Imagining India - A Book by Nandan Nilekani

"Imagining India -Ideas for the new Century" is a book written by Nandan Nilekani. In his book he not only talks about the socio-economic and political problems and weaknesses facing India but also the strengths, if rightly harnessed, and solutions, if correctly applied, can change the face of our country. He discusses topics like, caste system, public transport, IT revolution, environment, power and energy, education, health etc. by providing its history, discussing the present scenario and its future effects on the Indian society.

The Author emphasizes on the need to capitalize on the unlimited and untapped human resource available in our society. He goes on to stress that as India is the largest democratic country in the world with a very large young population it is the biggest advantage any country could have. He talks about the bottom-up growth meaning that socio-eonomic development should begin from the villages and then move upwards to the cities thus making the foundations of our country strong. In present times rural India severely lacks good infrastructure whether in terms of roads, hospitals, education, water and electricity supply. Right after independence the focus of our leaders was on industrial development and building world-class universities. In this whole proccess our national leaders forgot to concentrate on rural development - they failed to provide better agriucultural equipments, failed to build schools. Hence this has lead to the rapid degeneration of our rural society. Though post liberalization India has made rapid growth but the ever present regional and caste differences weaken our country. Nandan Nilekani also talks about the IT boom in India. He discusses its immense power on our lives on how it can be used for connecting people, conducting businesses in rural and urban India, - whether it is stock exchange, internet banking, online railway reservations or access to any other information. He gives an example of Sriram Raghvan who has opened some internet kiosks in few villages of India and how it has changed the lives of villagers as these IT kiosks offer services like checking crop prices to accessing e-governance, getting treated through telemedicine and education. He talks about the awakened Indian citizens who want to have a say in the growth of the country and who are willing to embrace new ideas for development and who see themselves as the major source of change. The ever growing middle-class has now begun to demand transparency, law & order and better infrastructure.

I enjoyed reading this book as it talks about new, stronger and fast growing India. I liked the fact that the Author has not written this book just to criticise India for its lack of infrastructure, resources and political will to change but has also talked about its strengths and has given many small and big examples about people coming up with new and innovative ideas to bring socio-economic development in our society. The growth could be much rapid if the strength of the people could be combined with the quick implementation of the reforms introduced by our governments.