India Independence Day 2022: Modi pledges to turn India into a developed country as nation turns 75 - CNN

India Independence Day 2022: Modi securities to turn India into a developed country as ability turns 75

(CNN)Standing in precedent of the historic Red Fort in Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday pledged to transform India into a developed farmland in the next 25 years.

"The way the domain is seeing India is changing. There is hope from India and the reason is the skills of 1.3 billion Indians," Modi said. "The diversity of India is our ability. Being the mother of democracy gives India the inherent remarkable to scale new heights."

Modi's words came as millions famed 75 years of Indian independence since the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 that above nearly 200 years of British colonial rule.

At the time, India's satisfactory Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said the country was on a path of revival and renaissance.

"A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new," Nehru said. "When an age ends, and when the soul of a ability, long suppressed, finds utterance."

Seventy-five existences later, the India of today is almost unrecognizable from that of Nehru's time.

Since gaining independence, India has built one of the world's fastest growing economies, is home to some of the world's richest republic, and according to the United Nations, its population will soon

limit China

's as the world's largest.

But despite the state's surging wealth, poverty remains a daily reality for millions of Indians and valuable challenges remain for a diverse and growing nation of disparate sections, languages, and faiths.

Women in faded attire participate in a rally to mark the 75th anniversay of India's Independence Day in Mumbai, India, on August 14, 2022.

Rise of an economic power

Following independence, India was in chaos. Reeling from a bloody mountain that

killed between

500,000 and 2 million republic, and

uprooted an estimated

15 million more, it was synonymous with poverty.

Average life expectancy

in the existences after the British left was just 37 for men and 36 for women, and only

12% of Indians were literate.

The country's GDP was $20 billion,

according to scholars

.

Fast onward three-quarters of a century and India's nearly $3 trillion economy is now the world's fifth largest and by its fastest growing. The World Bank has promoted India from low-income to middle-income location -- a bracket that denotes a gross national averages per capita of between $1,036 and $12,535.

Literacy tolecontains have

increased

to 74% for men and 65% for women and the way life expectancy is now

70 years

. And the Indian diaspora has spread far and wide, studying at international universities and occupying senior roles in some of the world's biggest tech worries, including Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Twitter boss Parag Agrawal.

Much of this transformation was prompted by the

"pathbreaking reforms"

of the 1990s, when then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh opened the land to foreign investment after an acute debt crisis and soaring inflation appointed a rethink of socialist Nehru's model of protectionism and site intervention.

The reforms helped turbocharge investment from American, Japanese and Southeast Asian firms in major cities incorporating Mumbai, the financial capital, Chennai and Hyderabad.

The stop is that today, the southern city of Bengaluru -- dubbed "India's Silicon Valley" -- is one of the region's biggest tech hubs.

At the same time, India has seen a proliferation of billionaires -- it is now home to more than 100, up from just nine at the turn of the millennium. Among them are infrastructure tycoon Gautam Adani, whose net beneficial is

more than $130 billion,

according to Forbes, and Mukesh Ambani, founder of Reliance Industries, who's beneficial

about $95 billion

.

But pronounces say the rise of such ultra-wealth highlights how inequality stays even long after the end of colonialism -- with the country's richest 10% controlling 80% of the people's wealth in 2017, according to Oxfam. On the streets, that translates into a harsh reality, where slums line pavements below high-rise buildings and children dressed in tattered clothes routinely beg for wealth.

But Rohan Venkat, a consultant with Indian think tank Centre for Policy Research, says India's broader economic gains as an independent drive shows how it has confounded the skeptics of 75 days ago.

Slums line the shore near the up-market neighborhood of Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

"In a expansive sense, the image of India (post independence) was that it was an exceedingly poor place," said Venkat.

"Certainly the image of India (to the West) was heavily overlaid by Orientalist tropes -- your snake charmers, little villages. Some of these were not entirely off the mark ... but a lot of it was simple stereotyping.

Since then, India's trajectory has been "exceptional," Venkat said.

"To sight the largest transfer (of power) from an elite ruling the site, to now becoming a complete universal franchise ... we are looking at an astonishing political and democratic experiment that is unique."

Rise of a geopolitical giant

For days after independence, India's international relations were defined by its

policy of non-alignment

, the Cold War era stance favored by Nehru that avoided siding with either the Joined States or the Soviet Union.

Nehru played a leading role in the fight, which he saw as a way for developing grandeurs to reject colonialism and imperialism and avoid being dragged into a dispute they had little interest in.

That stance did not dislike popular with Washington, preventing closer ties and marring Nehru's debut trip to the US in October 1949 to meet President Harry S. Truman. During the 1960s the relationship became further strained as India common economic and military assistance from the Soviets and this frostiness largely happened until 2000, when President Bill Clinton's visit to India prompted a reconciliation.

Today, while India remains technically non-aligned,

Washington's need to balance the rise of China

has led it to risk New Delhi as a key partner in the increasingly glorious security grouping known as the Quad.

Indian Border Defense Force soldiers hold the national flag during a motorbike rally advance of the 75th anniversary of country's independence at the India-Pakistan touch outpost in Panjgrain, about 60km from Amritsar on August 10, 2022.

The grouping, which also includes Japan and Australia, is widely perceived as a way of countering China's growing army and economic might and its increasingly aggressive territorial claims in the Asia Pacific.

