreign trade regime and export promotion. Inflation was to submit to stabilisation programmes. State-owned enterprises were to be privatised. A poor country was now considered poor because of inappropriate policies, and good economics, that is, neoclassical economics – was good for the developing country”.

Development Economics as a Separate Discipline:

In the 1950s and 1960s the pioneers in development economics had asked why underdeveloped countries were poor and backward and put forward the grand theories and development strategies for starting and accelerating economic growth so as to lift them out of poverty trap. In propounding the various theories and strategies to accelerate economic growth in developing countries, the pioneers in development economics abandoned the use of neoclassical economies which involves free working of market mechanism and role of material incentives and profit motive guiding allocation of resources and economic growth in an economy.

The pioneers in development economics considered the neoclassical economics as a special case applicable to developed countries having not much relevance for the underdeveloped countries as the latter are structurally different from the developed economics. These pioneers investigated the factors that perpetuate underdevelopment and poverty in underdeveloped countries and for initiating and boosting economic growth not only rejected the principles of neoclassical economics but also found theories of development of classical economists such as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and Marx not fully applicable to the present-day developing economies. Prominent contributors to development economics are Arthur Lewis, Ragnar Nurkse, Albert Hirshman, Hans Singer, Rostow, Michael Todaro, Amartya Sen among many others.

However, as explained above, from the early eighties there has been greater reliance on neoclassical economics which gives greater role to market mechanism and profit motive for efficient resource allocation and economic growth in developing countries. Further, as this neoclassical economics applies equally to rich developed countries and poor developing countries.

Therefore, it has been asserted by some economists prominent among whom is Albert Hirshman, that the development economics which was thought to be a separate and distinct subject, different from the principles of neoclassical economics has collapsed and that there is no any distinct or special subject of development economics applicable to developing countries alone.

To quote Hirshman, “The sub-discipline of development economics has achieved its considerable lustre and excitement through the implicit idea that it could slay the dragon of backwardness virtually by itself or at least that its contribution to this task was central. We know that this is not so.”

Hirschman’s view has been challenged by Prof. Amartya Sen. According to him, the original themes with which development economics has been concerned “while severely incomplete in coverage did not point entirely in the wrong direction and the discipline of development economics does have a central role to play in the field of economic growth in developing countries”.

Hirschman pointed to the main themes or ideas which formed the basis of development economics.

(1) Rural underemployment including disguised unemployment that prevailed in underdeveloped countries which became the focus utilisation of surplus labour for industrial growth or capital accumulation;

(2) The subject of late industrialisation of underdeveloped countries which, according to the standard development economics required active role and guided efforts by the State and also economic planning and protection measures by the state to overcome the disadvantages of late industrialisation.

While there have been differences about certain issues in development strategies to be adopted to break out of the low-level equilibrium trap but, as has been mentioned by Amartya Sen, the following three are the strategic themes in terms of economic policy with which standard development economics has been concerned to achieve rapid economic growth:

1. Industrialisation.

2. Capital accumulation.

3. Mobilisation of underemployed or disguisedly unemployed labour for bringing about economic growth.

4. Planning in an economically active State.

As explained by Amartya Sen, the above themes used for planning and active role of the State in promoting industrialisation (or capital accumulation) and the use of surplus labour for it are parts of the standard development economics on account of which neoclassical economics has been said to be inapplicable for acceleration of economic growth in developing countries.

Hirschman who explained the rise and decline of development economics hold the view that the neoclassical economics as applicable to both developed and developing countries alike. In other words, he talked of the relevance of ‘mono-economics’ for both developed and developing countries and argued against the development economics as a separate and distinct subject.

The resurgence of neoclassical economics has drawn its support from the high growth performance of East Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong-Kong and Singapore in which higher economic growth rates have been achieved based on market mechanism, private enterprise, profit motive and material incentives, and liberal foreign trade.

On the other hand, the lower growth in developing countries of South East Asia, Africa and Latin America has been cited as a result of the intervention in market by the government and role of planning in resource allocation in the growth process. Similarly, failure of development experience in Soviet Russia and China under activist state and centralised planning played a significant role has been cited as a proof of collapse of standard development economics with its emphasis on role of State and economic planning.

The sum and substance of the critique of development economics has been that neoclassical economics with its role of free market mechanism, private enterprise, material incentives ensure higher economic growth as against State-guided industrialisation through centralised planning.

However, the above mentioned defence of neoclassical economics and critique of development economics has been challenged, among others, by Amartya Sen. To quote Sen, “I believe that contentious and simplistic though development economics might have been in some respects, the main themes that were associated with the origin of development economics and have given its distinctive character are not rejectable for that reason”.

It is worth mentioning that traditional development economics has concentrated on economic growth as against economic development which is a broader concept than economic growth.

However, so far as economic growth is concerned, the strategic themes such as role of capital accumulation, industrialisation and role of State and planning for acceleration of economic growth is concerned Amartya Sen using World Bank data of GNP per capita, gross domestic investment, (i.e., capital formation) as per cent of GDP and percentage share of industry in GDP and growth rate during 1960-80 pertaining to 14 low-income countries and 18 middle income countries has shown that capital accumulation and industrialisation have played an important role in achieving higher GDP growth rate.

As regards role of mobilisation of surplus labour he points out that high growth performance has distinguished record of labour-using growth particularly in case of China and South Korea mobilisation of labour for bringing about rapid growth is quite outstanding.

Lastly, he points out that in China, Romania, Yugoslavia and South Korea State intervention and planning have played a significant role in fostering economic growth. Thus, in conclusion, Sen writes- “Despite these average achievements the performance of various countries is highly different. There is still much relevance in the broad policy themes which traditional development economics has emphasized.”

Further, in defence of traditional development economics, he writes – “The general policy prescription and strategies in this tradition have to be judged in terms of the climate of opinion and overall factual situation prevailing at the same time these theories were formulated”. Development economics was born at a time when government involvement in deliberately fostering economic growth in general and in industrialisation in particular, was very rare, and when the typical rates of capital accumulation were very low.

It may be further noted that despite the revival of importance of neoclassical economics which emphasises liberalisation and privatisation for accelerating economic growth, role of State or Government is still in two important respects:

First, the Government has to play a significant role in making arrangements for the expansion of education, healthcare for the advance of human capabilities on which growth depends.

Secondly, the government has an important role in building up physical infrastructure such as power, roads, railways, ports and telecommunication as lack of these facilities is holding back economic development.

Thirdly, the Government has a special role in starting schemes for alleviation of poverty and unemployment in the developing countries as the free working of market mechanism will not ensure this.

Essay # 5. Obstacles to Economic Development:

1. Lack of Infrastructure :

Economic growth in the developing countries has been impeded by inadequate availability of infrastructure. Infrastructure includes power, irrigation, transport and communication. It may also include credit facilities available from banks and other financial institutions and also the facilities for the education and training of labour.

