India and China were the richest nations on earth in the sixteenth century as per Forbes and economic historian Angus Maddison. In 1700, India's share of world income was almost equivalent to that of the whole of europe.
Economy of India - Wikipedia
Unfortunately, both of them along with other Asian nations came under western colonialism in the last two centuries. The British who came as humble traders to India, later used Indian sepoys or mercenaries to start establishing their rule in India gradually, which impoverished the nation from being among the richest to the poorest on earth.
The indigo famine in India, like the potato famine in Ireland, was designed to cater to British market and hegemonistic designs, without taking into consideration the native farmer or needs of population. Both famines resulted in deaths of millions.
Great Bengal famine of 1770 - Wikipedia
Great Famine (Ireland) - Wikipedia
Many cottage industries were identified and systematically destroyed to ensure monopoly of British goods in India and drain India's wealth to Britain without any need for quality improvement through competitiveness, cost effectiveness and so on.
The systematic destruction of the Indian cottage industries and artificially engineered famines ensured that the rich became poor and the poor were wiped out.
The Chinese also had a nasty experience in this regard, when the British waged a war against them to repeal the laws against importing of opium, so as to continue their lucrative trade in opium, disregarding the negative social effects on young chinese.
Opium Wars - Wikipedia
India and China are case studies of the fact that capitalism divorced from ethics and morals is injurious to overall world prosperity rather than increasing it. One man's luxury is brought off the calculated exploitation of an another man's honest labour.
Consequently Indian and china, after independence took the route of socialism and communism respectively, which stifled their overall economic growth but ensured that the poor and underprivileged got state resources for development, and meet their primary needs.
But still India and China have emerged from the depths of poverty to being the fastest growing major economies in the world at the moment, lifting millions out of poverty every year, and quite reflective of the past where they used to be the dominant economies on earth.
This article mentioned is of 2012, nine years back, and much water has passed in the river after that. India has only gained her independence 72 years back.
It is an uphill task to lift a 1.35 billion population to prosperity again. At present, India has created the largest pool on earth of scientific, engineering and managerial personnel through its educational institutions.
We have an advantage of having a highly youthful population, proportionately speaking , and this augurs well in terms of creativity and innovation.
The challenge thus is to harness these young intellectual energies to ensure high productivity in all spheres of material life. Due to inspiring leadership in the form of Vikram Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan and Abdul Kalam and others, we are now becoming fast self-reliant in science and technology, and hopefully will create cutting edge scientific discoveries and technological applications in the near future.
