After independence

A pall of gloom and doom seems to have enveloped India ahead of its 67th year of independence. Even the number of hawkers proffering the tricolour to the more muscularly patriotic among the national capital region's denizens is noticeably smaller. Is this feel-bad mood justified? That depends on the yardstick against which India is measured.

The conventional point of comparison is within the BRIC grouping created by Goldman Sachs in 2001. But this comparison may not be valid in terms of each country's history, which inarguably has an impact on how nations develop. Two of the countries (Russia and China) have never been fully colonised (although Napoleon and Hitler tried hard in the first case and Japan in the second) and both were (and are) colonisers in their own right. Brazil was freed from Portugal's yoke in 1822, so it has had a decade less than two centuries to shrug off the worst excesses of colonisation and to create or recreate the institutions of governance.

But since it's Independence Day, let's look at another comparator. Fourteen states attained independence in the decade between 1947 (Pakistan being the first of them, on August 14) and 1957 (Malaysia being the last, on August 31). Several of these newly independent states (like Pakistan and Israel) were created in cauldrons of political antagonism that keeps them in a state of permanent instability six decades later. Others (such as Malaysia and India) were disparate principalities brought together by a combination of historical developments and prescient local leaderships. But all of them have had at least half a century to develop as countries in their own right.

How has India fared vis-à-vis these states? A broad-brush picture reveals some inconvenient truths that are incompatible with our collective sense of self in the world order. India comes first on just two parameters of the group - the largest population and the largest economy (the world's ninth largest) - in which the smallest economy is Bhutan at a global rank of 169.

But let's look at the human development index (HDI), now increasingly considered a more critical metric than economic growth. According to the United Nations' HDI rankings, five countries figure in the "high" category, six in the medium ranking, and three in the "low" (there is none in the "very high" category). India shares the "medium" category with Laos, Cambodia, Ghana, Bhutan and Morocco. At 136, it is just two ranks above Laos and Cambodia (both at 138), but Morocco (130) and Ghana (135) outperform it.

If we exclude Israel, an unabashed client state of the West that enjoys the highest HDI ranking of 16 in the group, and Libya and Tunisia (64 and 94), which have tiny populations (6.4 million and 10.6 million respectively), the real stars of this show are Sri Lanka (at 92) and Malaysia (also at 64).

That ties in with the percentage of population that lives on less than $1.25 per cent (World Bank figures have been used since they are presented in purchasing power parity terms and provide ease of comparison, and to circumvent the frenzied controversy that pervades domestic poverty debates). Malaysia had none (this is a 2009 figure), Sri Lanka roughly seven per cent (though on the higher cut-off of $2 a day, the percentage swelled to nearly 30). India, however, is among the poverty leaders, so to speak, with 32 per cent (68 per cent at the $2 cut-off) - behind only Laos at 33.88 per cent.

Again, in terms of annual GDP growth between 2008 and 2012 (the post-global crisis years), India is one of the poorer performers at 3.2 per cent. It is joined by Morocco at 2.7 per cent and Tunisia at 3.6 per cent (these are also World Bank figures, which follow a calendar year, so they will differ from government of India data). Sudan, which shrank 10 per cent in this period, can be ignored since it was suffering the pangs of partition; in fact, South Sudan, the breakaway nation, fared far worse by shrinking 55 per cent.

This poor performance in general human development terms is not surprising since India (at 132) is among the worst places to do business within this group of 14. Only Laos (163), Cambodia (133), Sudan (143) and Bhutan (148) fared worse on the Doing Business rankings (but maybe this doesn't matter since Bhutan is the world's happiest country, by its own reckoning).

The best performer of this particular show is Malaysia, the last of the countries to gain independence, and written off then as a backward agrarian economy. In the 56 years since it melded its princely states together and achieved independence, it has emerged as the 12th best country to do business, enjoys a decent growth rate and standard of living and is a proud member of the southeast Asian Tiger economies that demonstrated the poverty-alleviating benefits of plugging into the global supply chain. So maybe we don't need to agonise over whether Jagdish Bhagwati or Amartya Sen is right. Mahathir Mohamad might be the more appropriate person to consult.