How India Can Become Developed When Malnutrition Prevalent, Asks Raghuram Rajan

India needs to address problems like malnutrition to become a developed nation and also focus on its most important asset of human capital, former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said on Sunday.

Speaking at an interactive session on a book co-authored by him at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad, he asked how the country can become a developed one when malnutrition is prevalent.

“We are fixated with becoming a developed, rich country by 2047. I use this as an example to say, you must be joking about becoming a developed rich country by 2047 with 35 percent malnutrition today,” he said.

The children who are suffering from malnutrition now would join the labour force 10 years from now, he said.

He also stressed nurturing the human capital in the country by offering appropriate training on a large scale.

“In order to get the medium term right, we have to focus on India’s most important asset, its human capital. We have 1.4 billion people more than any other country in the world,” he said.

“If we can train a large number of those people well, we have access to so much in terms of value creation. I would say let’s start with that. Figure out what’s going wrong there and fix it,” Mr Rajan said.

Asked whether the banking system which he had started “cleaning up” when he was Governor of RBI got cleaned up or that there is still a lot of work to do, Mr Rajan said, “It’s taken a long time, but I actually understand that it’s now cleaned up”.