Every day, 50% of Copenhageners commute to work or school by cycles. There is no law forcing them to do so, nor any real incentive. Most cycle because they want to. To support their interest, the local administration has built nearly 400km of bike lanes across the city.
As societies evolve, individuals take over the responsibility of social progress. Monarchs, governments and other authority figures are required only till such time as citizens take over the running of their lives. Sadly, Indian society hasn’t yet reached that point. The Indian tendency to rail against authority is evident in the Devyani Khobragade incident as much as in blaming the police alone for the rise in crimes against women.
It is time to look inwards, where there is a lot that is wrong. Our sense of entitlement, as well as the wretched, fatalistic attitude we have inherited, blinds us to personal shortcomings—our biases and prejudices, our inability to follow reasonable civic rules, or do something about our abysmal creativity and productivity levels. We pride ourselves on being tolerant but are blatantly racist, with each other and with people from other nations who have a different color of skin or a different way of speaking English. We believe the Taj Mahal is the greatest architectural marvel ever created, not because we have compared it with others, but merely because we don’t, and don’t want to, understand or appreciate the architecture of other nations. That xenophobia blinds us. So the only alternative to Hindi movies is Hollywood pulp, to the utter disregard of masterpieces from Kerala or Iran. We wallow in the mediocrity of our film music, insulting not just a glorious tradition but also the universality that it should bring. So no wedding in the vast Hindi heartland, encompassing some eight states, ever resonates to the soothing notes of Carnatic music.
The insularity is compounded by our preference for jugaad over original invention and discovery. For the former, we credit our ability to cut corners, get the job done, no matter what the ecological or social cost. For the latter, we blame the government.
Nor is this lack of creativity in India stemming from an overt focus on hard work. No one will accuse us of high levels of productivity though the sheer number of hours we spend at our workplace should raise hopes of it. According to the Asian Productivity Organization’s Databook 2013, India’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP), an index of its labour productivity, was 7.5% of that in the US in 2011, lower even than that of countries like Fiji, Mongolia and the Philippines. The fate of nations like Italy and Greece shows the ill effects of chronically low productivity levels. Indeed, there is empirical evidence to suggest that productivity growth is a major factor in pushing economic growth as well as the standard of living of a nation, as seen in the case of both Germany and Singapore. Higher productivity leads to increased profitability as costs fall. The sharp recovery in the US despite the financial meltdown shows how higher productivity can lead a nation out of economic gloom.
Nations that are driven by the vim and the vigor of their people exude a soft power that far exceeds mere economic or military might. Germany, Monocle magazine’s leader of the year in its annual ranking of countries by soft power, receives 30.4 million tourists a year. India by contrast gets 6.5 million though its 28 UNESCO World Heritage Sites compares well with Germany’s 38.
The world lauds individual initiative and talent, which is why Scandinavian countries are routinely at the top of any ranking of most respected countries. Creativity and productivity are virtues that need little support from the state. It is about time we turned our attention to our poor performance on both counts.
This is the fourth in a series of essays in which Mint’s editors take stock of 2013 and look at what the new year holds for India.