The availability of these infrastructures facilitates production in industry, agriculture and other productive sectors of the economy. These infrastructures give rise to external economies and thereby cause reduction in costs, facilitate production and increase efficiency in all productive sectors of the economy. Thus power (electricity) is used in the production process these days both in industry and agriculture.

It is now too well known in India that non-availability of adequate amount of power lowers industrial and agricultural development. Likewise, the existence of the means of transport is essential for transportation of raw materials to the place of production and to sell the goods produced too far off places. In fact, the availability of transport widens the market for goods and thereby encourages their production. Likewise, the availability of adequate irrigation facilities is necessary to raise agricultural output.

One of the most important hurdles in the growth of investment in developing countries is the acute lack of external economies which, as has been stated above, are provided by basic infrastructures such as transport, communication and power. In a developed country the economic system being highly diversified there are tremendous amounts of external economies which a new enterprise can draw upon. The various types of infrastructure in developed countries were generally built up by private enterprise although with the liberal help of the Government in the form of grants and loans.

In contrast, the contemporary developing countries lack an adequate system of transport, communication and power. For instance, the inadequacy of railway network in most of the newly independent countries of Africa and Latin America is a bottleneck in the expansion of national market and growth of industries.

Since development of power, transport, communication involves lumpy investment, has long gestation period and the returns accrue mainly in the form of external economies, the private enterprise is not attracted to build this infrastructure. The Government should therefore play an important role in undertaking the task of building up adequate infrastructure to speed up economic growth.

Likewise, there is a lack of adequate credit facilities or funds. For an entrepreneur who wishes to undertake business or set up some factory he should have sufficient funds to finance it. Credit facilities are also badly needed by farmers for agriculture. The growth of agriculture suffers if adequate credit facilities are not available. Therefore, the Government in the developing countries should give high priority to develop the facilities of providing adequate credit and finance for the development of industry and agriculture.

2. Demonstration Effect and Economic Growth :

In raising rate of capital formation, the developing countries have to contend against one problem which arises from demonstration effect on consumption. Demonstration effect leads to initiation and imitation of superior consumption standards stimulates consumption among the middle and upper middle class which increases their propensity to consume and consequently reduce their capacity to save.

Nurkse laid great stress on this new theory of consumption and saving. We ordinarily think that a man’s consumption depends on his income. But that is not quite correct. A person’s consumption does not merely depend on his own income but also on the incomes and therefore the consumption behaviour of his friends and relations with whom he maintains social contacts.

A man finds some of his friends using colour televisions, luxury cars, costly mobiles, refrigerators, air-conditioners, electric hot plates, and electric washing machines and so on and experiences a sort of restlessness and a craving is generated in his mind to enjoy these amenities some immediately and others some later days. These desires for conspicuous consumption generally outrun the consumer’s means. Thus consumption behaviour of individuals depends not on absolute real income but on relative levels of real incomes. It does not depend on what we can afford but what the others afford and enjoy. This is what Duesenberry calls ‘demonstration effect’.

The intensity of this demonstration effect on saving seriously impairs a person’s capacity to save. He may save less even if his income has gone up; the ability to save may have increased but the willingness to save has decreased. It has been estimated that 75 per cent of the Americans do not save. The reason is not that they are too poor to save but that they are adopting better ways of living seen among the upper classes. It is thus the interdependence of consumer’s preferences which determines the choice between consumption and saving. This is Duesenberry’s relative theory of consumption and saving.

What is true of individual applies also to nations. The disparities in the real incomes of nations have a profound effect on the economic development of nations. Whereas the rich nations can help the poor nations develop economically and break the vicious circle of poverty, they also pass on to them their consumption patterns. The poor countries may not find it easy to increase productivity and raise income but it is easy to imitate costly consumption standards. Thus, there is international demonstration effect which lowers the propensity to save of the less well-off developing countries.

The demonstration effect aggravates propensity to consume and reduces capacity to save which is a serious impediment to economic development. The relative aspect of the problem needs to be emphasized again. It is not the absolute level of income which determines consumption pattern but the relative levels of national income of connected countries which affect consumption of a less prosperous country.

It follows therefore that even if the national income of a developing country goes up, it may not be able to save more than before simply because the income gap between this country and the other countries with which it has commercial or political intercourse has increased. The ability to save may have gone up but the willingness to save would have gone down on account of a keen desire to consume luxury goods which are consumed in the richer countries.

Thus, the interpersonal and international consumption functions are interrelated and not independent. The consumption and saving habits of the economically backward countries are greatly influenced by those of the prosperous countries. As Nurkse puts it, “When people come into contact with superior goods or superior patterns of consumption, with new articles or new ways of meeting old wants, they are apt to feel after a while a certain restlessness and dissatisfaction. Their knowledge is extended, their imagination stimulated, new desires are aroused, the propensity to consume is shifted upward.”

It is not merely the superior consumption prevalent in rich countries which exercises influence on the consumption in the poor countries but also the knowledge of it. First, we know and then we imitate. Knowledge opens eyes to the future possibilities. “It widens the horizons of imagination and desires.” New products or new patterns or designs of old products are constantly being advertised and brought irresistibly to the notice of the consumer at home and abroad. These new goods enter into the standard of living of the poorer communities. “The presence or the mere knowledge of new goods and new methods of consumption tends to raise the general propensity to consume.”

The movies, the radio and television, spread of education and modern travel facilities are the powerful media through which new goods or new and better ways of living are communicated far and wide. In the present state of the world attraction of advanced living standards have a fairly wide influence on the consumption of the people of low-income countries.

Propensity to save is directly influenced by propensity to consume. When the poor countries copy living standards from the rich, they must pay the price. The price is that their capacity to save must diminish. This no doubt adds to the difficulties of bringing about economic development. We have already said that this saving potential can be mobilised only if consumption is kept at the same level as before. But we have seen that when such a country comes in contact with a rich country, its propensity to consume is likely to go up. The potential domestic sources of capital are seriously impaired by the impatience and dissatisfaction, which the demonstration effect tends to generate.

This impatience to raise living standards curtails the capacity to save. The conflict between the need to save and the desire to consume is intensified by the demonstration effect. Thus the small rate of saving in poor developing countries may not be altogether due to low level of real income. It may also be due to allurement of superior levels of living. This throws new light on international economic relations. Prosperity in one country may breed prosperity in another but it may also create difficulties by provoking consumption that it cannot afford and which it should avoid for some time at any rate. The high consumption of a rich country in this manner hinders capital formation in developing economies.

We may conclude in Nurkse’s words – “The great and growing gaps between the income levels and therefore living standards of different countries, combined with increasing awareness of these gaps, may tend to push up the general propensity to save”. The entrepreneurial class in India is, in fact, aping western modes of living and squandering away profits which they should plough back into investment. The country is poorer for this senseless consumption behaviour.

