The Rediff Special/President K R Narayanan

'We have to give the youth of the country new opportunities, new hopes and new challenges'

Fellow citizens, we have every reason to be proud of our democracy. But we will have to strain our every nerve to purify our political, administrative and electoral processes and to remove the aberrations and distortions that have come into the functioning of our democracy.

It is in the area of economic, technological and social development that India, during the last fifty years, has had to face formidable challenges. Here, though we have registered significant successes, the fact of the matter is that we have not been able to abolish poverty, ignorance and disease from among our people.

The massive programmes that we have launched in these fields have not yielded the desired fruits. But we ought not to understimate our achievements. India is today a considerable industrial and technological power of the world, and promises to be an economic giant in the twenty first century.

The economic reforms that we launched six years ago with the liberalisation and opening up of our economy have reached a decisive stage. The country has moved to a high trajectory of growth with a growth rate of 7 to 8 per cent of GNP envisaged for the next five years. This is a record- breaking achievement. We have accomplished this by standing on the shoulders of our basic policies of self-reliance and social justice.

In this context I would single out two broad parameters of progress we have made. One is the revolution in the production of food grains making the country self-sufficient in food and the other, is the rise in the average expectation of life of an Indian which more than doubled since Independence.

Notwithstanding all these we have yet to provide for our people safe drinking water, basic health facilities, electricity supply and other basic necessities of daily life.

But obviously these rates of progress are not enough for us to take pride in or to be complacent about. Other countries have gone far ahead of us. We have to move faster without upsetting the delicate and complicated balance of our society. We have to put special emphasis on the development of infrastructure and on investment. But we also have to devote more serious attention to the question of equity and social justice thus releasing the energies of nearly 75 per cent of our population for productive purposes.

We have to give the youth of the country new opportunities, new hopes and new challenges. All these require hard work, discipline and unity of purpose and faith in the future of the country.

India has always had a vision of the world and a message for the world, it has played a crucial role in international relations and has every right to be in the central organs of the United Nations system. From the dawn of our civilisation we had believed the world is one and humanity is a single family.

In dark and bitter days of the Cold War, it was this vision that Jawaharlal Nehru projected to the world through his policy of non-alignment and peaceful co-existence. The Cold War is fortunately over today partly due to the refusal of India and other non aligned nations to join up with one or the other bloc and their efforts to promote detente and reconciliation between the two.

A new pluralistic world order has now emerged but there are still signs of the powerful developed nations trying to marginalise the weak and developing countries which constitute two-thirds of the world. And real disarmament and a world without arms remain a distant dream.

In this context, India entertains her vision of the world as an associate of free and independent nations in an inter-dependent world. Let us on this fiftieth anniversary of our Independence dedicate ourselves to the welfare and happiness of the people of India, the peoples of Asia, and all humanity.

Jai hind

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