It is fifty years since India won its independence from the British, and its problems are widely advertised. Problems there undeniably are -- with nearly a billion people occupying a land area about a third the size of the United States -- but the second half of the century has witnessed dramatic advances in the quality of life of most Indians, despite the enormous economic reversals suffered during the first half under British colonial rule. PNS commentator Sanjoy Banerjee is professor International Relations in the San Francisco State University.

On August 15th, India will celebrate its fiftieth year of independence. The occasion has brought forth a great deal of commentary inside and outside India -- most of it quite morose. We hear that India has fallen behind other Asian states in economic growth, over a third of Indians remain below the poverty line, corruption has become endemic -- in general, that the dreams of India's founders have not been realized.

All these facts are true enough, but the commentary lacks historical perspective.

The fundamental cause of India's slow development in the second half of the twentieth century is its socioeconomic disintegration in the first half -- and in the entire 190 years of British colonial rule that ended in 1947. During the last fifty years of British rule, while other societies in Asia enjoyed periods of growth, per capita income in India declined by half a per cent per year.

East Asian economies were depressed by war and revolution at mid-century, but they snapped back -- their recent growth is actually a second wind of modernization, and the current boom is built on foundations well established by earlier development.

In a sense, over the last fifty years India has gone through what its neighbors to the east did decades earlier.

At the time India gained independence in 1947, life expectancy was 28 years and the literacy rate was at 14%. Since then, life expectancy has more than doubled and literacy has more than quadrupled. Over these years, economic growth has gradually accelerated, with per capita income rising at 1.5% annually until 1975, at 3% until 1993, and at 5% in the last three years.

Each period has laid the foundations -- in terms of capital, education, entrepreneurship -- for higher growth rates in the next. It is tragic that 36% of Indians were below the poverty line in 1994, but in the 1970s the majority of Indians were below that line.

Corruption is severe in India, but probably no more so than in the booming economies of China or Indonesia. And of late, Indian politicians and bureaucrats, once above the law, have begun to encounter an element of risk in corruption. The political instability of recent years has opened the way for non-political institutions, such as the courts, national police forces, and the election commission, to impose some accountability on politicians.

Hindu-Muslim relations have been relatively placid since the early 1990s, though it would be premature to speak of long-term progress. On the contrary, there was less violence between Hindus and Muslims in the first three decades after independence than in the last two.

Hindu-Sikh relations do appear to show more decisive improvement after the disastrous violence in the Punjab of the 1980s and early 1990s. Today in the Punjab, Sikhs and sectarian Hindus have now joined hands against those they really hate, the secular Congress Party.

Finally, the selection in July of K. R. Narayanan as India's first Dalit (formerly "untouchable") President is a symbol of the country's progress toward social equality over the last half century. In the late colonial period, untouchability was rigidly observed in public places throughout India. But in March of 1997, India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, came under the rule of a Dalit-led party, the BSP -- surprisingly, in partnership with the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP. Uttar Pradesh is historically the citadel of caste hierarchy, and the site of a disproportionate share of hate crimes against Dalits. The BJP has strong upper caste support, so its support to the BSP represents quite a turn in history. At the same time, Dalit poverty remains intense and caste discrimination is far from ended.

The situation of the Dalits is emblematic of that of all Indians over the last half century. They have come from a very bad place, have struggled to progress with mixed success, but have much to celebrate on August 15th.