How to Overcome Demonstration Effect :

Curtailing the Consumption of Luxury Goods:

The working of demonstration effect in developing economies implies that wants should be regulated or curtailed. If wants of the people go on multiplying under the influence of demonstration effect, the demand for luxuries or non-basic consumption goods will increase. This will raise the propensity to consume of the economy resulting in a low ratio of saving to income. Further, the increased wants for luxuries and their consumption will divert the basic resources such as steel, cement, machines etc., towards their production.

As a result, the production of basic consumption goods will be starved of essential resources’. The use of scarce national resources to satisfy the non-basic wants of the people when millions who live below poverty line are unable to meet their basic wants for subsistence is purely a wastage of resources.

Thus, according to Prof. A. K. Dass Gupta, “The implication of luxury consumption for an underdeveloped country is more obvious and direct. The underdeveloped countries will need a high rate of growth for quite some time to come. Their level of per capita income is too low. In India, for example, the per capita income is hardly adequate to afford a man his minimum subsistence. Even with a stationary population, the country will thus require years of capital accumulation for it to attain a civilized standard. Luxury consumption slows down the rate of accumulation and thus hampers growth.”

Limitation of Wants:

Mahatma Gandhi had warned long ago against multiplication of wants. He thus stated, “I do not believe that multiplication of wants is taking the world a single step nearer its goal. I whole-heartedly detest this and desire to increase animal appetites and go to the ends of the earth to satisfy them. If modern civilization stands for all this and I have understood it does, I call it satanic.”

It may be noted that Mahatma Gandhi was not against the satisfaction of wants for consumption goods which are absolutely needed for maintenance of health and promotion of productivity. It is the multiplication of wants for non-basic consumption goods, that is, luxuries against which Mahatma Gandhi wrote. According to him, there is no end to the multiplication of wants and efforts ought to be made to reduce them. To quote him again, The mind is a restless bird, the more it gets, the more it wants and still remains unsatisfied. Therefore, the ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be delusion and snare. Civilization in the real sense of the term consists not in multiplication but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants.

One may not entirely agree with Mahatma Gandhi regarding the limitation of wants, but in the context of poor underdeveloped economies in which glaring inequalities of income prevail, the restraint on the multiplication of wants of the richer sections of the society is essential if economic surplus is to be generated and used for productive investment. Consumption of luxury and semi-luxury goods should therefore be controlled if rate of capital accumulation is to be stepped up.

Japan and South Asian countries were able to raise the level of their saving and investment to 30 per cent and above of their national income and achieve a high rate of economic growth by cutting consumption to the minimum. Now, the question is how to regulate wants and curtail consumption of luxury goods. One way is the adoption of fiscal measures under which heavy taxes should be imposed on luxurious consumption expenditure by individuals and business companies. Heavy excise duties and sales taxes should also be imposed on luxury goods so as to curtail their consumption by the rich people. Physical controls can be imposed on the production and distribution of luxury goods such as cars, air conditioners. These goods should be distributed to the individuals on functional basis rather than on the basis of money power.

Restricting the Production of Luxury Goods:

But the most effective method to curtail consumption of the affluent is to suitably restrict the production of luxury goods and a much high priority should be accorded to the production of basic consumption goods needed by the masses. This will raise the rate of capital accumulation on the one hand by releasing resources from the production of luxury goods and reduce inequalities between the rich and the poor on the other by raising the living standards of the latter. But the restriction on the production of luxury goods is easier said than done.

This is because luxury consumer goods are produced by the private sector in mixed economies of underdeveloped countries. Guided as they are by the market or effective demand, the private capitalists prefer to produce luxury goods since there is ample market for them by the richer sections. Prof A.K. Dass Gupta rightly states- “The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 gives private capitalists the complete sway over the production of consumer goods. Restrictions on imports protect them from international competition. A sheltered market is created in the country for luxury goods. These industries thus receive high priority from India’s capitalists”.

Related Articles:

  • Essay on the Role of Banks in Economic Development
  • Difference between Economic Growth and Economic Development
  • How to Measure Economic Development ? | India | Economics
  • Industrialisation and India’s Economic Development
  • School Guide
  • History Most Important Questions
  • Geography Most Important Questions
  • Polity Most Important Questions
  • Economics Most Important Questions
  • English Grammar
  • Parts of Speech
  • Figure of Speech
  • English Tense Chart
  • Mathematics

Development in India After Independence

  • Independence Day [India] - Date & Important Facts
  • Economic Condition and Planning After Independence
  • How was the Economic Development of India visualised in the early decades after Independence?
  • Give reasons why English continued to be used in India after Independence
  • Rural Development: Meaning, Significance, Process and Evaluation
  • Economic Environment in India
  • The Gandhian Model of Development -Five Year Plan
  • Introduction to Development Economics
  • Foreign Trade and Demographic Condition on the Eve of Independence
  • Planning For Development - Overview and Examples
  • Agriculture Sector on the Eve of Independence
  • National Development Council
  • Economic Growth and Development
  • Indian Economic Development
  • Indian Independence Act 1947
  • Indian Economy on the eve of Independence
  • CBSE Class 12 Indian Economic Development Notes
  • Industrial Sector on the Eve of Independence
  • State: Emergence and Elements

India, which has now turned into a significant nation internationally has grown a ton since it got its freedom from the British East India Company rule. Yet, very much like all the other things, various individuals have various sentiments about it. While some think that it has seen huge development, others are of the view that the development is delayed when contrasted with what it ought to be. Regardless of these differentiating sees, the way that remains is that the India we see today is unique in relation to what it was during autonomy.

It has created regarding the foundation, schooling, medical care, science and innovation, and in practically any remaining areas. Yet, it is viewed as a non-industrial country. This infers that the nation is requiring some investment to find the created world. Allow us now to take a gander at the improvements that India has made in various areas in the beyond seventy years.

Indian Development after Independence

Indian Development After Independence

Table of Content

India after independence- achievements, significant developments in india after independence, two phases of economy, administration sector growth, development of the agriculture sector, foundation development, the first independence day of india, logical achievements.

After independence, Indian citizens have the right to vote for choosing the government into power. Important leaders who helped to secure independence was Mahatma Gandhi, who began the fight for independence since 1914. Mangal Pandey was the first freedom fighter from India who fought against British in 1857.

Some important developments in India after independence have been as follows:

  • Indian Railways operate with about 7000 stations and was formed in 1951.
  • First general elections in India was held in 1951 with Congress winning over majority.
  • India developed Asia’s first nuclear reactor. Apsara nuclear reactor was developed in 1956.
  • Chandrayan 1 came to be launched in 2008 to the moon.

A free India was granted a broke economy, broad ignorance, and stunning destitution. Contemporary financial specialists partition the historical backdrop of India’s monetary development into two stages – the initial 45 years after autonomy and very nearly thirty years of the unrestricted economy. The years going before the financial progression were predominantly set apart by cases wherein monetary improvement got deteriorated because of an absence of significant strategies.

