It sounds paradoxical to say that though poverty has declined yet challenges remain in the country. Poverty rates in the country have declined substantially from 54.9 per cent in 1973-04 to 27.5 per cent in 2004-05 as measured by the National Sample Survey (NSS). That is because of planning and development. But this does not mean that challenges posed by poverty have all vanished. While delivering the 2015 Indira Gandhi Memorial Lecture of the Asiatic Society on national integration, Vice President Hamid Ansari touched upon a very crucial point and asked whether democracy as a form of Government has been able to eradicate all the challenges that poverty poses.
The question is what form of democracy we have accepted for our country and whether the usual norms that make a democracy a success are really available. The democracy which we are observing in our country is called Westminster democracy as it was borrowed from the British democracy. The time has come when we shall have to debate the feasibility of Westminster democracy to our country with such a variety of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and historical diversity. The subject is worth national debate. We would like that a broad-based debate on the proposition should take place in the public domain.
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