Why Developed India is a fantasy

I keep abreast of the happenings in my country through the humble newspaper and twitter (thanks to modern technology). I have been doing these for the last 20 years. And in all this time, I have never read any article that mentions any concrete steps or ideas for development. And I believe if some techie finds some time to write an algorithm that will take into account all the news articles of the last 20 years (even from a single publication) and finds stories which have ‘development’ in it and then do a qualitative filtering process of listing the actual ideas or steps, it won’t be more than 20 such articles. Out of these 20 ideas or announcements, 5-6 would have been scrapped for lack of funds or initiative. The remaining hopefully would be WIP.

The reason that I am throwing up such wild figures is frustration…frustration of seeing the same old stories on crime, corruption, infighting within political parties, some ban or the other. But in the same publications international section, one finds stories about how China is building a solar power station in space, or how Finland is scrapping traditional school subjects in favour of topics.

Why haven’t we moved to solar energy as the main consumer energy despite being a tropical country with an abundance of sunlight?

Why haven’t we developed water sports not only for recreation, tourism but as an Olympic strategy despite having one of the largest coastlines?

Why haven’t we increased employment in all public sectors but have encouraged ‘agent culture’?

Why are continuing to give drought relief and farmer subsidies for the last 15 years to the Vidharba region, instead of figuring out a source of water?

But instead our idea of development includes building a 300 crore statue of Shivaji in the Sea, having Aadhar and UID both.

All we hear about in the 5 year plans is ‘aim to reduce poverty, increase growth rate of agriculture, industries and services by 9%, etc. But how does it plan to do that?

We have planning commission, urban & rural development officers, many ministries to support all of these ideas but looks like somebody forgot to have a chief idea officer who can not only use available resources but look at the current crisis situations and provide solutions. Who is this person?