by SURUPA GUPTA
India and Pakistan inherited the same economic legacy of underinvestment and neglect from Britain when they became independent states following the Partition on Aug. 15, 1947. Their colonial economies were among the poorest in the world.
For both nations, independence almost immediately led to strong growth and fueled significant gains in education, health care and other areas of development. But it was Pakistan that saw faster growth rates during the first four decades or so, while India lagged behind.
Something began to change around the 1990s as their roles reversed and India vaulted ahead of Pakistan, eventually becoming the world’s third-biggest economy by purchasing power and the “I” in BRICS – an acronym referring to a bloc of five key emerging market countries.
What accounts for India’s growth spurt?
As a scholar of international political economy, I believe India’s stronger embrace of democracy – at the same time that Pakistan experienced frequent military dictatorships and changes in government – has a lot to do with it.
A colonial inheritance
From 1857 to 1947, Britain ruled directly over most of the territory that became the independent states of India and Pakistan.
Economic growth under British rule was minimal, averaging just 0.9% a year from 1900 to 1947. This happened largely because the colonial Indian economy was mostly agricultural, and yet the British made little investment in improving farm productivity.
Additionally, Great Britain made limited investments in the well-being of the people of India, notably by underfunding their education and health care. As a result, colonial India had one of the lowest literacy rates in the world at about 17%, and life expectancy was in the mid-30s. Britain’s neglect of the plight of Indians is perhaps best illustrated by the 1943 famine in Bengal in eastern India, in which over 1.5 million people died as result of policy failure.
Post-independence growth, led by Pakistan
Britain decided to give up its “jewel in the crown” and partition the region into Hindu-dominated India and Muslim Pakistan after facing mounting pressure from the local population and a growing nationalist movement.
This led to one of the largest forced migrations of the 20th century: Nearly 9 million Hindus and Sikhs moved into India and about 5 million Muslims to a geographically separated East and West Pakistan over the next two decades. An estimated 1 million people died amid mass violence.
Economic growth, however, took off, with both new countries growing at 3% to 4% in the first decade or so of independence as the respective governments invested more into their economies. But soon, differences emerged.
The Conversation for more