The Challenges for India in the Next Millennium

India ,like all other countries world over ,is at the threshold of next millennium. We have challenges to face as we prepare ourselves to step into 21st century. Let us briefly explore some of these challenges. As we all know, India is a wonderful mixture of so much diversities – different religions,languages,geographical conditions, cultural habits and so on. maintaining harmony among these diversities against growing tendency of separatism is one of the main tasks lying ahead of us as we enter the next millennium. If this harmony is destroyed, the foundation of India is sure to collapse. Preserving unity among so much diversities is indeed, a difficult task . Especially , when we consider the influx of selfish, individualistic approach in our societies. The nation is built up on the value system of its people. The problems we have now – communalism, regionalism, growing violence, separatism are all directly or indirectly reflection of erosion of our basic value system. Re building this should start from each one of us , from our families, from our homes. It will then spread to the societies that we live in and will eventually keep on strengthening the nation. Ironically we all keep on lamenting about the pathetic situation of India without doing anything constructive to resolve it. Next millennium will experience unimaginable technological advancement. Nations all over the world are striving hard to keep pace with this. In India we face a Herculean task to prepare ourselves to meet this challenge . The basic ingradients required are proper education for all our citizens & opportunities to flourish. Education should not be just for the sake of degrees or diplomas. People need to be educated so that they expand their horizon of knowledge, wisdom, attitudes and become real human beings of superior qualities. Considering our present literacy rate of and our budget allocation only this indeed is a great challenge for the next mellinnium. Providing education is not enough; we need to create enough opportunities for our people to use their talents. Considering our unemployment rate of we have to go a long way in stimulating our economy & industrialisation. Rapid industrialisation while preserving our natural resources & less pollution is a huge challenge to face in the next millennium. Economic advancement requires rapid industrialisation. Pollution, destruction of natural resources, urbanisation & subsequent social tensions are the obvious consequences of fast pace of industrialisation. We need to carefully formulate our policies to have full advantages of industrialisation while minimising its negative side effects. Next millennium is likely to face acute shortage of energy. Conservation of energy & expanding utilisation of our natural energy sources (solar, wind, wave etc) are the solutions to meet this challenge. We need to produce simple mechanisms so that the practice of using natural energy sources will reach common man. Our present political system has lost its credibility. Rampant corruption & misuse of power has created an ugly image of politics among the younger generation and they prefer to totally detach from politics. This is not a desirable tendency for the future of the nation. We need talents in future politics of our country. It is a great challenge to cleanse politics off corruption and restructure it for the next millennium. We have already crossed 1 billion mark of our population. This rate of growth of our population poses great challenge for the next millennium where resources will be scarce. We need to enhance our efforts considerably to control this explosive growth of population. The easiest way to destroy a country is , perhaps, to destroy its culture. With the advancement of mass media , the erosion of our cultural heritage is also speeded up. Many western countries, after realising the evils of the so called ‘modern free society' are slowly going back to their original cultural ethics. Where as , we in India , are on the verge of breaking it. In the next millennium, as world gets smaller & smaller through media, it is a great challenge to preserve our cultural ethics. There are no easy solutions to any of these challenges we have to face. We, the younger generation, cannot remain aloof and let things happen just like that. We need to awake and seek ways & means to live up to the challenges. Indeed , we shape the future – whether it is good or bad depends a lot on us.