The financial changes acted as the hero with the start of a strategy of progression and privatization. An adaptable modern permitting strategy and a casual FDI strategy began getting positive reactions from worldwide financial backers. Among the main considerations that drove India’s economic development following the financial changes of 1991 were expanded FDI, reception of data innovation, and expanded homegrown utilization.

A significant improvement in the country’s administration area has been noticeable in the telecom and data innovation areas. A pattern that began exactly twenty years back is currently well thriving. A few worldwide firms keep on re-appropriating their tele administrations and IT administrations to India, bringing about the development of ITES, BPO, and KPO organizations. The securing of mastery in data innovation has prompted the age of thousands of new positions, which thus expanded homegrown utilization, and normally, more unfamiliar direct speculations ended up satisfying the needs.

As of now, the administration area utilizes over 30% of the Indian labor force and this course of improvement began, thinking back in the 1980s. During the 60s, the area utilized just 4.5% of the functioning populace. As per the Economic Survey 2021-22, the administration area represented over half of the Indian GDP, and the figures are supposed to fill from now on.

Since the 1950s, the advancement in agribusiness has been fairly consistent. The area developed at around 1% per annum in the main portion of the twentieth hundred years. During the post-Independence time, the development rate bumped around 2.6 percent per annum. The central point of development in agrarian creation was the extension of cultivating regions and the presentation of high-yielding assortments of harvests. The area could figure out how to end its reliance on imported food grains. It has advanced both concerning yield and underlying changes.

Reliable interest in research, land changes, development of degrees for credit offices, and improvement in the provincial foundation were some other deciding variables that achieved an agrarian upset in the country. The nation has likewise developed further in the agri-biotech area. The Rabobank report uncovers that the agri-biotech area has been developing at 30% in a couple of years. The nation is likewise liable to turn into a significant maker of hereditarily changed/designed crops.

The Indian street network has become one of the biggest on the planet with the all-out street length expanding from 0.399 million km in 1951 to 4.70 million km starting around 2015. Also, the complete length of the country’s public thruways has expanded from 24,000 km (1947-69) to 1,37,625 km (2021). Legislative endeavors have prompted the extension of the organization of State parkways and significant local streets, which thus has straightforwardly added to modern development.

As India needs the ability to drive its development motor, it has set off a critical improvement in the accessibility of energy by embracing a multi-pronged methodology. After just about seventy years of Independence, India has arisen as the third biggest maker of power in Asia. It has expanded its power age limit from 1,362 MW in 1947 to 3,95,600 MW starting around 2022. By and large, the power age in India has expanded from 301 billion units (BUs) during 1992-93 to 400990.23 MW in 2022. With regards to provincial jolt, the Indian government has figured out how to carry lights to each of the 18,452 towns by April 28, 2018, when contrasted with 3061 every 1950.

Progress in Education Sector

Hauling itself out from far and wide ignorance, India has figured out how to carry its school system at standard with the worldwide norm. The number of schools saw a sensational increment during the post-freedom period. The Parliament made rudimentary training a major ideal for youngsters in the age gathering of 6-14 years by passing the 86th amendment to the Constitution in 2002. At freedom, India’s education rate was a miserable 12.2 % which expanded to 74.04% according to the 2011 evaluation.

Accomplishments in the Field of Healthcare

A reduction in death rates is viewed as one of the significant accomplishments that came in India’s direction in this area. While the future was close to 37 years in 1951, it nearly multiplied to 65 years by 2011. In 2022, it was expanded to 70.19 years. Comparative improvement was seen in the maternal death rate too. India’s maternal death rate likewise declined from 212 passings for every 100,000 live births in 2007 to 103 passings in 2017-19, according to a report by The Hindu.

First Independence Day in India took place in 1947. Jawahar Lal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, unfurled the tri-colour flag of India. Prime Minister of India hoists the tri-colour flag in Red Fort and first Independence Day of India is dedicated to brave men and women who laid their lives to free their motherland.

Autonomous India has taken certain steps on its street to logical turn of events. Its ability is being appeared in a steady increase of aggressive ventures. India invests wholeheartedly in its space programs, which started with the send-off of its most memorable satellite Aryabhatta in 1975. From that point forward, India has arisen as a space power that has effectively sent off unfamiliar satellites. Through Chandrayaan-1, India turned into the fourth country on the planet to establish its banner on the lunar surface in 2008. Its most memorable mission to Mars was sent off in November 2013 which effectively arrived at the planet’s circle on 24 September 2014. In June 2015, ISRO sent off 104 satellites (most noteworthy on the planet) from a solitary rocket through PSLV-C37.

India is additionally forcefully seeking both atomic and rocket programs. That has all the while expanded the country’s safeguard strength also. BrahMos drafted into the safeguarding framework is the world’s quickest voyage rocket that has been together evolved by India and Russia. After over sixty years of autonomy, India has now drawn nearer to being a free power to deal with in the field of atomic and rocket innovation.

A significant contribution to the economy and technological advancements and Indians are known for their hard work, dedication, and resilience in their contribution to the country. Indians have excelled in different fields since independence. In different fields like technology, sports, and others Indians have excelled.

Related Links

  • Indian Economy on eve of Independence
  • Indian Freedom Movement

Frequently Asked Questions

How india has developed in 75 years.

Infrastructural development drastically improved in 75 years. There was advancement in the road network, rail lines, airports, and many other important types of developments in various other sectors, contributing to the economy of India.

What are the major developments in India?

The major developments in India are as follows: Historic Tax Reform Digitization Drive Institutional Reforms

How has India developed in the last 10 years?

India’s GDP Growth rate has increased in the last 10 years by an average growth rate of 6-7 percent.

Please Login to comment...

Similar reads.

  • History-MAQ
  • School History
  • School Learning
  • Social Science

Improve your Coding Skills with Practice

 alt=

What kind of Experience do you want to share?

Essay on Democracy in India for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy in india.

Essay on Democracy in India – First of all, democracy refers to a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting. Democracy holds a special place in India. Furthermore, India without a doubt is the biggest democracy in the world. Also, the democracy of India is derived from the constitution of India. After suffering at the hands of British colonial rule, India finally became a democratic nation in 1947 . Most noteworthy, Indian democracy since independence is infused with the spirit of justice, liberty, and equality.

short essay on development of india

Features of Indian Democracy

Sovereignty is a vital feature of Indian democracy. Sovereignty refers to the full power of a governing body over itself without outside interference. Moreover, people can exercise power in Indian democracy . Most noteworthy, people of India elect their representatives. Moreover, these representatives remain responsible for common people.

The democracy in India works on the principle of political equality. Furthermore, it essentially means all citizens are equal before the law. Most noteworthy, there is no discrimination on the basis of religion , caste, creed, race, sect, etc. Hence, every Indian citizen enjoys equal political rights.

