The theme for the second round is "Developments in India after Independence"So Participants have to collect pictures regarding
"Developments in India after Independence"
and info regarding the same.Read n vote for best Info+Pic+TitlePoll Choice 1 :
Major Developments in India after Independence
A tour of the events that made a significant impact on India, after its Independence on 15th August 1947.
Poll Choice 2 :
Our Mother India After Independence
India is a country in the subcontinent of South Asia in the larger continent of Asia. South Asia is made up of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
India is the dominant country in the subcontinent. India is the world's second most populous country in the world with a rapidly expanding population of well over 1billion people. It is a vast country with many physical features ranging from the Himalayas in the north, to the Ganga valley in the east, to the Thar desert in the west. India has a mainly tropical climate but also has a typical monsoon climate with heavy rain from June to September and dry weather for the rest of the year, the country also has very warm weather for most of the year. India has many large metropolitan conurbations.
Lets see the developments that happened since / after Independence.
Government of India
Indian governmental structure change rapidly after independence. It went from being a country within the British Commonwealth to a sovereign, secular country. India became a fully independent, secular state on the 26 November 1950 when the new constitution was passed/introduced. The country developed into a democratic republic with a president, prime minister and a council of ministers, all who are elected by the public. India's full title is the Republic of India and today it is the largest full democracy in the world.
Agriculture
Before independence India was a country which relied heavily on agriculture. After independence this remained much the same, even today India ranks second worldwide in agricultural output.
Recently India has developed a rapidly growing agricultural biotech sector. According to a report, the agri-biotech sector in India has been developing at an amazing 30 per cent since the last five years, and it is likely to sustain the growth in the future.
India has massive potential in the agri-biotech sector with the possibility that the country will become a major grower of genetically modified rice and other genetically engineered crops. India has always been a major grower of cash crops such as tea, tobacco, coffee and spices while also being a world leader in exporting many varieties of fruit.
Although India has developed many modern and innovative means of farming the agricultural sector in India remains synonymous with poverty. The majority of India's farmers earn less than $2 (USD) per day growing rice on tiny family-owned plots.
Industrialization
Before independence India was a largely agriculture-based country. Although there was a relatively large manufacturing sector in some parts of the country it was mainly in the form of small-scale local enterprises such as spinning, weaving and woodwork industries. These businesses served their local markets which meant that large-scale expansion of an industry was very difficult at that time.
Postindependence, the Indian private sector began attempts to expand. However it was faced with foreign competition, including the threat of cheaper Chinese imports. It has since handled the change by squeezing costs, revamping management, focusing on designing new products and relying on low labour costs and technology.
Technology has been one of the main cornerstones of India's industrial development. The city of Bangalore has become known as the 'Silicon Valley' of India.
Over 250 high-tech industries have set up their including IBM, Intel and HP. These companies are part of India's growing IT Sector while also being involved in software manufacturing. This growing IT and technology sector has spread to most of India's other large cities.
Mining and other energy exploits have also been one of the main areas which have pushed the industrialization of India since independence. India has the third largest coal reserves in the world and full-scale exploitation of the coal resources began in the mid-1960s. Evidence of this can be seen all across the country with huge coal mines, especially in the east. This has also lead to the industrialization of many of India's major cities with huge coal-producing factories in cities such as Kolkata.
India is involved in the production of many other Fossil Fuels such as oil and gas and as of January 2007 India had 5.6 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. However the most interesting area of energy development in the country in recent years has been the move towards renewable and nuclear energy research and production.
India has recently developed many Hydroelectric Power stations in the north of the country along the foothills of the Himalayas.
Nuclear Power is a very large source of electrical consumption in India. As of 2010, India has 19 nuclear power plants in operation generating 4,560 MW while four other are under construction and are expected to generate an additional 2,720 MW. This recent development has coincided with further industrialization of many of India's cities.
Industrialization in India has probably been the country's main development since independence in 1947. This vast industrialization has also led to changes in the country's population dispersion and settlement patterns.
Poll Choice 3 :
My India-Glorified with post-independence Development
Fifty Eight years after independence the world is beginning to realize what most Indians always believed – that India is a great power and civilization. India's recent economic growth has attracted the attention of strategic analysts and future forecasters everywhere. A three trillion dollar economy [PPP], fourth in size after the US, China and Japan, consistently growing at 6-7% per year cannot be ignored specially when it is backed by explosive growth in the key technology of our times – InfoTech. India's phenomenal technological and economic growth in the arena of information technology is matched by developments in the nuclear sciences giving it an added strategic dimension that cannot be ignored both at the regional as well as the global level. The recent talk of India getting a permanent seat in the UN Security Council is a measure of the global recognition of India's emerging significance.
