May Day Eve: When Priorities Shift and Definitions Invert - India’s Path to Becoming a Respected Nation

When hard work is done over years, relentlessly and consistently, you reach a state of eliciting respect. India’s growing industriousness is increasingly visible in both perception and performance, as the country steadily earns global approval through sustained effort rather than mere potential. Over the past decade, India has maintained a strong growth trajectory of around 6–7% annually, while lifting millions into the middle class and expanding its formal workforce. The country’s rise in the Global Innovation Index from 81st in 2015 to the top 40 reflects a deeper shift toward productivity and innovation. Meanwhile, record foreign direct investment inflows exceeding $80 billion annually signal growing global confidence in India’s work ethic and reliability. From technology services to manufacturing and startups, Indian professionals are increasingly known for consistency and scale. This gradual but steady transformation points to a larger truth: India is no longer seeking recognition based on promise alone, but is working persistently to earn respect through measurable performance and disciplined growth.

Another visible marker of India’s rising industriousness—and its gradual gain in social and global approval—is the steady expansion of home ownership across income groups. In India, the number of households owning homes has grown significantly over the past two decades, with ownership rates estimated at over 65%, reflecting both aspiration and financial progress. Government initiatives like Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana have accelerated this trend, with over 30 million houses sanctioned for urban and rural beneficiaries combined. Access to housing finance has also deepened, with home loan portfolios expanding at double-digit growth rates annually, indicating rising creditworthiness and stable incomes. For many families, owning a house is not just a financial milestone but a symbol of dignity, discipline, and long-term effort. As more Indians move from informal living to formal home ownership, it signals a society working steadily toward stability, respectability, and broader economic legitimacy. 

Let us look at where the nation has begun in history, how it drifted backwards and slowly regaining the lost ground while also getting back one key ingredient – respect. 

The Weight of a Glorious Past 

To speak of India's quest for respect in the modern world, one must first stand in the shadow of what it once was. This is not nostalgia — it is context, and without it, the distance India has fallen, and the distance it must travel, cannot be properly measured. 

For millennia, India was not merely a participant in world civilisation — it was one of its engines. The subcontinent gave the world the decimal number system and the concept of zero, without which modern science and computing would be inconceivable. Nalanda and Takshashila were universities that drew scholars from China, Persia, and Greece centuries before Oxford was founded. India's share of world GDP hovered around 25 percent as late as the early eighteenth century. Its cotton textiles clothed empires. Its spices drove the age of exploration. The very desire of European powers to find a sea route to India set in motion the discovery of the Americas. The world, in a very real sense, once orbited around this subcontinent. 

Then came two centuries of colonial extraction. The British systematically dismantled Indian industry — famously reversing the flow of textiles so that Indian cotton was shipped to Manchester, woven into cloth, and sold back to India at a profit, while Indian weavers starved. By 1947, when India reclaimed its independence, it inherited an economy devastated by deliberate underdevelopment, a literacy rate below 20 percent, a life expectancy of barely 32 years, and institutions designed not to serve Indians but to govern them. The starting point was not merely humble — it was a ruin. And while that historical wound explains much, a nation cannot live forever in the explanation. At some point, it must simply rise. 

The Parameters of Disrespect — Where India Has Lagged 

Independence brought freedom but not immediately dignity, at least not in the eyes of the world's measuring instruments. Across almost every parameter by which nations are quietly judged, India spent the better part of seven decades underperforming in ways that were, at times, genuinely embarrassing for a civilisation of its stature and size. 

On the Human Development Index, India today still ranks 132nd — below far smaller and economically weaker nations. The Global Hunger Index, for several years, placed India below sub-Saharan African countries, a fact that ought to provoke not political outrage at the index, but national fury at the condition it reflects. That a country producing world-class software engineers and nuclear scientists could not adequately feed its own children is not a colonial legacy alone — it is a failure of governance and priority that accumulated across decades of mismanaged socialism and bureaucratic indifference. 

The Olympics have long served as a particularly unforgiving mirror. At the Tokyo 2020 Games, India — home to one-fifth of all humanity — won seven medals. Jamaica, with a population of under three million, won nine. The arithmetic is not merely unflattering; it is a structural indictment of a system that treats sport as a distraction, athletes as amateurs, and physical excellence as secondary to examination scores. For 1.4 billion people to be consistently outperformed by nations a fraction of their size is not bad luck — it is a policy failure dressed up as sporting misfortune. 

Corruption has been perhaps the deepest wound. Transparency International ranked India 93rd out of 180 nations in its 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index. For decades, corruption was not an aberration in Indian public life — it was the operating system. Getting a driving licence, registering a property, filing a police complaint, or accessing a hospital bed required navigating a labyrinth of palm-greasing. The Licence Raj that prevailed from the 1950s through the early 1990s gave the state extraordinary power over economic activity, and with that power came a culture of extraction that demoralized honest citizens and rewarded the well-connected. It created, in effect, a parallel moral economy where cynicism was rational and integrity was a disadvantage. 

