The man, who was instrumental in founding a political party and decades later became Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy, cannot be an ordinary person as it requires the highest level of commitment. Of course, this is about former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who is the reason why Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is governing the country today. He served as Prime Minister for three terms- first for 13 days in 1996, second for 13 months from 1998 to 1999 and third from 1999 to 2004.
Now, when Bharat is remembering former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on his 100th birth anniversary, it becomes vital to look at the initiatives taken by the former Prime Minister.
It is very common that when someone mentions Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Pokhran (1998), and Kargil war (1999) comes to our mind. But, the kind of development initiatives Prime Minister Vajpayee took during his tenure could have been taken decades back and it would have completely changed the country. Unfortunately, it happened too late.
Of course, one of the biggest reasons was that the Nehru-Gandhi family wanted to control everything. So, everything was centralised. Coming to the point, Infrastructure development plays a vital role in the GDP growth of any country, which generates millions of jobs. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure from 1999 to 2004 was full of crucial developments starting from roads, highway constructions and improving school education to bringing telecom revolution. It is worth mentioning the famous quote of the former US President John F Kennedy , who once said,” American roads are not good because America is rich, but America is rich because American roads are good.” This is exactly what Atal Bihari Vajpayee did during his tenure by bringing the concept of Golden Quadrilateral to connect metropolitan cities — Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai — through a network of highways and to connect most of the major industrial, agricultural and cultural centers of India. He also conceptualized the Pradhanmantri Gramin Sadak Yojna to connect villages across the country with a network of roads. As a result of that, today in the last two decades, the total road network in the country is 6.4 million km comprising national & state highways and rural & urban roads. National highways account for 2 per cent of the total road network. Notably, road and rail connectivity play a bigger role in making any country prosperous- which helps save time in moving goods.
Even if we take an example of China, it mainly focused on road and rail connectivity in its early days of economic reforms. China in mid-90s, with World Bank assistance launched Roads Improvement for Poverty Alleviation (RIPA), which was linked to poverty alleviation programmes. And since then, it worked more and more on road and rail connectivity as it knew that infrastructure development is the key to prosperity.
Even today, China is showing its hegemonic nature through ‘Belt and Road’ initiatives and wants to control the world market with help of this. Looking at the data, we find that India’s GDP grew faster after 1999 when former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee took some powerful initiatives in the area of Infrastructure development. It is true that after economic reforms in early-90 by the Narsimha Rao government, the Indian economy started growing.
India’s total GDP was $333 billion in 1994. But it started going up in 2002; then India’s total GDP was $523.77 billion. And in the next two years, it became $721 billion. And since then India’s GDP growth has been breaking all the records. Importantly, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee came into power in 1998, India’s total GDP was $428 billion.
Therefore, it’s quite evident that after the tenure of former Prime Minister Vajpayee, the Indian economy found a direction. Not only economic development, he also improved India’s relations with many countries. After the Pokhran test, India’s relations with the US were in turmoil and it imposed sanctions on India, yet in the same tenure Vajpayee improved ties with the US.
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