People sometimes describe India as undergoing an economic miracle in the past twenty years. After decades of indolent economic growth following independence, a number of sectors of the economy have taken off with high rates of growth and increasing income. Deepak Lal addresses this assumption in "An Indian Economic Miracle?" (
link). Here is the crucial graph from Lal's paper:
As the graph indicates, starting in roughly 1980, both GDP and GDP per capita increased at a rising rate, greatly exceeding the disparaging "Hindu rate of growth" of the 1950s and 1960s. Lal's paper is worth reading. But the overall impression is that India is finally moving forward -- an impression reinforced by some of Tom Friedman's comments in
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.
However, this impression is very misleading with respect to India's rural population; or so V. K. Ramachandran at the Indian Statistical Institute argues. (Here is an
interview I conducted with Ramachandran in 2008.) Ramachandran and his collaborator, Madhura Swaminathan, have pursued an important program of research on village India under the rubric of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (
link). They and their research teams have conducted a series of village studies over the past ten years that shed detailed light on the economic, social, and caste circumstances of rural India; and the picture they find does not conform to the idea of an "economic miracle." Instead, they find patterns of social inequality and social domination that are continuing and increasing; patterns of landlessness that have worsened in the past decade or so; and levels of poverty that continue to challenge the idea of a fully developed human life for many hundreds of millions of Indian rural people.
A recent publication summarizes their studies of several villages in Andhra Pradesh (
Socio-Economic Surveys of Three Villages in Andhra Pradesh: A Study of Agrarian Relations), and it is worth reading in detail. This book synthesizes the detailed surveys conducted in three villages in 2005-06. The authors describe the goals of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India in these terms: to study and analyse ...
- village-level production, production systems and livelihoods, and the socio-economic characteristics of different strata of the rural population;
- sectional deprivation in rural India, particularly with regard to the Dalit and Scheduled Tribe populations, women, specific minorities and the income-poor; and
- the state of basic village amenities and the access of rural people to the facilities of modern life. (1)
Here are the three villages included in the survey (Bukkacherla, Ananthavaram, Kothapalle):
View Andhra Pradesh in a larger map The villages are small, ranging from 292 households (Bukacherla) to 667 households (Ananthavaram). Here is a zoom view of Kothapalle village (372 households):
And here is Ananthavaram:
The surveys attempt to capture the important social and economic characteristics of the villages, including population, agricultural practices, social class composition, and caste composition. Class and caste are particularly important characteristics in the analysis. The researchers classify households as "landlord -- big capitalist farmer -- manual worker -- peasant -- other" (chapter 2). Here is how this classification works out for Kothapalle village:
- landlord / big capitalist farmer 1%
- capitalist farmer / rich peasant 9%
- peasant: middle 13%
- peasant: poor 5%
- hired manual worker 44%
- artisan and work at traditional caste calling 1%
- business activity 8%
- rents / moneylending 1%
- salaried person 11%
- remittance/pension 5%
In other words, about 50% of households are in socially disadvantaged positions (poor peasants, landless workers, and artisans).
Here is a snapshot of the three villages extracted from the study with respect to several important socioeconomic characteristics: percent scheduled classes and tribes, percent landlord and capitalist farmer, percent poor peasant and hired laborer, land ownership Gini coefficient, household income Gini coefficient, medial household income as percent of poverty budget, and percent female literacy for persons seven years or older.
Several things are apparent from this summary. First, the distributions of land and household income are very unequal in all three villages, with a Gini coefficient of .86 for land distribution in Ananthavaram. The Gini coefficients for the distribution of income hover around .60 for all three villages -- a very high degree of income inequality by international standards (link,
link)). And it is interesting to notice that Ananthavaram village enjoys the highest median household income and highest female literacy, but simultaneously the highest degree of inequality of property and income and the highest percentage of scheduled castes and tribes.
Second, all three villages represent a high degree of poverty among households. The income bar represents median household income as a percentage of a household poverty budget of 21,304 Rs. The median household in Bukkacheria falls short of this budget -- as do the 50% of households below the median, implying a poverty rate of more than 50%. The median household in Kothapalle is slightly higher than the poverty budget, and only Ananthavaram has a median income significantly higher than the poverty budget (120%). So the poverty rate ranges between 40% and 55% in all three villages -- very high.
