A friend sent me the above article and asked for my comments. My comments are prefixed by “PL]” without the quotes.
:: This sounds persuasive as long as you don’t know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia’s imminent economic superstardom.
PL] It is entirely up to mr. Mittal to decide where to invest. Not investing in one’s country of origin is no cause for blame. It is not a case so much of an Indian success story but a person of Indian origin succeeding.
:: But trade and cooperation between India and China is growing; and, though grateful for American generosity on the nuclear issue, India is too dependent on Iran for oil (it is also exploring developing a gas pipeline to Iran) to wholeheartedly support the United States in its efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
PL] India voted with the USA on condemning Iran’s nuclear program. Plus, that pipeline will have to pass through Pakistan which could be a significant stumbling block. Trade with China is indeed growing but then that is business.
::> But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mentioned the fact that the country’s $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.
PL] Part of this is due to a lack of government reform. Politically, the stumbling block is the communist party. Rural India is good at doing business. I used to employ a driver. One of his relative’s used to buy cooking oil from some place and sell it in villages.
:: Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country’s market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country’s growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country.
PL] But a lot of this is coming to light due to media activism and things are being done.
:: the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names
PL] What is wrong with that? Being literate is defined is you being able to sign your name.
:: Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by the urban-oriented economic growth, communist insurgencies (unrelated to India’s parliamentary communist parties) have erupted in some of the most populous and poorest parts of north and central India. The Indian government no longer effectively controls many of the districts where communists battle landlords and police, imposing a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless rural population.
PL] True.
:: No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.
PL] I cannot comment on the numbers but as for social instability, it goes up and down and predicting a war of the classes is being alarmist.
:: For decades now, India’s underprivileged have used elections to register their protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the 2004 general elections, they voted out a central government that claimed that India was “shining,” bewildering not only most foreign journalists but also those in India who had predicted an easy victory for the ruling coalition.
PL] There is apathy, cynicism and a lack of political sensibility amongst the Indian middle class to political processes. The middle class did not vote which is why that government lost. However, this is changing. See the right to information campaign.
:: Among the politicians whom voters rejected was Chandrababu Naidu, the technocratic chief minister of one of India’s poorest states, whose forward-sounding policies, like providing Internet access to villages, prompted Time magazine to declare him “South Asian of The Year” and a “beacon of hope.”
PL] Votes especially in rural India are not truly independent. A lot of parties canvas rural voters by giving gifts just before election. The voters are happy so the parties get the vote. This is a problem of a lack of education and independent thinking. This has plagued India for quite some time and is government independent. I suspect all governments have used this lack of independent thinking to win votes.
:: But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism.
PL] It is no longer a question of have nots. The people of Kashmir want peace and are tired of conflict. The insurgency is being fueled by outside militants. Lets say you are a villager. You have 5 children to support and the rest of your family is starving. Some one pays you rs. 900 to throw a grenade in a market? Do you say no? That Rs. 900 will prevent your children from dying perhaps. What moral compass do we use to judge such actions? Of course, why were you starving in the first place? It is a chicken and egg situation. There is no investment since the terrorists wont stop and the terrorists are able to function so effectively by exploiting the lack of basic things such as food.
:: Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths.
PL] Agreed. Complacency is indeed a problem but with increased access to government and information this is changing.