Infrastructure told a similar story of institutional neglect. For most of the post-Independence era, Indian roads were potholed, power cuts were scheduled like appointments, airports resembled overcrowded bus depots, and open defecation — affecting hundreds of millions — was a public health catastrophe witnessed by the world with a mixture of horror and pity. That India, which had sent satellites into orbit and built atomic reactors, could not provide its citizens with toilets was a civilisational contradiction that demanded confrontation. The press freedom index, gender equality rankings, and ease of doing business scores told equally sobering stories — of a state that had the ambition of a great power but frequently the delivery of a struggling one. 

The Turn — Present Day Improvements 

The past twelve years have not transformed India, but they have redirected it — and the direction now, for the first time in generations, is unmistakably forward across multiple fronts simultaneously. 

The infrastructure revolution, while still incomplete, is the most visible. Highway construction accelerated from under 12 kilometres per day in 2014 to over 28 kilometres per day by 2023 — more than doubling the pace. The Bharatmala project is knitting together a modern road network across the subcontinent. Airport expansions and new terminals in Tier-2 cities are reducing the geography of opportunity. Metro rail networks have expanded to dozens of cities beyond the traditional four. The Swachh Bharat Mission, whatever its imperfections in behavioural follow-through, constructed over 110 million toilets and shifted a national conversation about sanitation from shame to action. 

Digital infrastructure may be India's most genuinely world-class achievement of this era. The Unified Payments Interface — UPI — now processes over 13 billion transactions monthly and is being adopted by countries across Southeast Asia and the Middle East as a model for real-time payment architecture. The JAM trinity of Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar biometric identity, and Mobile connectivity has plugged an estimated ₹2.7 lakh crore in welfare leakages by routing benefits directly to citizens, bypassing the long chain of middlemen that had made Indian poverty a business for the corrupt. These are not glamorous reforms — they are the plumbing of a functional state — and India is finally laying that plumbing at scale. 

Science has delivered moments of genuine pride. The Chandrayaan-3 mission in August 2023 made India the first nation in history to land a spacecraft near the lunar south pole — and it did so at a cost lower than the budget of many Hollywood films, demonstrating that Indian scientific ingenuity, when properly organized and funded, belongs at the frontier of human achievement. In sport, Neeraj Chopra's gold medal in javelin at Tokyo, followed by a silver at Paris 2024, represents not just personal glory but the first green shoots of a culture beginning to value athletic excellence alongside academic achievement. 

Arriving at Respect — The World Begins to Take Notice 

The most telling evidence that India is arriving at something resembling genuine respect is not self-reported — it is reflected in the behaviour of other nations, which, unlike speeches and surveys, does not lie. 

In trade and diplomacy, the shift is profound. India signed a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with the UAE in 2022 — the fastest such negotiation in India's history, completed in under 90 days — signalling that the world's appetite to formalise economic relationships with India has grown sharply. The India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement followed the same year. In March 2024, India signed a landmark Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement with EFTA — the bloc comprising Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein — under which EFTA nations committed to facilitating $100 billion in investment into India over 15 years, arguably the most consequential investment commitment India has ever secured in a trade deal. Negotiations are simultaneously advancing with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. This flurry of diplomatic trade engagement — after decades in which India was considered too protectionist and too bureaucratic to negotiate with — signals a fundamental shift. Countries do not rush to sign trade agreements with nations they do not respect or trust as long-term partners. 

The geopolitical repositioning is equally significant. India's presidency of the G20 in 2023 was a masterly exercise in diplomatic soft power — bringing together the Global North and Global South around an agenda of digital public infrastructure, climate finance reform, and inclusive growth. The African Union's admission to the G20 under India's presidency was a diplomatic stroke that enhanced India's standing across an entire continent. Nations as varied as the United States, France, Australia, Japan, and the UAE are actively deepening strategic and economic ties with India, not out of charity but out of calculated self-interest — which is precisely how genuine respect in international affairs operates. 

The Indian diaspora, long a source of quiet pride, is now an instrument of active soft power. Indian-origin leaders helm Google, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, and FedEx. The Vice President of the United States was of Indian descent. This extraordinary record of achievement wherever Indian talent finds open systems is both a testament to the civilisation's deep reserves and a standing challenge — to build, at home, systems worthy of that talent. 

India is not yet a fully respectable nation by the exacting standards the word demands. Hunger persists. Inequality is wide. Institutions remain fragile in places. But for the first time in a very long while, the trajectory is clear and the momentum is real. Respect, once it arrives in sufficient measure, does not merely feel good — it becomes a force multiplier. It draws investment, elevates diplomatic leverage, inspires civic pride, and creates the virtuous cycle where achievement begets more achievement. 

The shores of respect are no longer a distant dream glimpsed on clear days. India is in the water, rowing hard, and the shore is coming closer. The task now is not to slow down and admire the progress, but to row harder still — because a civilisation of this depth, this size, and this potential deserves nothing less than to fully arrive.