India's Road to Development

Over the last few decades, the percentage of people worldwide living in poverty has been reduced at a dramatic pace. Especially in Asia a spectacular transformation of almost all aspects of society is taking place. Asia no longer is the continent of poverty, of an 'Asian drama', as Gunnar Myrdal called it in the 1960s, but it has quickly turned into an area of increasing wealth and unlimited opportunities. East and Southeast Asia were the first regions of the continent to modernize. It is only recently, starting in the 1990s, that India has joined the other countries on the road to development. India's participation in the modernization process raises many new questions, since the country is clearly outside the cultural sphere of Confucianism, which many observers have thought to be an important ingredient for the rise of East and Southeast Asia. But notwithstanding its completely different historical, political and cultural background, India undoubtedly also rises, and fast as well.

The rise of India has received widespread academic attention, first of all from an economic point of view. But perhaps the changes have come so fast, that time was lacking to reflect on some of the obvious questions:

1. Why have Indians, since the 1990s, become richer?
2. Why did this not happen earlier (or later)?
3. How does modernization change Indian society?
4. How does the development of India compare with the development of other countries in Asia?
5. What can be expected for the coming years?

This paper investigates possible answers to these questions with a view to draw general lessons from the case of India about the start of the development process. What can countries struggling to escape from poverty learn from the experience of India?

More information

Information is available at the secretariat of the Clingendael Diplomatic Studies Programme of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, contact by email or tel. 070-3746605.

About the author

Roel van der Veen has worked for years with sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and as a strategic policy planner. He is the author of What Went Wrong With Africa: A Contemporary History (Dutch publication 2002), which was translated into several languages. He received his PhD in 2004 on a dissertation called The Disintegration of States in Africa: The Interaction of Politics, Economics, Culture and Social Relations, 1957-2003. He wrote this discussion paper on the development of India while staying at the Clingendael Institute as a research fellow.