By Aabir Lahiry

India’s ambition is to become a developed country, said Raghuram Rajan, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, during an interview with ABP Live while attending Jaipur Literature Festival 2024. He also said that we can create those developed country jobs, but we need to get the people who can do those jobs.

He added that the country should focus on a child’s good education and health to equip them to do those intellectual jobs required to help India become a developed nation.

“Ambition is to become a developed country. We can create those developed country jobs, but we need to do our homework. And by the homework, I mean getting people who can do those jobs by focusing on a child’s good education and health. If you starve a child of nutrition early on, their brain gets stunned, their health gets impaired, and they can’t actually do work, so we need to get rid of malnutrition. These are the things we need to do in order to become a rich country and not just import big infrastructure or create big factories,” Rajan said.

Speaking about what he thinks about some of the bad economic decisions for the country, Rajan said, “We can have a long debate about whether bank nationalisation was a good thing or bad thing.” 

“In some ways, the State Bank of India was already nationalised. Did we need to nationalise many more private sector banks in order to provide that mix of the private and public sector, or did we go too far by nationalising all the big Banks and therefore creating a public sector-focused culture? I’m not sure. I think competition between different ownerships is a good thing, but emphasising one over the other sometimes creates a risk aversion or a kind of harmed our financial system,” he added.

Also Read: ‘Not A politician’: Raghuram Rajan Dismisses Speculation About Rajya Sabha Seat