Mr Prime Minister, now’s the time to have a ministry of the future

Five years ago, the Swedish government set up a department whose only concern was the future. Not the immediate future of the next decade, but across time — half a century and beyond. The department examines public health, education, housing and other areas of welfare. This, from a people-centric socialist democracy that has made public welfare into a careful equation. In the US, similar concerns are being addressed at private platforms funded by philanthropic institutions to create opportunities and safeguards for their people. Other countries in Europe have devised hypothetical scenarios of increasing population densities, new settlements, fuel and energy requirements, etc and proposed physical solutions for them. New cities with altogether different, experimental parameters are also coming up in China and Abu Dhabi.

Where does this place a country soon to be the most populous by 2025, with 50 megacities, each with more than a million people? How is India placed to tackle future problems of so great a magnitude, when the scourge of the present casts such a spell of doom? The lack of social, political and financial resolve that taints the country with a dismal annual performance, also makes it most suited to have a Ministry for the Future, like Sweden. What would India be like in 2050 and beyond could be correlated by simple math and multiplication. But what would we want India to be like in 2050 is an altogether different — and more difficult — question.

Sweden’s Council for the Future examines methods of cooperation between countries, ways to reconcile competitiveness, employment opportunities in emerging fields and new forms of inclusive social development.

All of it sounds suitably vague, but with education, environment, and innovation under review, the council seeks a challenge far beyond conventional answers, and originally proposed the question, “If the president were to appoint a cabinet member to worry about future generations, what would his/her job be?” It is a question India should have asked after Independence.

The failure of the country’s housing, education and health policies has so far been related primarily to inadequate provision; there was never enough to go around. The population has bloomed into so unwieldy a behemoth that conventional programmes will always be mired in shortfalls. Look at the government programme to provide a house for every family. In 1990, according to the National Building Organization, housing requirement in the country stood at two crore units. A decade later, the demand rose to four crore and today it stands at a whopping 5.5 crore. Similar stories show up in public health, rural education, civic utilities and infrastructure. Despite many successes, the backlog is always on the rise.

If the current scenarios look bleak, it is only because the situation demands instantaneous solutions. When drought hits a state, the demand for water is immediate; when cars flood roads, the PWD starts work on road widening. Indian institutional structures are fixated on solving the immediate problem, or at least appearing to do so. The distant future calls for no such deliberate and measured action. Its unpredictability, and consequently its resolution of projected scenarios, calls for flights of the imagination that must rely on invention and ingenuity.

Sixteenth-century Italy had no explicit need for a flying machine, yet Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings for his model came from his own mental mappings. Similarly, a glass dome over New York City was one of Buckminster Fuller’s many far-fetched ideas. In it was a suggestion of the ecological problems he foresaw in the place. Like ministers for the future, both were ahead of their time. Having achieved some notoriety in official circles for their inventiveness, and social labels that varied from genius to crank, both enjoyed immunity from conventions of the time. So should the ministry.

Since Prime Minister Modi is much too preoccupied with issues of the present, he needs the support of a full-time Ministry of the Future. Like Sweden, obviously any intervention in the future will have to look beyond current solutions to ask impossible questions. Are there ways of providing nutrition to waterless rural areas without conventional crop cycles? Is it possible to shelter people without the cumbersome physical structures of housing? Could drones be used as mobile hospitals to bring health facilities where needed? Can virtual teachers and schools be sent to children unable to attend classes?

Freed of conventional thought processes, the future may come with surprising solutions. If Modi is interested in looking beyond the immediate competition with China, and leaving more than just a copycat legacy, he will need to formulate a ministry that looks beyond his own lifetime.