The Myth of the New India

theodp writes "An NYT op-ed on The Myth of the New India reports that only 1.3M Indians are participating in the so-called new economy of BPO, leaving 400M have-nots without a piece of the pie. Despite recent gains, nearly 380M Indians still live on less $1 a day, setting the stage for rural and urban conflict." From the article: "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."

Re:Does it look like Texas

[fatman22]

Maybe not New Texas but it sure looks a lot like Iran under the Shah. Small pockets of good economic growth while the rest of the country lived in abject poverty. It brought on a revolution which put the Islamic theocracy back into power.

Re:Scaremongering

[hackwrench]

Also 1.3M + 400M adds up to only 401M. According to Wikipedia, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India [wikipedia.org] ) India has a population of 1,103M, so what's going on here?

Re:$1 a day? let me tell you about $1 a day.

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Sight set in motion. I've bought property in central america - house in the mountains, view of the Pacific ocean, less than 5 miles from the coast. $35K, $300 year property taxes, $500 year caretaker. Cost of living is dirt fucking cheap compared to the metropolis where I currently live. Sure, it'll get more expensive there. But it will never outpace where I live now. I can work until I'm 65 to live out my years where I live now or I can work until I'm 45 and sit on a beach there.

Over-hyped.

[ruzhen]

I'm from India. I know the truth of what's happening here by virtue of the fact that I live here. And the truth is, my country will never become a developed nation. The population has gone to a point where even if you try to curb it, it'll have a steady growth. It's standing at 1.2billion now and even a sharp decrease in the birth rate will still mean that the population cannot be curbed. 'cause 1.2 billion, friends, is a _lot_. The only ones who think India will become a developed nation[some even people a super power, heh] are loyally blind Indians and foreigners fooled by statistics of India's IT growth. We lack basic amenities lack drinking water in almost every region of even the posh areas. The air is polluted, the condition of the roads is pathetic in many place. We can't even meet our basic needs. 25% of the population lives below the poverty line; 25% of the population is unemployed. That's 250 million. More than the population of 90% of the countries in the world. It'll only increase. The percentage might go down eventually, but the number will still increase. We Indians are mostly deluded. We do have brain power, the educational system here is rigorous, but it's more about just memorizing things and learning them rather than understand the concept thereof. We will never become a super power.

Re:Ya gotta start somewhere

[Stephen Tennant]

Here's a good place to start: Dharavi [bbc.co.uk], the world's largest slum.

The sheer scale of dealing with the poverty of just this one part of India gives you an idea of the astronomical scale of effort needed to transform India into a fully developed, (relatively) fair and equitable state.

Re:Cultural Problems

[MaximusTheGreat]

If the reason is cultural, how come before 1800s, i.e. before British took over India, India had been either the richest country in the world, or the second richest from 1CE to 1800s?
Here are the numbers in various centuries from The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective by economic historian Angus Maddison
Country GDP($millions)1CE 1000 1600 1700
World 102536 116790 329417 371369
India 33750 33750 74250 90750
China 26820 26550 96000 82800
M. East 16470 16470 36725 40567
W. Europe 11115 13723 43000 45000

Don't blame ills of a socialist economy on cluture

Comparing with China

[Anonymous Coward]

The Indian nobel laurelate Amartya Sen made the point that the literacy rate in India is much lower than the literacy in the east asian countries such as China, and therefore the chinese factory workers has ended up being more valuable than the Indian factory workers. On the contrary India has a lot of well-weducated people. As a result of this difference the cheap plastic industry has ended up in China whereas the Indian economic growth is centered around a comparatively small middle class. In other words the lack of investment in education of the poor has lead to inequality. I warmly recommend Sen's book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199257493/qid=11 52349068 [amazon.com]

On the contrary I recently heard a talk of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who was one of the arcitects behind the Indian move towards market economy in the 1980's. He said that according to some of the standard measures of inequeality the inequality is India has not been rising. Here is a summary of a similar speach

http://info.worldbank.org/etools/BSPAN/Presentatio nView.asp?PID=1069&EID=328 [worldbank.org]

Personally, I don't know what to believe. Perhaps some Indian slashdot readers can enlighten me.

Re:Scaremongering

[univgeek]

There is India and there are India's.

On your scale, Rs 17 is a meal at a shack. I've eaten meals for Rs.10 this year at decent places.

Your scale seems to be tilted to the upper-middle class. If you go out to a semi-rural area the costs fall even further. Breakfast (4idlis+tea) at Rs. 6. An entire house for Rs. 1500 a month.

There are people who live on salaries an order of magnitude less than yours. And they're not on the streets. This is not to say that the costs you project are incorrect. Merely to say that they are just on a higher scale than the lowest scale here.

Re:Difference between India and China

[kgskgs]

You are simplifying things too much.

First a few things in India's favor. Demographics are big time in favor of India for next few decades. As the article points out a large number of fresh young people will enter workforce. In the same time Japan, Europe and China will have start graying in that sequence. There will be more people to support than the number of people supporting. As a consequence of strictly enforced population control, China will see rather steep change. This will definitely bring a big change in dynamics.

Touch wood, but nature seems to be smiling. Monsoon is showing regular presence and for last a decade or so, consistently hitting average or above for overall India. This results in steady growth in agriculture, but that is just a part of it. There is nothing like steady water supply.

Democracy and other institutions have taken deep root. Free press is in place, which is voicing the concerns of suppressed and thus providing effective drain before things build up to explode. Thus I doubt there will be any major uprising as such in foreseeable future.

Definitely all is not well. Lots of improvements are needed. Caste system needs to be chased out; infrastructure, education and public health issues need to be tackled at high priority. But those are policy matters to a lot of extent.

And that's where I am most hopeful. India is an old civilization, but young nation. The concept of a large society coming together and governing itself effectively by means of policies is still taking root. But it is taking root. And once this learning phase and mistakes era is complete, certainly things will show drastic improvement.

And people that time will blame the good results on the things at hand that time, leaders, world events etc. But sadly no one will think of all these years of frustrations and failures as groundwork for that moment.


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You deserve what you create, not what you expect.
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