Rule of the majority is an essential feature of Indian democracy. Moreover, the party which wins the most seats forms and runs the government. Most noteworthy, no-one can object to support of the majority.

short essay on development of india

Another feature of Indian democracy is federal. Most noteworthy, India is a union of states. Furthermore, the states are somewhat autonomous. Moreover, the states enjoy freedom in certain matters.

Collective responsibility is a notable feature of Indian democracy. The council of Ministers in India is collectively responsible to their respective legislatures. Therefore, no minister alone is responsible for any act of their government.

Indian democracy works on the principle of formation of opinion. Furthermore, the government and its institutions must work on the basis of public opinion. Most noteworthy, public opinion must be formed on various matters in India. Moreover, the Legislature of India provides an appropriate platform to express public opinion.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Ways to Strengthen Democracy in India

First of all, people must stop having a blind belief in the media. Many times the news reported by media is out of context and exaggerated. Most noteworthy, some media outlets may propagate the propaganda of a particular political party. Therefore, people must be careful and cautious when accepting media news.

Another important way to strengthen the Indian democracy is to reject the consumer mentality in elections. Several Indians view national elections like consumers buying a product. Most noteworthy, elections should make Indians feel like participants rather than separatists.

People in India should make their voices heard. Furthermore, people must try to communicate with their elected official all year-round instead of just during elections. Therefore, citizens must write, call, email, or attend community forums to communicate with their elected official. This would surely strengthen Indian democracy.

Huge voter turnouts is really an efficient way to strengthen democracy in India. People must avoid hesitation and come out to vote. Most noteworthy, large voter turnout would signify a substantial involvement of the common people in Indian politics.

In conclusion, the democracy in India is something very precious. Furthermore, it is a gift of the patriotic national leaders to the citizens of India. Most noteworthy, the citizens of this country must realize and appreciate the great value of democracy. The democracy in India is certainly unique in the world.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “State any two features of Indian democracy?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Two features of Indian democracy are the rule of the majority and collective responsibility.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “State any one way to strengthen democracy in India?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”One way to strengthen democracy in India is to reject the consumer mentality in elections.”} }] }

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

tutor

  • Travelling Essay
  • Picnic Essay
  • Our Country Essay
  • My Parents Essay
  • Essay on Favourite Personality
  • Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
  • Essay on Knowledge is Power
  • Essay on Gurpurab
  • Essay on My Favourite Season
  • Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Google Play

short essay on development of india

Tips to answer multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay-type questions in exams

E xams are a stressful affair and they require smart strategies and techniques to excel. While in-depth learning is crucial, different types of questions demand specific strategies and approaches for solving.

Exams may appear in several formats including multiple choice questions, short answers and essays, each requiring different techniques of answering.

Below is a comprehensive guide to solving exams with different types of question patterns:

TIPS TO ANSWER MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS

  • The first and foremost thing to do is to read the questions properly. Often, students miss out on important details due to a lack of focus. Paying attention to each and every piece of information and reading with attention is crucial.
  • After reading the question, try to predict the answer without referring to the given options. This increases your chances of selecting the correct answer through educated guessing.
  • Using the process of elimination can do wonders. In this method, you eliminate the options you believe are incorrect. This narrows down your choices and aids in identifying the correct response.
  • Paying attention to words such as 'always,' 'never,' 'sometimes,' 'most,' 'only,' 'many,' 'but,' and 'often' can help us better understand the sentence. These words tend to alter the meaning of the sentence and hence should be paid attention to and read properly.
  •  Understanding concepts thoroughly enables you to grasp the context of questions accurately and answer them correctly.

TIPS TO ANSWER SHORT QUESTIONS

  • Read the question properly and comprehend it well. Understand whether you need to give a definition, provide examples, write a brief summary or offer comparisons.
  • Write the answer to the point, avoiding unnecessary explanations and using keywords. This increases your chances of scoring higher.
  • Use simple language and avoid complex terms, as they can confuse the examiner. The simpler your answer, the higher your score.
  • Write your answers in a logical and organised manner. Structure your answers with separate paragraphs, bullet points, flowcharts, tables, etc., as this makes it easier for the examiner to read and understand your answer.
  • During the preparatory phase, use colourful pens, flashcards, charts, and drawings to learn concepts well. This method helps in recollecting the answers during exams.
  • Indulge in self-testing methods by practicing sample question papers, demo tests, and solving previous year question papers to understand the probable questions and the exam pattern.
  • Having a time management strategy in place is important. Allocate time for different types of questions and try to solve them within the given time frame.

TIPS TO WRITE ESSAYS

  • Understand the topic well and follow the instructions.
  • Brainstorm ideas on the topic and plan the points you intend to include.
  • Begin with an informative yet concise introduction, followed by a detailed body and a conclusion that summarizes your essay.
  • Ensure the essay is well-structured and divided into a minimum of 3-4 paragraphs.
  • Use quotations and examples to support the information you have written.
  • Adhere to the specified time and word limits.
  • Ensure your essay is written in simple and clear language.
  • Always remember to proofread the essay to eliminate grammatical and spelling errors.
  • Make reading a regular practice to enhance language proficiency and facilitate a smoother flow of thoughts.

By implementing such strategic approaches, you can efficiently answer your questions. It is important to study diligently and practice with sample papers.

During the exam, take the time to read the question paper properly during the allocated reading time and manage your time effectively.

- Article by Nischal Narayanam, mathematical child prodigy, winner of the National Child Award (Gold Medal), youngest double Guinness World Record holder in memory power, first Indian to win the World Memory Championship title, youngest CA, and Founder and Mentor at Nischals

Watch Live TV in English

Watch Live TV in Hindi

Tips to answer multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay-type questions in exams

Main Navigation

  • Contact NeurIPS
  • Code of Ethics
  • Code of Conduct
  • Create Profile
  • Journal To Conference Track
  • Diversity & Inclusion
  • Proceedings
  • Future Meetings
  • Exhibitor Information
  • Privacy Policy

NeurIPS 2024

Conference Dates: (In person) 9 December - 15 December, 2024

Homepage: https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2024/

Call For Papers 

Author notification: Sep 25, 2024

Camera-ready, poster, and video submission: Oct 30, 2024 AOE

Submit at: https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference  

The site will start accepting submissions on Apr 22, 2024 

Subscribe to these and other dates on the 2024 dates page .

The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in machine learning, neuroscience, statistics, optimization, computer vision, natural language processing, life sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and other adjacent fields. We invite submissions presenting new and original research on topics including but not limited to the following:

  • Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)
  • Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)
  • Evaluation (e.g., methodology, meta studies, replicability and validity, human-in-the-loop)
  • General machine learning (supervised, unsupervised, online, active, etc.)
  • Infrastructure (e.g., libraries, improved implementation and scalability, distributed solutions)
  • Machine learning for sciences (e.g. climate, health, life sciences, physics, social sciences)
  • Neuroscience and cognitive science (e.g., neural coding, brain-computer interfaces)
  • Optimization (e.g., convex and non-convex, stochastic, robust)
  • Probabilistic methods (e.g., variational inference, causal inference, Gaussian processes)
  • Reinforcement learning (e.g., decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)
  • Social and economic aspects of machine learning (e.g., fairness, interpretability, human-AI interaction, privacy, safety, strategic behavior)
  • Theory (e.g., control theory, learning theory, algorithmic game theory)

Machine learning is a rapidly evolving field, and so we welcome interdisciplinary submissions that do not fit neatly into existing categories.

