Amul’s Enduring Relevance

I grew up and went to school in Gujarat where an enduring story from my civics textbooks was that of Amul.  Now institutionalized in our societal memory through its superb ads, the movie Manthan, and the legendary Verghese Kurien, it is amazing that the story still has legs.

Harish Damodaran, author of the must-read “India’s New Capitalists,” has published an insightful op-ed on the continued relevance of Amul showing us how enduring great ideas can be.

Gujarat’s development bogey

Just wondering why Gujarat did not make it to this list of best Indian states under any category of development.  To boot, this was prepared by India Today, a staunch BJP supporter.

Delhi votes for development

India’s cities and its middle class have, unfortunately, played an enabling role in the rise of the BJP and its divisive religion-based politics.  (As an astute observer I admire said, “India’s middle class has degrees, no education.”)  Even so, they are marginal players, in broad terms, notwithstanding their explosive growth over the past 20 years.  This was evident in 2004 when the country’s predominantly-rural electorate rejected the NDA’s “India Shining” thesis.

Delhi was no different – and once the strongest of BJP bastions – but has become an interesting laboratory for the “development versus ideology” experiment over the past decade.  In 2008, Delhi’s voters returned a Congress government for the third time making Sheila Dikshit the country’s first longest-serving woman chief minister.  Over the past 10 years, Dikshit has zealously pursued a single-minded agenda transforming the crumbling capital into one of the world’s most livable cities.

In 10 years, Dikshit’s Congress government has doubled power generation (quadrupling it by 2011), water supply, and hospitals; tripled sewage treatment capacity; built (or is building) more than 130 flyovers and underpasses; switched over its bus transportation fleet to clean-burning natural gas dramatically reducing pollution; and implemented a world-class city-wide rail commuting system amongst other things.  This development track record has trounced the BJP’s ideological posturing in three consistent elections.

This is a heartening story because it shows that the strongest of ideological bastions can be stormed (and retained) with sustained political action emphasizing governance and development.  The validity of this political emphasis will be tested again in Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha seats.