THERE is good news from the economic front, with the economy getting poised for what the Ministry of Finance described as V-shaped growth in the quarter ending March 31, 2021. The economy has gotten out of recessionary phase that the nation endured for two successive quarters due to coronavirus pandemic. Now is the time of better health, better prospects, better times for all sectors of the economy, as the Government has asserted. It is necessary to analyse this development in the right perspective. Figures, numbers and statistics have their own story to tell, which is common knowledge. But what is more important than all those is an element that some may tend to describe as abstract -- the spiritual and psychological dimension of economic activity.

 

It is this dimension that has made all the positive difference to the Indian economy in the past one year when the nation -- and also the world -- was afflicted severely by history’s worst pandemic that sent national economies reeling. And that is also the dimension that helped India regain its economic composure to become one of the few top economies that have exited recessionary phase. Every country took measures to help its economy. As India, too, took certain steps, all the activity had a spiritual core -- of extreme confidence in the resilience of the larger Indian society. It was this element that the national leadership understood in totality.

 

The robustness of the Indian people, their sense of survival, endurance became the key factors of the great story of India’s economic recovery, no matter what political detractors might have had to say about the Government’s efforts. Unpurturbed by political assaults, unfazed by criticism, the Government worked out a plan of recovery that included not just pumping of money into the economy, but also doing so in an organised, well-thought manner. Out of that planning, the series of measures that took care of core sectors of the economy one by one -- banking, aviation, medium and and small industries, large and heavy industry, agriculture. No matter what the Opposition had to say, the Government moved with an extreme sense of self-assertion and ensured that there was no dearth of money for all critical sectors.

 

The great concept of Atmanirbhar Bharat was born out of that self-assertion. Not only did it revive the emotion of Swadeshi, but also appealed to good economic sense at a vast range of domains from local to global. The stand-off with China, also, helped in this national resolve -- to give a tight slap to the Chinese who wanted to sweep the Indian marketplace. If there was an official response to reducing the Chinese dominance of the marketplace, the common people, too, responded patriotically to reject whatever was Chinese.

 

This became possible because the national leadership recognised the psycho-spiritual dimension of the economic activity. Prosperity is not an outcome of money; it is a reward of sense of self-worth and self-assertion that one is the master of one’s own economic fortune. Modern-day economists may not attach much importance to these abstract aspects, but traditional economic philosophers believed in the potency of human component as a major factor. The credit of India’s national leadership is that it believed in the strength of the human core of the economic activity and latched on to it as a credible tool of recovery. At this stage, as the national economy emerges from the recessionary phase, it is necessary to understand this silent core of India’s spiritual robustness in the face of adversity. It also offers us a clue to handling the future challenge as well.