Third, female literacy is often regarded as an important measure of overall human development in a poor region or country; and the rates observed by these surveys are quite low (42-47%), with a substantial gap to the rates for male literacy. Likewise, there are substantial variations in literacy across castes. Female literacy in Bukkacherla village is 43% for all households but is 28% for Dalit households; 37% for "backward class" households; and 53% for "other caste" households (160). In other words, the literacy rate for Dalit women is about half that of "other caste" women.
Put the point another way: these village surveys do not support the idea that social progress is occurring rapidly and broadly in India. Rather, these particular villages support the idea that inequalities in rural India are extensive and possibly increasing; that poverty is widespread; that class and caste continue to determine life prospects; and that human development is impeded by these conditions of inequality and poverty.
It is interesting to consider the question of representativeness that this volume raises. The studies provide data for only three out of thousands of villages in one Indian state. So it is productive to ask whether the findings provided here are "typical" of rural Andhra Pradesh -- let alone other parts of India. Ramachandran and Swaminathan have surveyed villages in a number of states, and will continue the project into the future. Plainly, it is important to bring these micro-studies into relation with other larger-scope studies in order to assess the degree to which these developments are typical of rural India. The authors do a good job of trying to make these connections using national and state social data sources; plainly, both methods are needed in order to arrive at justified conclusions about the state of Indian agrarian society.
Second, it is interesting to read this report as an exercise in empirical Marxist economics. The studies are highly empirical and data-rich. At the same time, the categories of analysis are drawn from Marxist economics: exploitation, class analysis, productive relations, and social relations of domination, extraction, and control. The report provides a powerful illustration of the analytical value of a Marxian sociology and political economy in this context; relations of power, privilege, and property plainly have a determining role in the processes of social change in rural India today.
Indian Mines It was only after independence that the Indian mines and minerals sector experienced a phenomenal increase in growth rate. In total there are 84 minerals being produced in India including 4 fuels, 11 metallic, 49 non-metallic industrial and 20 minor minerals. The products of Indian mines and minerals sector consist of Coal, Lignite, Limestone, Iron Ore, Bauxite, Copper, Lead, Zinc and many more contributed by over 3100 mines located all over the country. Productions from open cast mines account for more than 80 percent of the total mineral production in the country. So the quantity of minerals being taken out annually from the Indian mines can be determined by totalling up the quantity of overburden with the annual mineral production.
Indian mines are scattered unevenly throughout the country based on the topography and accumulation of minerals in the region. Most of the mines are located in Orissa plateau and Chota Nagpur Plateau spreading over
West Bengal,
Orissa and
Jharkhand. Moreover,
Karnataka,
Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh,
Tamil Nadu,
Maharastra,
Gujarat,
Madhya Pradesh and
Rajasthan are also rich with minerals and have numerous mines which significantly contribute to the economy of the state.
Poll Choice 4 :
India's Technological Progress Since Independence
Defence:
At the time of our country's Independence, the Indian armed forces consisted mostly of Emergency Commissioned Officers of World War II and were almost ill-equipped. Our country lacked the infrastructure to produce even a rifle at the time, let alone aircraft or tanks. A foundation had to be laid for the defense industry at that time, especially because there was almost immediate invasion from our neighbors. Modernization of the defense forces was a must. It was a long process which involved several border conflicts, where India learnt about the kind of defense necessary. We also went on to conduct nuclear tests, even risking international criticism and repercussions to irreversibly upgrade its nuclear deterrent capability. While India has been an avid supporter of international nuclear disarmament, the nuclear arms development was purely meant as means of self-defense to thwart any evil schemes of aggressors. Even though it is nuclear capable, India reiterates time and again its No First Strike doctrine.
Today, the Indian Army is equipped with supersonic cruise missiles such as BrahMos, Prithvi I, II and III, Nag, Shaurya, etc. capable of carrying conventional as well as nuclear warheads and capable of striking deep into enemy territory. We also have Exo-atmospheric interceptor system, commonly known as anti-missile technology, which can intercept and destroy enemy ballistic missiles before they reach the target.
In terms of aircraft, we have the LCA and the latest multi-role air superiority fighter Sukhoi Su-30MKI which is jointly developed by India's Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Russia s Sukhoi Corporation. India's own nuclear powered Arihant class of submarines are slated to be unveiled next year, while Shivalik class stealth frigate has been commissioned for this year.
In addition to addition to the Indian Army's arsenal of several different weapons and armoured vehicles developed in India, there is also a new program to modernize the infantry, known as Futuristic Infantry Soldier As a System (F-INSAS) to be commenced in 2012 and to be completed by 2020.
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Voting Ends On 1st Feb. '13 
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Financial markets and global economy
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