Authors are asked to confirm that their submissions accord with the NeurIPS code of conduct .

Formatting instructions:   All submissions must be in PDF format, and in a single PDF file include, in this order:

  • The submitted paper
  • Technical appendices that support the paper with additional proofs, derivations, or results 
  • The NeurIPS paper checklist  

Other supplementary materials such as data and code can be uploaded as a ZIP file

The main text of a submitted paper is limited to nine content pages , including all figures and tables. Additional pages containing references don’t count as content pages. If your submission is accepted, you will be allowed an additional content page for the camera-ready version.

The main text and references may be followed by technical appendices, for which there is no page limit.

The maximum file size for a full submission, which includes technical appendices, is 50MB.

Authors are encouraged to submit a separate ZIP file that contains further supplementary material like data or source code, when applicable.

You must format your submission using the NeurIPS 2024 LaTeX style file which includes a “preprint” option for non-anonymous preprints posted online. Submissions that violate the NeurIPS style (e.g., by decreasing margins or font sizes) or page limits may be rejected without further review. Papers may be rejected without consideration of their merits if they fail to meet the submission requirements, as described in this document. 

Paper checklist: In order to improve the rigor and transparency of research submitted to and published at NeurIPS, authors are required to complete a paper checklist . The paper checklist is intended to help authors reflect on a wide variety of issues relating to responsible machine learning research, including reproducibility, transparency, research ethics, and societal impact. The checklist forms part of the paper submission, but does not count towards the page limit.

Please join the NeurIPS 2024 Checklist Assistant Study that will provide you with free verification of your checklist performed by an LLM here . Please see details in our  blog

Supplementary material: While all technical appendices should be included as part of the main paper submission PDF, authors may submit up to 100MB of supplementary material, such as data, or source code in a ZIP format. Supplementary material should be material created by the authors that directly supports the submission content. Like submissions, supplementary material must be anonymized. Looking at supplementary material is at the discretion of the reviewers.

We encourage authors to upload their code and data as part of their supplementary material in order to help reviewers assess the quality of the work. Check the policy as well as code submission guidelines and templates for further details.

Use of Large Language Models (LLMs): We welcome authors to use any tool that is suitable for preparing high-quality papers and research. However, we ask authors to keep in mind two important criteria. First, we expect papers to fully describe their methodology, and any tool that is important to that methodology, including the use of LLMs, should be described also. For example, authors should mention tools (including LLMs) that were used for data processing or filtering, visualization, facilitating or running experiments, and proving theorems. It may also be advisable to describe the use of LLMs in implementing the method (if this corresponds to an important, original, or non-standard component of the approach). Second, authors are responsible for the entire content of the paper, including all text and figures, so while authors are welcome to use any tool they wish for writing the paper, they must ensure that all text is correct and original.

Double-blind reviewing:   All submissions must be anonymized and may not contain any identifying information that may violate the double-blind reviewing policy.  This policy applies to any supplementary or linked material as well, including code.  If you are including links to any external material, it is your responsibility to guarantee anonymous browsing.  Please do not include acknowledgements at submission time. If you need to cite one of your own papers, you should do so with adequate anonymization to preserve double-blind reviewing.  For instance, write “In the previous work of Smith et al. [1]…” rather than “In our previous work [1]...”). If you need to cite one of your own papers that is in submission to NeurIPS and not available as a non-anonymous preprint, then include a copy of the cited anonymized submission in the supplementary material and write “Anonymous et al. [1] concurrently show...”). Any papers found to be violating this policy will be rejected.

OpenReview: We are using OpenReview to manage submissions. The reviews and author responses will not be public initially (but may be made public later, see below). As in previous years, submissions under review will be visible only to their assigned program committee. We will not be soliciting comments from the general public during the reviewing process. Anyone who plans to submit a paper as an author or a co-author will need to create (or update) their OpenReview profile by the full paper submission deadline. Your OpenReview profile can be edited by logging in and clicking on your name in https://openreview.net/ . This takes you to a URL "https://openreview.net/profile?id=~[Firstname]_[Lastname][n]" where the last part is your profile name, e.g., ~Wei_Zhang1. The OpenReview profiles must be up to date, with all publications by the authors, and their current affiliations. The easiest way to import publications is through DBLP but it is not required, see FAQ . Submissions without updated OpenReview profiles will be desk rejected. The information entered in the profile is critical for ensuring that conflicts of interest and reviewer matching are handled properly. Because of the rapid growth of NeurIPS, we request that all authors help with reviewing papers, if asked to do so. We need everyone’s help in maintaining the high scientific quality of NeurIPS.  

Please be aware that OpenReview has a moderation policy for newly created profiles: New profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks. New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated automatically.

Venue home page: https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference

If you have any questions, please refer to the FAQ: https://openreview.net/faq

Ethics review: Reviewers and ACs may flag submissions for ethics review . Flagged submissions will be sent to an ethics review committee for comments. Comments from ethics reviewers will be considered by the primary reviewers and AC as part of their deliberation. They will also be visible to authors, who will have an opportunity to respond.  Ethics reviewers do not have the authority to reject papers, but in extreme cases papers may be rejected by the program chairs on ethical grounds, regardless of scientific quality or contribution.  

Preprints: The existence of non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv or other online repositories, personal websites, social media) will not result in rejection. If you choose to use the NeurIPS style for the preprint version, you must use the “preprint” option rather than the “final” option. Reviewers will be instructed not to actively look for such preprints, but encountering them will not constitute a conflict of interest. Authors may submit anonymized work to NeurIPS that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv) without citing it. Note that public versions of the submission should not say "Under review at NeurIPS" or similar.

Dual submissions: Submissions that are substantially similar to papers that the authors have previously published or submitted in parallel to other peer-reviewed venues with proceedings or journals may not be submitted to NeurIPS. Papers previously presented at workshops are permitted, so long as they did not appear in a conference proceedings (e.g., CVPRW proceedings), a journal or a book.  NeurIPS coordinates with other conferences to identify dual submissions.  The NeurIPS policy on dual submissions applies for the entire duration of the reviewing process.  Slicing contributions too thinly is discouraged.  The reviewing process will treat any other submission by an overlapping set of authors as prior work. If publishing one would render the other too incremental, both may be rejected.

Anti-collusion: NeurIPS does not tolerate any collusion whereby authors secretly cooperate with reviewers, ACs or SACs to obtain favorable reviews. 

