An open letter to Prime Minister Modiji

Dear Modiji, 

Congratulations on much deserved victory in recently concluded elections. Without wasting your valuable time, straight away I will come to a point why I thought of writing to you. I think you can deliver on the expectations of this great nation and it citizens and you understand them very well. But, I took the liberty of clubbing them together and bringing to your notice in three important and broad issues:

1.     Jobs

2.     Migration and

3.     Infrastructure

Additionally, I have divided India into three different regions to highlight the above mentioned common issues. Even though the issues are same across India but their form, magnitude and impact are different for different parts of the country: 

1.     Villages

2.     Developing cities

3.     Capital cities

Majority of India's population resides in villages and dependent on agriculture, whose output and contribution to Indian economy is determined by rain god! More than 50% of the Indian population is employed/occupied with agriculture either directly or indirectly. This ample magnitude of the population and agriculture sector contributes not more than 18-20% to the Indian economy due to irrigation issues, unskilled & shortage of labor (due to migration for better opportunities), lack of technology, improper pricing (mostly due to dealers between farmers and consumers), lack of infrastructure to modern markets. 

I am from a small village called M.K. Hubli in Belgaum district in Karnataka. During my childhood our village used to be a full of people who hardly visited Belgaum for jobs but now including my family members most villagers either migrated to Belgaum or do travel daily for better opportunities. That doesn't mean that village is mostly empty, but thanks to demographics village is still full of this generation. The migration (due to inadequate income from farming, lack of proper education/opportunities, pathetic infrastructure) causing talent drain which in turn leads to villages with unskilled or partially skilled population. The side effect this migration is soon will be majority villages may become (if not already) old age places, similar to some of Japanese villages. So we should think of moving majority of the population out of agriculture and provide opportunities related to agriculture-allied services, which can support agriculture too. At the same time there has to adequate technological support to agriculture but it has to be customized as unlike west most Indian farmers don't own big chunk of land and can't afford high end technology and big investments.  

Even though moving to developing cities provides better education and opportunities to villagers but those cities need to have adequate infrastructure for next wave of development and high paying jobs (MNCs), which have ripple effect in the consumption oriented economy. Mostly MNCs are concentrated in and around capital citiesand MSMEs in developing cities. This in turn leading to migration of educated ones to either capital cities or abroad. And the same old chain continues with age old parents leaving behind in cities. Even though Smart City project is addressing the issue of infrastructure to some extent but the focus should be more on wooing companies to have their branches/manufacturing units in these cities so that economic activity can improve.

Me and my wife live in Bangalore and come under highest tax bracket. That means roughly we pay 45-50% tax (direct + indirect) and recently we started thinking whether it is worth staying here in India! Believe me the thought of settling down in abroad never came to our mind until recently. But considering crumbling infrastructure, pathetic public service and adulterated food articles and polluted environment (the in-famous burning and snowing Bellandur lake) and no accountability from public servants are too much to tolerate. In addition to these, migration keep pushing more people to Bangalore or other capital cities. Even though I am not against migration as I myself is a migrant but somewhere we should think of reducing it as it is not possible to stop it completely. Majority of capital cities, including Bangalore/Chennai/Mumbai contribute almost half of their respective state's exchequer and government's can't keep on ignoring intra-city connectivity issues. In Bangalore we jokingly say that don't measure the distance between two places in kilometers but in terms of time taken to travel. It is unimaginable to travel 10 km before 75-90 minutes during peak hours on weekdays. As Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley mentioned in one of his books, this kind of characters are first sign of a country which may fail to transit herself from developing nation to developed nation status due to middle income trap.

Initially when I thought of writing to you, I didn't think it will be so long but when I started writing it down too many things started coming to my mind. My apologies for wasting your time on things which you're already aware of but still I thought of writing to considering that you're one such person who resonates with common man's issues on the ground and try honestly to solve some of these issues. Thank you and all the best for your second term:)