Kolkata: Thinker and economist Swaminathan Gurumurthy on Sunday said India would produce all that Indians need in a Viksit Bharat, and called for an alternative intellectual architecture of which economics would be a part.Speaking at an interactive session organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce, he said: “It is not that India will become America. India will be India. It will produce all that the Indians need. But it will not produce what the Westerners need in India.”Viksit Bharat, he said, meant India would rise by presenting its own model, as it had for thousands of years, with adjustments as time demanded. “It is this sustainability that is going to be the foundation on which Viksit Bharat will emerge… The Western model is bound to collapse and is collapsing.” Citing the US social security system, he claimed the country’s social security obligation, at $73 trillion, had become “dynamite sitting under the American corner”.Drawing on the Swadeshi movement, he said: “We all told the people, buy your own goods… But we also told them it is not enough that goods should be Indian. The habits, the lifestyle, the culture must be Indian.”He cautioned against too much stress on GDP numbers through traditional models. “Where India will be after China, after America, it will all happen. But that is not going to be the index of Viksit Bharat’s personality. Its personality will be what is sustaining India, about which there is no understanding in this country.”Warning against becoming “atomised, isolated individuals” in a pursuit of money without philosophy, culture or a settled way of life, he said: “That is the lifestyle into which the world has been evangelised by the West. We have to resist it. We have to create an alternative intellectual architecture. Economics will be part of it.”Note
