Follow Globalization and Self-Reliance: NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman

According to NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar introvert policies may be damaging and India should follow the path of globalization and self-reliance. He said that big cities were now redundant as people could now meet on the internet, and it was time the country looked beyond urbanization to urbanization. He advocated replacing English with an “indigenous connecting language”, and said Indians should become “multilingual but without inferiority to our own mother tongues”. “We will have to address the developmental disparity. We talk about online education but the fact is that only 35 per cent of schools in India have an internet connection and only 65 per cent of schools have electricity connection,” Kumar said. Kumar’s suggestions were part of his “seven-point development agenda” for accomplishing the objective of “Bharat reset”. According to the seven-point development agenda, India needed to make development a public movement; introvert policies may be damaging, and India should follow the path of globalization and self-reliance; governments should work to ease stress of the agriculture sector, and villages should be self-reliant. Kumar suggested that development should become a public movement akin to the freedom movement during British Raj. The PM has in recent years spoken of constructing a ‘new India’ by 2022, the 75th anniversary of the independence by making development a people’s movement. “Today, most people think development as the sole responsibility of the government agencies which is a wrong approach. We should all go beyond our self-interest and do something for the nation. Every citizen needs to play his due role for the development of the country,” Kumar said.