A taxi with a board highlighting India’s progress

New York, Sept. 26: On the face of it, the IncredibleIndia@60 extravaganza that has taken the Big Apple by storm is a much bigger and glitzier version of the India Shining campaign that played itself out back home before the 14th general elections in 2004.

But lessons from the NDA’s “feel good” fiasco have not been entirely forgotten — with voices of scepticism and caution leavening the hype and hoopla at nearly every discussion over the past four days.

If The New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman, full of praise for the Indian “miracle”, was hopeful that India would overtake China and emerge as an important global power, our own columnist (and also a best-selling author) Ramachandra Guha was equally dismissive of India’s efforts to get on to “the high table”.

They were both speaking on India 2050: A Grand Strategy for India Rising presented by Yale University and the Confederation of Indian Industry at the prestigious Yale Club on Monday.

It was the same story on Sunday when the BBC’s acerbic Tim Sebastian hosted a discussion — as part of The World Debate series — on India’s achievements after 60 years of Independence. Telecom tycoon Sunil Mittal and Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia had a tough time defending India’s growth story in the face of a barrage of criticism from fellow panellists Shabana Azmi, Dipankar Gupta and, again, Guha.

At the Yale Club panel discussion and the BBC debate, Guha insisted that “if there is a success story, it is in politics and not in economics”.

That India had survived as a vibrant democracy called for “modest” celebrations but the current hype about India’s emergence as an economic superpower was wholly misplaced, he said. India would “muddle along on the middle path”, as it always did, and should not even aspire to become a superpower.

Gupta and Shabana also stressed that despite economic growth, the problems of the “vast majority” have largely remained unaddressed with India continuing to remain at the bottom of the heap in critical areas of education and healthcare.

Countering them, Ahluwalia maintained that economic reforms had not just helped a few “but millions of people”, with only 25 per cent of the Indian population still below the poverty line.

Concerns of the “aam aadmi” came up even at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas — the first to be held outside India — gathering held at the picturesque Pier 60 on the Hudson river on Sunday morning.

Commerce minister Kamal Nath spoke with great enthusiasm about India’s booming economy and entrepreneurial talent in a bid to sell it as the ideal investment destination for NRI businessmen.

But in a departure from the usual sales pitch, he also said: “We still have 300 million people (who live) on less than a dollar a day, we have more poor than all the LDC countries put together.”

And in reply to questions, he admitted that “if we don’t have all-inclusive growth, it (the high growth rates) will not last”.

In all the discussions, the success of IT and the growth in manufacturing came in for much praise, but more questions were raised about the abysmal quality of primary school education, the continuing disconnect between rural and urban India and the potential for growing unrest if prosperity did not spread widely or quickly enough.

The cautionary voices over the last four days stood out even more because of the over-the-top slogans on billboards across the city. These have highlighted the growing number of billionaires in India, the record profits made by MNCs in India, and the success of the IT, pharmaceutical and telecom industries.

But slogans, such as “Health is Wealth”, claiming that “India’s pharmaceutical industry has the highest number of FDA-approved plants outside the US”, have ended up raising questions on India’s dismal record in healthcare just as too much tom-tomming of the country’s “knowledge” industry has led to criticism about low levels of overall literacy.

Although the Incredible India campaign was the tourism ministry’s brainchild and has proved a big success in showcasing India’s culture, heritage and art forms to uninformed foreign tourists, the fact that the CII chose to co-sponsor the event has shifted the focus to “Brand India” and the country’s “dynamic economy”.

If India’s exotica has been on display to attract the tourist, the Brand India impetus seems aimed at the American, particularly NRI, investor. The coming together of the tourism ministry and the CII has certainly given a much bigger profile to the campaign but, as the contrarian voices showed, may have also ended up as a bit of an overkill.