 The cavalcade of India's democratic process rolled on. In these jubilant and robust scenes, almost 600 million Indians were being wooed by a spectrum of political ideologies. For the 12th time since it became independent 50 years ago, a free and democratic republic was once again going through the excitement of a pole process. As the people of India voted for a new government, 50 years after independence, the concerns remained as much with the future as with the present. Economic liberalization has resulted in conspicuous changes. Changes visibly manifest in both the social and economic aspirations of a section of its citizens. But the dominant image of a nation 50 years old still remains that of contradictions. Development always has an underclass, particularly in complex multi-ethnic large societies. And this underclass just cannot be removed by the volume of development. In other words, even for growth rate is 20%. It is no guarantee that you will not have destitutes and poor in the society if you are a complex multi-ethnic society. Though agriculture continues to be the backbone of the economy, urbanization in the 80s, followed by economic liberalization in the 90s, drastically changed the demographic and job profile of a resurgent India. If one scientific aspect symbolizes the coming of age of a section of India, it is the huge pool of computer software engineers the country today boasts of. India is the technology partner for outsourcing, project development, product development, et cetera. More today, software development as opposed to product development which uses both hardware and software. So I don't know of very many companies which do product development, but software development, I would say, a lot of companies and this is growing and the awareness is growing and people are looking at India as the choice technology partner. In a very short period, a large number of industries were set up. This created a choking situation as far as the infrastructure is concerned because the time constant of industrial change and the time constant of infrastructure change did not match. 32-year-old Yadram has taken this land on lease from the Thikedar, or contractor. Yadram, his wife, and three children migrated from a small village in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He does subsistence farming for nine months of the year and he has been doing this for the past five years. Yadram is the face of the migrating India. But for every thousand who migrate in search of greener pastures, only a few hundreds manage to land up jobs and a better life. Even these better off-classing villages are moving to urban areas and urban areas they can move into quickly and make some kind of a go of it, make some headway in it is the small town. They're really moving out and they're seeking jobs in urban areas even though these jobs are not very well-paying, even though these jobs are not to once would come with some guarantee. But still they want to go to the urban areas because they see the future there. The pluralism of the country, its unity in diversity, should transcend slogans to accommodate a comfortable existence of different religious and ethnic groups. The coming years will be crucial as political leaders will have to reinforce within the psyche of the nation this obligation towards pluralism. The agenda for the future must encompass the legacy of free speech and a free press to strengthen its judiciary, to ensure that the executive remains paramount vis-a-vis the armed forces. 50 years since it became an independent nation, the country finds that it has to revert back to the ideals which inspired the founding fathers of this nation to discover in their vision the blueprint for completing the task they had embarked upon.