Author responses:   Authors will have one week to view and respond to initial reviews. Author responses may not contain any identifying information that may violate the double-blind reviewing policy. Authors may not submit revisions of their paper or supplemental material, but may post their responses as a discussion in OpenReview. This is to reduce the burden on authors to have to revise their paper in a rush during the short rebuttal period.

After the initial response period, authors will be able to respond to any further reviewer/AC questions and comments by posting on the submission’s forum page. The program chairs reserve the right to solicit additional reviews after the initial author response period.  These reviews will become visible to the authors as they are added to OpenReview, and authors will have a chance to respond to them.

After the notification deadline, accepted and opted-in rejected papers will be made public and open for non-anonymous public commenting. Their anonymous reviews, meta-reviews, author responses and reviewer responses will also be made public. Authors of rejected papers will have two weeks after the notification deadline to opt in to make their deanonymized rejected papers public in OpenReview.  These papers are not counted as NeurIPS publications and will be shown as rejected in OpenReview.

Publication of accepted submissions:   Reviews, meta-reviews, and any discussion with the authors will be made public for accepted papers (but reviewer, area chair, and senior area chair identities will remain anonymous). Camera-ready papers will be due in advance of the conference. All camera-ready papers must include a funding disclosure . We strongly encourage accompanying code and data to be submitted with accepted papers when appropriate, as per the code submission policy . Authors will be allowed to make minor changes for a short period of time after the conference.

Contemporaneous Work: For the purpose of the reviewing process, papers that appeared online within two months of a submission will generally be considered "contemporaneous" in the sense that the submission will not be rejected on the basis of the comparison to contemporaneous work. Authors are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work and perform empirical comparisons to the degree feasible. Any paper that influenced the submission is considered prior work and must be cited and discussed as such. Submissions that are very similar to contemporaneous work will undergo additional scrutiny to prevent cases of plagiarism and missing credit to prior work.

Plagiarism is prohibited by the NeurIPS Code of Conduct .

Other Tracks: Similarly to earlier years, we will host multiple tracks, such as datasets, competitions, tutorials as well as workshops, in addition to the main track for which this call for papers is intended. See the conference homepage for updates and calls for participation in these tracks. 

Experiments: As in past years, the program chairs will be measuring the quality and effectiveness of the review process via randomized controlled experiments. All experiments are independently reviewed and approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Financial Aid: Each paper may designate up to one (1) NeurIPS.cc account email address of a corresponding student author who confirms that they would need the support to attend the conference, and agrees to volunteer if they get selected. To be considered for Financial the student will also need to fill out the Financial Aid application when it becomes available.

Essay on Indian Economy

India’s economy is described as huge, complex and growing. It is one of the most exciting and emerging markets in the world. Since 1951, India has grown as a planned economy. The first few plans focused on growth with the strengthening of the manufacturing sector, emphasising heavy industries to form the backbone of the economy. Other principal areas of planning were agriculture and social development. During the post-independence period and the period of the “Five-year plans”, efforts were focused on identifying the needs of the economy. Further, the economic reforms in the early 90s opened a new chapter in India’s economic history. It gave India an opportunity to shake off the shackles of its past and emerge on the world stage as a progressive nation. This essay on the Indian Economy will help students know about the Indian economy in detail.

Students can go through the list of CBSE Essays on different topics. It will help them to improve their writing skills and also increase their scores on the English exam. Moreover, they can participate in different essay writing competitions which are conducted at the school level.

500+ Words Essay on the Indian Economy

India is on the high road to economic growth. Since 2020, the world economy has declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Repeated waves of infection, supply-chain disruptions and inflation have created challenging times. Faced with these challenges, the Government of India has taken immediate action so that it has the least impact on the Indian economy.

The Indian economy has been staging a sustained recovery since the second half of 2020-21. However, the second wave of the pandemic in April-June 2021 was more severe from a health perspective. The national lockdown has affected small businesses, common people and everyone in India. Due to this, the Indian economy has gone down. But now, it is slowly rising up and taking its form.

Role of Agriculture in the Indian Economy

Agriculture is one of the most important sectors of the Indian economy. It supplies food and raw materials in the country. At the time of independence, more than 70% of India’s population depended on agriculture to earn a livelihood. Accordingly, the share of agriculture in the national product/income was as high as 56.6% in 1950-51. However, with the development of industries and the service sector, the percentage of the population depending on agriculture, as well as the share of agriculture in the national product, has come down. Agriculture is the source of food supply. Agriculture is also a major source of foreign exchange earnings through export. The share of agriculture in India’s export in the year 2011-12 was 12.3%. The major items of export include tea, sugar, tobacco, spices, cotton, rice, fruits and vegetables, etc.

Role of Industry in India’s Economy

Industry is the secondary sector of the economy and is another important area of economic activity. After independence, the Government of India emphasised the role of industrialisation in the country’s economic development in the long run. Initially, the public sector contributed the maximum to economic growth. In the early 1990s, it was found that the public sector undertakings were not performing up to expectations. So, in 1991, the Indian Government decided to encourage the role of the private sector in industrial development. This step was taken to strengthen the process of industrialisation in India.

The progress of the Indian economy after independence was impressive indeed. India became self-sufficient in food production due to the green revolution, and industries became far more diversified. However, we still have to go a long way to become a 5 trillion economy by 2025. But, with government effort and the right policymakers, it can be achieved.

Students must have found this essay on the Indian Economy useful for improving their essay-writing skills. They can get the study material and the latest update on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams at BYJU’S.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

short essay on development of india

  • Share Share

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

close

Counselling

IMAGES

  1. Development of India

    short essay on development of india

  2. 😝 Essay on economic development in india. Economic Development Of India

    short essay on development of india

  3. Essay on India for Students from Class 6 to 12

    short essay on development of india

  4. essay on Development of India after independence /5 lines on

    short essay on development of india

  5. Essay on India for Students from Class 6 to 12

    short essay on development of india

  6. Short Essay On India Before Independence In English

    short essay on development of india

VIDEO

  1. #ytshort #contentcreator #trending #youtubeshorts #viral #foryou #india

  2. 20 Lines about Constitution of India

  3. India officially ELIMINATED POVERTY

  4. | 10 lines on India in English

  5. UAE is Serious to create relations with INDIA

  6. Tourism Industry in Nepal essay in English #nepal #tourism

COMMENTS

  1. Essay on India is a Developing Country

    In conclusion, India is indeed a developing country, with a vast potential for growth and improvement. Its journey towards development is marked by both achievements and challenges. The nation's future hinges on how effectively it can address its issues and capitalize on its strengths. 500 Words Essay on India is a Developing Country Introduction

  2. 75 Years of Independence: The Changing Landscape of India

    The Landscape of Education and Health. In 1947, India had a population of 340 million with a literacy rate of just 12%, today it has a population of nearly 1.4 billion and a literacy rate of 74.04%. The average life expectancy has also risen from 32 years to 70 years in 2022. Though India has shown remarkable progress In terms of literacy rate ...

