The title of this book, Making India Great Again, has a story in itself. With the emphasis on the word ‘again’, we get back to history and look at how the country was great, and the idea is to extract principles from the past to project into the future. The overarching argument of the authors is that we have all the basic ingredients for greatness, but it needs to be organised in a particular pattern.
Meeta and Rajivlochan take a broad-brush history of pre-independence India, and look at issues of innovation and productivity. The look at the resources that the country is endowed with; genius that was embedded in both our scientific and commercial knowledge systems and argue that India lost out on all these because of the failure to build on these systems. Three aspects that were needed to build on these systems. One, fitting these systems with data to harness scientific knowledge for a competitive edge; two, documenting the knowledge base to make incremental innovations in science and technology as well as in commercial structures...
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