Andalib Akhter / AMN /
NEW DELHI: A day after International ratings agency Moody’s asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to rein in his party members or risk losing global credibility, Chief of India’s apex bank asks people to show tolerance and respect if they want to to see India’s economy on path of progress
Addressing at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi’s 46th convocation today, Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan asked students to “fight” to protect “the tradition of debate in an environment of respect and tolerance” and that, without this, there was no way to “keep the idea factory open.”
Rajan, in his address, argued that while India could “grow for a long time” simply by “catching up with the methods of the industrialized countries”, what it really needed to do was to find ways to get to the “production possibility frontier” as many of the software companies had done.
Read full speech : Tolerance and Respect must for Economic Progress
“Indeed, if what you do offends me but does not harm me otherwise, there should be a very high bar for prohibiting your act. After all, any ban, and certainly any vigilante acts to enforce it, may offend you as much, or more, than the offence to me. Excessive political correctness stifles progress as much as excessive license and disrespect,” Dr Rajan said.
“A quick resort to bans will chill all debate as everyone will be anguished by ideas they dislike. It is far better to improve the environment for ideas through tolerance and mutual respect,” the Governor added in his speech.
Taking offence suffers from a feedback loop, Dr Rajan said. Groups looking for insults everywhere suffer from the theory of confirmation bias in psychology, he explained. That is, the more they look for insults, the more they find them.
“While you should avoid pressing the buttons that upset me to the extent possible, when you do push them you should explain carefully why that is necessary so as to move the debate forward, and how it should not be interpreted as a personal attack on me. You have to tread respectfully, assuring me that a challenge to the ideas I hold is necessary for progress,” Dr Rajan said.
“New ideas, new methods of production, better logistics – these are what will lead to sustained economic growth…[and] economic growth through news ideas and production methods is what our professors and alums contribute to the nation,” he said.
“What does an educational institution or nation need to do to keep the idea factory open? The first essential is to foster competition in the market place for ideas. This means encouraging challenging to all authority and tradition even while acknowledging that the only way of dismissing any view is through empirical tests,” he said.
“What this rules out is anyone imposing a particular view or ideology simply because of their power. Instead all ideas should be scrutinized critically no matter whether they originate domestically or abroad, whether they matured over 1000s of years or a few minutes, whether they come from an untutored student or a world-famous professor.”