Dreams Which Should Not Let India Sleep

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the scientist who became India's eleventh President, is credited with the remark that a dream is not what you see in sleep, but what does not let you sleep. The line has been repeated to students all over the country. Its meaning is that a real dream is not a fantasy but a demanding goal that disturbs the dreamer until it is pursued. On the night of 14 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru told the Constituent Assembly that India was about to keep a tryst with destiny, and that the service of India meant the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The topic asks which of those dreams still belong in that wakeful category.

The first dream is freedom from hunger and want. India has made progress. The proportion of people below the poverty line has fallen from more than half in the early 1970s to around a fifth by the early 2010s, and famine has not occurred since independence. But about 270 million people were still poor in 2011 and 2012, and the country has more undernourished people than any other. Nearly four in ten children are stunted. In September 2015 the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, the first of which was to end poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030, and the second to end hunger. A country that sets aside food in warehouses while children go hungry has reason to lose sleep.

The second dream is learning for every child. The Right to Education Act of 2009 made schooling a fundamental right for children between six and fourteen, and enrolment is now nearly universal. But learning has lagged, and the Annual Status of Education Report has repeatedly found that about half of the children in the fifth grade cannot read a text meant for the second grade. A population that is young and unable to read well wastes what is called the demographic dividend. The dream is of a school where each child learns, with trained and present teachers, and of universities that produce thought and not just degrees.

The third dream concerns women. India's women have risen to be Prime Minister, President and astronauts, and yet millions face discrimination from before birth. The child sex ratio was 919 per thousand boys in 2011, the lowest since independence. Fewer than three in ten women are in the labour force. The attack in Delhi in December 2012 forced a public reckoning with violence, and the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign of January 2015 sought to change attitudes. A society where women cannot walk safely at night has not yet kept its promise of equality, and the dream is of an India in which a girl's birth is celebrated and her safety is assumed.

A society where women cannot walk safely at night has not yet kept its promise of equality, and the dream is of an India in which a girl's birth is celebrated and her safety is assumed.

A fourth dream is harmony among the many communities. India's unity in diversity is one of its great achievements, yet it is repeatedly shaken by riots and by the hardening of religious and caste identities. The Constitution promised fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity of the nation. Ambedkar's dream was an India that annihilated caste, and the persistence of untouchability, in the form of separate wells and temples in some villages, shows how far there is to go. A country that cannot trust its own neighbours cannot sleep easily.

The fifth dream is for the environment. The rivers of India, which are sacred in tradition, carry sewage and industrial waste, and the Ganga was the subject of a new Namami Gange programme in 2014. Delhi's air in winter is among the worst in the world. Groundwater is being used faster than it is replenished. The dream is of a development that does not borrow from the children, with clean air, living rivers and cities that people can breathe in, a goal of immense practical importance for the farmers who depend on the monsoon and for the millions who will be affected by a warming planet.

The sixth dream is of an India of honest institutions and scientific temper. Article 51A of the Constitution makes it a duty of every citizen to develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry. This means a country where courts deliver justice within reasonable time, where officials serve the public, and where beliefs are tested against evidence. Tagore expressed the same wish in his poem that begins with the line where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, and ends with the prayer that his country awake into that heaven of freedom.

A seventh dream concerns work and dignity. Every year millions of young Indians enter the labour force, and the country has yet to find the jobs that they hope for. A farmer who can only earn a living by borrowing, a graduate who cannot find employment and a worker in an informal job with no security live with a restlessness that is not a dream but a nightmare. The dream is of a country where honest work brings a decent living and where the young do not have to leave their villages in despair to find it.

Dreams of this kind differ from slogans because they ask something of the dreamer. Kalam called on the young to take responsibility, writing of a developed India by 2020 in the report he prepared with Y. S. Rajan in 1998. Governments can build schools and pass laws, but the dream of clean streets needs citizens who do not litter and the dream of honesty needs those who refuse to pay a bribe. A dream shared widely enough becomes a habit, and a habit repeated long enough becomes a national character.

The danger is complacency. Growth, a rising stock market and a place among the great economies can lull a country into thinking its work is done. The poor are the least likely to be heard in such a mood. Which dream will wake India first, whether it is a disaster, a leader, a movement of the young or the discovery of a statistic too shameful to ignore, is not written anywhere, and it may be waking already in a house nobody has visited.