Ambition Is To Become A Developed Country, But Need To Do Our Homework: Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Rajan said India should focus on a child's good education and health to equip them to do those intellectual jobs required to help India become a developed nation.

India’s ambition is to become a developed country, and India can create those developed country jobs, but there is need for homework, according to Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). By "homework", Rajan meant preparing the workforce that can carry out those jobs, and that he said can be done by working on the foundation, which is by "focusing on a child’s good education and health".

Speaking exclusively to ABP Live on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024, he said listed the measures needed to be taken "to become a rich country".

“Ambition is to become a developed country. We can create those developed country jobs, but we need to do our homework. And by the homework, I mean getting people who can do those jobs by focusing on a child’s good education and health. If you starve a child of nutrition early on, their brain gets stunted, their health gets impaired, and they can't actually do work, so we need to get rid of malnutrition. These are the things we need to do in order to become a rich country and not just import big infrastructure or create big factories,” Rajan said.

He also spoke on the new book, 'Breaking the Mould: Reimagining the Economic Future’, which he has co-authored with Rohit Lamba. Both authors spoke at length on the various aspects of India's economy and growth factors, including bank nationalisation, manufacturing, and job creation.  

Bank Nationalisation Created A Public Sector-Focused Culture: Raghuram Rajan

Speaking about what he thinks about some of the economic decisions that proved bad for the country, Rajan said: “We can have a long debate about whether bank nationalisation was a good thing or bad thing.” 

He added: “In some ways, the State Bank of India was already nationalised. Did we need to nationalise many more private sector banks in order to provide that mix of the private and public sector, or did we go too far by nationalising all the big banks and therefore creating a public sector-focused culture? I’m not sure. I think competition between different ownerships is a good thing, but emphasising one over the other sometimes creates a risk aversion or a kind of harmed our financial system."

Watch the full interview here: