India, with the change in the government and enthusiasm of people to develop, is at the bottleneck of its development. Along with the framing of policies, leaders of the nation need to acquire the knowledge and prospect of some of the experienced leaders of the world. Lee Kuan Yew, the first PM of Singapore, is the one among them. Let me draw out some of his explicit moves and steps, which took Singapore from a third level country to the first level country.
Lee Kuan Yew, the man with a vision and action, dedicated more than four decades of his life to build a small city-state to a developed economic powerhouse. The strategy implemented to achieve this, mainly covers his policy of free trade and promising atmosphere for foreign trade and investment. These policies attracted enumerable numbers of investors from western countries and subsequently marking the nation on the economic map of the world. Now lets have a look at the current Indian situation, although India has liberalized its economy, but it lags far behind when it comes to investment and doing business in India. (!!India holds a rank of in Ease of doing business!!). When Modi talks of investments and ‘Make in India’, he does the road show, but investors are more pragmatic and they need the work on the ground.
Along with boosting the economy, inclusive growth remained another top priority of Lee. This can be observed from the various bonus and wages policy for the workforce. Special care had always been provided for the welfare of the workforce, and the emergence of Singapore’s National Trade union Congress is an example of that. The Provident fund system ensures the retirement benefits, hence making retired personal self-reliant and a reliever during economic crisis. There are many more examples and policies, where in order to develop the economy, inclusive growth is never neglected. Many people say in context with India, “Rich is becoming richer and poor, poorer”, hence the inclusive growth is the need of the hour for our nation. Again the policies framed under Lee can be taken as a guiding factor.
Tourism is one of the sectors, which hardly requires any input, but are efficient to give huge output, and Singapore harnessed this very nicely. When the British withdrew from Singapore in 1971, Lee was able to persuade British not to destroy their docks. Later, those docks were used for civil purposes. Similarly, many more beauties built by the British were preserved to boost the tourism industry. Lee showed a great attention in making an international image of the country as ‘Garden City’, and that has been maintained till date. To promote and maintain tourism, the Singapore government has been spending a huge sum of their GDP. India, with the vast richness in culture, can also harness huge benefits from the tourism industry. Similar to Singapore, it needs to spend more amount of its GDP with an effective effort, mainly in its cleanliness and awareness sub-sector.
The other policy, which ought to inspire the leaders or for that matter even the policy makers, is the way Lee made Singapore a water surplus country from a water deficit country. Singapore relied totally on Malaysia for water supply. Malaysia utilized this reliance as a strategic weapon. Therefore, Lee experimented with water recycling in 1974. Similarly, few of the other policies and schemes were used like Singapore International Water Week and NEWater study. Hence, these policies can be taken as the example to sort out the various problems arising in India mainly due to urbanization.
Corruption is one of the most intense issues of our country and needs to be given a vast special attention. Here also the example is set by Singapore under the leadership of Lee. Through his policies and ideas he exhibited the nation that, merely making the rules won’t stop the corruption till the time a stringent action is not taken against the violator.
The instance in 1975, when a Minister while returning from holiday was arrested at an airport for corruption charges, shows the stringency. In another instance in 1989, a minister for National Development committed suicide after being informed about the investigation into corruption charges. These instances show that not just policies, but it was also the strict implementation that played a crucial role to lessen corruption. (!!Singapore ranks 7 in corruption perception index 2014 among 170 countries!!). Indian executives can learn from them. Mere RTI won’t reduce corruption, till the time political parties are also not covered by them. Hence, policy with strict implementation is the best combination and also need of the time to diminish the corruption level in India.
Internal security of Singapore is the other pillar, which needs to be looked at seriously by the Indian leaders. The mechanism is made for free and fearless movement of women. This is the reason of vast employment among women. Ways of handling of internal instability, by Lee, arising due to few troubling organizations should also be learnt by Indian leaders. Since Naxali, Moist and militant are the three organizations responsible for internal instability. (!!2011 report- 83 districts and 9 states under red corridor. A point to ponder upon!!)
The other and the most noticeable approach of Singapore is its approach in the education system. Singapore applied the policy of equality and quality in education. At one level its aim was to cover the all the citizens at the primary and secondary level, and at another to provide a qualitative education to graduation students. This holistic and integrated approach gave an impactful result in both research, as well as quality employee. (!! Singapore has 3 colleges in top 50 Engineering & tech colleges, whereas India’s topmost IIT-B ranks 170!!). Hence, along with focusing on SarvaSikhshaAviyan, India needs to give attention on quality of education. Providing research atmosphere-incentives, good parts of GDP & quality improvement centers are some of the common ways. Taking examples from Singapore’s leader Lee’s policy for education, India can strengthen its fragile education system.
A leader is one who always has the passion to learn and hence the life of Lee is the perfect opportunity for Mr. Modi and our fellow leaders of India to learn. An intense research on the policy making capabilities of Lee can act as the guiding lamp for Modi to usher India into the league of developed nations.
