Former Union Minister of Divestment for the Indian Government and Editor of the Indian Express Arun Shourie led a discussion titled "Economy and Security in Asia" on Monday.
The talk was sponsored by the Indian Students at Tufts (ISAT) group.
Shourie, who decided to return to India after working for the World Bank and earning a Ph.D. in economics from Syracuse University, praised India's strong economic growth.
Both the economy and exports are growing, he said, reporting 8.9 percent and 20 percent increases in the last quarter, respectively.
"The manufacturing sector has been reinvented to compete with China," Shourie said. "The real developments are needed in agriculture and infrastructure. That will bring the most employment."
But India's dynamism is not shared across the region. "The economy in India and Southeast Asia is vigorous with strong growth," Shourie said. "Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have their own problems, and Pakistan has a superficially high rate of growth while its foundations are sinking."
Shourie identified the parliamentary system, government waste, and a failing higher education system as the three main obstacles to future growth.
"The parliamentary system must be changed to a system more like France," he said.
"We should have run-off elections like France and vote for blocks of party candidates instead of individuals," Shourie continued. "This will create cohesion while reducing the role of money and local bosses in elections."
While many of the students' questions focused on politically empowering the masses, Shourie countered that in a country of one billion people, the role of elected officials must be to think of what is best for India as a nation, not what contracts or jobs they can provide to their local district.
"This may run against your ideas of democracy, but in India we have too much democracy," he said. "Nothing gets done. Small groups can block any decision." Out of 257 agricultural bills passed recently, only five have been acted on, he said..
"The government has not gotten in the way of growth yet, but future growth depends on the government's ability to build the infrastructure a large modernizing country requires," he said. "Every dollar spent on a subsidy is a dollar that is not going to infrastructure."
With regard to Indo-U.S. relations, Shourie said it is a great mistake to frame the success of the relationship solely in terms of the nuclear issue.
"The Prime Minister [of India] refuses to comply with certain conditions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty," he said. "The U.S. Congress will not accept this. But the U.S. cannot allow any one issue to break down the relationship with India."
Perhaps most relevant to the audience at hand, though, was his discussion of the role of Indian students in the United States.
"The most important thing that Indians can do in the U.S. is to excel. By excelling in the U.S., the Indian community has changed the world's perception of India, and thus India's perception of itself," he said.
"Indian students must also act as a window to the world for their country. Students have access to that information. They can give [important] knowledge to the Indian media and help wake up the government," he said.
Reaction to his speech was very positive. "I have been a follower of Mr. Shourie's writing for a long time and we were very happy to have him speak," said ISAT's President Rakesh Venkatesh, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and the event's organizer.
Anil Saigal, the Chair of Mechanical Engineering, said that Shourie's perspective is a critical one for students to see.
"It is very important for young people to see Mr. Shourie's enthusiasm for what India has to offer," he said.