  3. Essay on India For Students and Children

    500+ Words Essay on India. India is a great country where people speak different languages but the national language is Hindi. India is full of different castes, creeds, religion, and cultures but they live together. That's the reasons India is famous for the common saying of " unity in diversity ". India is the seventh-largest country in ...

  4. India

    India, country that occupies the greater part of South Asia.It is made up of 28 states and eight union territories, and its national capital is New Delhi, built in the 20th century just south of the historic hub of Old Delhi to serve as India's administrative center.Its government is a constitutional republic that represents a highly diverse population consisting of thousands of ethnic ...

  5. India Overview: Development news, research, data

    The growth of the past two decades has also led to India making remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty. Between 2011 and 2019, the country is estimated to have halved the share of the population living in extreme poverty - below $2.15 per person per day (2017 PPP) (World Bank Poverty and Inequality Portal and Macro Poverty Outlook ...

  6. Development of India After Independence Essay for Students

    Short Essay About Development of India After Independence in 250 / 300 Words. India's development since independence has been a remarkable journey of growth and transformation. After gaining freedom from British colonial rule in 1947, the country embarked on a path of progress and development. In the economic sphere, India implemented various ...

  7. History of India (1947-present)

    India is a nuclear-weapon state, having conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, followed by another five tests in 1998. From the 1950s to the 1980s, India followed socialist-inspired policies.The economy was influenced by extensive regulation, protectionism and public ownership, leading to pervasive corruption and slow economic growth. Since 1991, India has pursued more economic liberalisation.

  8. Development of India after Independence, Essay on Development of India

    After more than six decades of independence, India has reached the level of being self-dependent in the field of space and missile technology. Read Essays on Development of Independent India. Achievements of india after independence essay. Development of independent india essay. Development of india after independence essay

  9. The History of Economic Development in India since Independence

    The country's per capita income grew by an average of less than 1 percent a year between 1966 and 1980, a rate that was too low to make a dent in the country's massive poverty. Thirty-five years after independence, India's leadership had yet to achieve, to any significant degree, its pledge of lifting living standards.

  10. Development of India After Independence Essay

    Development of India After Independence Essay 1: 100 Words. India gained independence from British rule on August 15, 1947, and since then, there has been a noteworthy development in various sectors. The country witnessed massive advancements in science and technology, education, infrastructure, and healthcare.

  11. Economic development in India

    The progress of economic changes in India is followed closely. The World Bank suggests that the most important priorities are public sector reform, infrastructure, agricultural and rural development, removal of labour regulations, reforms in lagging states, and HIV/AIDS. [7] For 2018, India ranked 77th in Ease of Doing Business Index.

  12. Constitutional Development of India (1773-1950)

    Constitutional Development of India. The Constitution of Independent India was drawn up by the Constituent Assembly, initially summoned on Dec. 9, 1946. It is the longest written Constitution in the world containing 395 Articles and 12 Schedules. Download PDF for IAS Exams. For UPSC 2024 Preparation, follow BYJU'S.

  13. India as a Developed Nation

    First, the World Bank currently categorizes India as a lower-middle income economy. On per capita income, India is behind even Bangladesh. China's per capita income is 5.5 times that of India, and the UK's is almost 33 times. Second, there has been substantial progress in infrastructure development in the last 75 years but still millions in ...

  14. Essay on India: 150-250 words, 500-1000 words for Students

    Essay on India in 150 words. India, a diverse and culturally rich country located in South Asia, is renowned for its vibrant festivals, ancient heritage sites, and diverse landscapes. With a population of over 1.3 billion people, India is a melting pot of religions, languages, and ethnicities.

  15. Make In India Essay for Students and Children

    500+ Words Essay on Make in India. Make in India campaign was launched by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 25th of September in 2014. It is an initiative to make a call to the top business investors all across the world for investment in India. It is a big opportunity for all the investors to set up their business in any field anywhere in ...

  16. Essay on Economic Development in India

    Essay # 2. The Concept of Economic Development (Modern View): The experience of the developing countries during the sixties and seventies showed that whereas target rates of economic growth were in fact achieved trickle-down effect in the form of creation of more employment opportunities, rise in wages and improvement in income distribution did not operate.

  17. Essay on India of My Dreams for Students

    500 Words Essay on India of My Dreams. India is a country where people of all cultures and religions coexist together. I suppose that each of us has dreamt about some version of India. Obviously, we may dream about anything at any time, and as Indian citizens, we are continuously looking for methods to improve our country and see a better India ...

  18. Development in India After Independence

    After just about seventy years of Independence, India has arisen as the third biggest maker of power in Asia. It has expanded its power age limit from 1,362 MW in 1947 to 3,95,600 MW starting around 2022. By and large, the power age in India has expanded from 301 billion units (BUs) during 1992-93 to 400990.23 MW in 2022.

  19. Essay on Constitution of India

    The Constitution is the backbone of every democratic and secular fabric of the nation. The Constitution of India is the longest Constitution in the world, which describes the framework for political principles, procedures and powers of the government. The Constitution of India was written on 26 November 1949 and came into force on 26 January 1950.

  20. Essay on Democracy in India for Students and Children

    Most noteworthy, public opinion must be formed on various matters in India. Moreover, the Legislature of India provides an appropriate platform to express public opinion. Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas. Ways to Strengthen Democracy in India. First of all, people must stop having a blind belief in the media.

  21. Debunking the Idea of a Single (Digital) Identifier: The Case of

    The proposed short essay focuses on the challenges that transgender persons in India face while changing their name and gender on identification documents and the role of technology and digitalisation in keeping this historically silenced community at the margins by limiting their access to rights and services.

  22. 500+ Words Essay on Sustainable Development

    There are three aims of sustainable development; first, the "Economic" which will help to attain balanced growth, second, the "Environment", to preserve the ecosystem, and third, "Society" which will guarantee equal access to resources to all human beings. The key principle of sustainable development is the integration of ...

  23. Tips to answer multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay-type ...

    TIPS TO ANSWER SHORT QUESTIONS. Read the question properly and comprehend it well. Understand whether you need to give a definition, provide examples, write a brief summary or offer comparisons ...

  24. NeurIPS 2024 Call for Papers

    Call For Papers. Abstract submission deadline: May 15, 2024 01:00 PM PDT or. Full paper submission deadline, including technical appendices and supplemental material (all authors must have an OpenReview profile when submitting): May 22, 2024 01:00 PM PDT or. Author notification: Sep 25, 2024.

  25. Essay on Indian Economy for Students in English

    Further, the economic reforms in the early 90s opened a new chapter in India's economic history. It gave India an opportunity to shake off the shackles of its past and emerge on the world stage as a progressive nation. This essay on the Indian Economy will help students know about the Indian economy in detail.