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Envisioning the India of 2047
The graduates of universities eventually fit, by and large, into social positions as solid citizens. This is in spite of the deep uneasiness some of them may continue to have with the society. Many of them continue to translate their disaffection into creative and intellectual expressions within the contours of the existing order. Even the most “radical” of our universities have, over the years, produced multiple times more teachers, researchers, professionals, civil servants, journalists and development workers than they have produced anarchists and revolutionaries.
This article is based on the 21st D S Borker Memorial Lecture delivered by the author at the India International Centre, New Delhi on 24 August 2019.
D S Borker was a distinguished civil servant in whose memory the D S Borker Memorial Lecture Series on “My Vision of India: 2047” has been instituted.
We are often bewildered by the apparent caprice and unpredictability of contemporary developments—local, national, regional and global—that we encounter in shorter spans of time, day to day or in these days of Twitter, almost minute to minute. In the process of making sense of some of these short time frame developments, sometimes, we lose sight of the larger perspective, a longer time frame.
The year 2047 is symbolic for us. It takes a full century, one would think, to build the nation we had promised ourselves in 1947, when we had redeemed “not wholly or in full measure,” as Jawaharlal Nehru reminded us, the pledge we had made to destiny during our tryst with it long years ago. A hundred years hence, we expect that we will have redeemed it wholly and in full measure and perhaps even managed to do something more.
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