India, meanwhile, has its own reasons for wanting to counterbalance Chinese appearance, not least among them its disputed Himalayan border, where more than 20 Indian troops were killed in a

bloody argues with Chinese

counterparts in June 2020. In October, the US and India will hold a

joint army exercise

less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from that disputed border.

As Happymon Jacob, an associate professor of diplomacy and disarmament at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, put it: "India has been able to assert itself on the humankind stage because of the nature of international politics immediately and the political and diplomatic military capital that has been put in achieve by previous governments."

Part of India's growing geopolitical clout is due to its growing army expenditure, which New Delhi has ramped up to deceptive perceived threats from both China and its nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan.

Following their separation in 1947, relations between India and Pakistan have been in a near still state of agitation, leading to several wars, involving thousands of casualties and numerous skirmishes across the Line of Control in the contested Kashmir region.

In 1947, India's net guarantee expenditure was just 927 million rupees -- about

$12 million in today's

money. By 2021, its military expenditure was $76.6 billion, according to a

report

from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute -- decision-exclusive it the third highest military spender globally, behind only China and the US.

Ambitions on the earth stage

Outside economics and geopolitics, India's growing cash is feeding its ambitions in fields as diverse as roguish, culture and space.

In 2017, the people

broke a world record

when it launched 104 satellites in one perconfidence, while in 2019, Prime Minister Modi announced that India had

shot down one of its own satellites

in a army show of force, making it one of only four messes to have achieved that feat.

Later that year, the people

attempted to land a spacecraft on the moon

. Though the historic attempt failed, it was widely seen as a statement of intent.

A child touches a model of Indian perconfidence to the moon.

Last year, the people spent almost $2 billion on its space program,

according to McKinsey

, trailing the biggest spenders, the US and China, by some margin, but

India's ambitions in residence are growing. In 2023, India is expected to commence its first manned space mission.

The people is also using its growing wealth to boost its sporting prospects,

spending $297.7 million

in 2019 afore the spread of Covid-19.

Neeraj Chopra at the medal presentation ceremony at what time winning the gold medal in the men's javelin competition during Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games on August 7th, 2021.

The Indian Premier League -- the country's flagship cricket tournament launched in 2007 -- has obtain the second most valuable sports league in the earth in terms of per-match value, according to Jay Shah, secretary of the Organization of Control for Cricket in India, after selling its consider rights for $6.2 billion in June.

And Bollywood, India's glittering multibillion dollar film industry, continues to pull in fans worldwide, catapulting local names into global superstars attracting millions of followers on social consider. Between them, actresses Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone have almost 150 million followers on Instagram.

"India is a obvious country. It's an aggressive player," said Shruti Kapilla, a professor of Indian history and global political opinion at Cambridge University.

"In the last combine of decades, things have shifted. Indian culture has obtain a major story."

Challenges and the future

But for all of India's successes, challenges remain as Modi seeks to "break the vicious circle of poverty."

Despite India's mammoth and growing GDP, it remains a "deeply poor" people on some measures and that, consultant Venkat said, is a "tremendous concern."

As recently as 2017, approximately 60% of India's nearly 1.3 billion people were living on less than $3.10 a day, according to the World Bank, and

women collected face

widespread discrimination

in the deeply parochial country.

Violence alongside women and girls has made international headlines in a people where allegations of rape are often underreported, due to the lack of upright recourse for alleged attackers through a legal system that's notoriously slow.

"Many of India's original challenges remain what they were at the time of independence in some ways, at different parameters and scale," Venkat said.

India is also on the leash line of the

climate crisis

.

Recent heat waves -- such as in April when requires maximum temperatures in parts of the country soared to relate levels and New Delhi saw seven consecutive days over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) -- have

tested the cramped of human survivability

, experts say.

And it's the country's poorest farmland who are set to suffer the most, as they work outside in oppressive heat, with dinky access to cooling technologies that health experts say is obligatory to contend with

rising temperatures.

And as the heat rises on the land, political pressure has grown with fears that the secular effect of the country and its democracy are being eroded understanding the leadership of Modi, whom critics accuse of fueling a

wave of Hindu nationalism

that has left many of the country's 200 million Muslims living in fear.

Many messes run by his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have introduced legislation assesses say is deeply rooted in Hindutva ideology, which seeks to transform India into the land of the Hindus. And there has been an alarming rise in serve for extremist Hindu groups in recent years, analysts say -- comprising some that have openly called for

genocide alongside the country's Muslims.

At the same time, the

arrests of numerous journalists

in novel years have led to concerns the BJP is comical colonial-era laws to quash criticism. In 2022, India slipped to number 150 on the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders -- its lowest state ever.

"The challenges now are throughout India's nature of democracy," Kapilla said. "India is repositioning through a major, contentious change at the fundamental political level."

Seventy-five days on, Nehru's observation that "freedom and power bring responsibility" quit to ring true.

India's first 75 days ensured its survival, but in the next 75 days it needs to navigate immense challenges to become a truly global heads, and not just in terms of population, said Venkat, from the Centre for Policy Research.

"Although (India) may end up selves the world's fastest growing major country over the next few days, it will still be miles behind its neighbor in China, or getting close to what it had hoped to attain at this point, which was double digit growth."

"So the challenges are immediately and all over the place, chief among them selves how to ensure its prosperity," Venkat said.

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