Is India the Next Major Global Power?

[Sketchy]

I know outsourcing is all the rage, but I have my doubts about India's ability to play with the big dogs. India may have the resources, but I don't kow if they have the discipline. However, when a PM promises to end poverty by the year 2040, eyebrows will raise. That being said, I encourage to check out this article. It's a nice outline of factors to be considered and possibe reprocussions of current move made by India and the global economy as a whole.

Will India make the breakthrough?
BBC World Service will be dedicating a week of special programmes from 3-11 February looking at how India is changing.
The BBC's George Arney has been reporting on India for many years and, for just as long, the country's promise has been waiting to be fulfilled.


How do you summarise a country which is home to one in six members of the human race, which contains a third of the world's poorest people and yet has an increasingly consumer-oriented middle-class twice the size of the population of Germany?

And which - according to predictions by the CIA and investment bankers Goldman Sachs - could, along with China, come to dominate the global economy in the next few decades?

India has always been hard to get a handle on. In all these years that I've been visiting, thinking and writing about this vast and varied subcontinent, I've clung on to an unnerving, and yet somehow also reassuring, truism: for any generalisation that can be made about India, the opposite is equally true.

So is it or is it not true that, 60 years after partition and independence, India is finally about to take its place on the world stage as a major player?

Slumbering elephant

Dusting off my first ever Indian guide book (a 1978 Fodor Guide) - I can see that that the predictions of a resurgent India have been around a long time.

"India has rocketed", the foreword says, "from a backwater colony into the forefront of the world's leading nations."



But predictions that the slumbering Indian elephant would wake up never seemed to come true.

As the "tiger" economies of South-east Asia roared away in the 1970s and 1980s, India's biggest achievements remained its ability to feed its own people, and its adherence - against the odds - to democracy.

The question now, as one long-time observer puts it, is whether India will emerge as a major power, or whether it will remain "forever arriving".

Despite endemic problems of poverty and disease, major changes have already occurred.

Unshackled by the economic liberalisation of the early 1990s, India is already poised to overtake Japan as the world's third largest economy.

It is also strutting its stuff on the world stage. Its nuclear status has now been formally acknowledged by the US. And, when the UN is finally reformed, it's likely to land a permanent seat on the Security Council.

India Shining

All this adds up, to use the slick advertising slogan coined a couple of years ago by the then governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a new India: India Shining.


But hang on. Wasn't that slogan exposed as an empty boast, when - despite presiding over a period of unprecedented economic growth - the BJP was decisively rejected by India's have-nots at the last general elections?

Amidst all the buzz about the vibrant, new India getting ready for take-off, is the old India still capable of dragging it back, aborting the countdown?

Consider a few statistics: 300 million Indians live on less than US$1 a day, compared to only 85 million in China, which has a bigger population.

Forty-five per cent of Indian children under the age of five are malnourished. Less than a third of India's homes have a toilet. Less than half of its 500,000 villages are connected to the electricity grid.

Globalisation challenge

Despite the explosion of consumerism and capitalism in India's booming cities, more than half of all Indians still live in rural areas.

Farmers are committing suicide because they can't compete in a globalised market. "India doesn't live in its villages," says author and activist Arundhati Roy. "It dies."


In the rush for riches, can India's social fabric stand the strains?

Having shed its old commitment to state-directed socialism, critics argue that the Indian state is failing to provide the most basic necessities to its poorest citizens: health care, education, drinking water.

As the gap between rich and poor widens, Naxalite militants have spread their doctrine of Maoist revolution, now making their presence felt in more than a quarter of the country.

Maoism, according to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by India.


And, even though the Maoists are unlikely ever to bring the government to its knees - as they did in neighbouring Nepal - the brutal low-intensity conflict they've spawned is helping to keep India's poorest regions poor - and sharpening the inequity which some see as the biggest danger facing India over the next few decades.

So where is India headed? Some changes are visible to any casual visitor. The rampant consumerism in India's cities was unimaginable when I first visited in 1978.

But how far are India's traditional values breaking down under the onslaught of consumerism and individualism?

Are caste and hierarchy being eroded - and if so, are the downtrodden benefiting?

Is the explosion of television creating a new, more homogenised Indian culture?

Globalisation has brought tremendous changes and, for some, tremendous rewards. But are there more losers than winners, and, if so, what will the consequences be? In the rush for riches, can India's social fabric stand the strains? Or will growing inequities pull it apart at the seams?

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ia/6280027.stm

[DasJa]

Fuckin-A hommie

[Sketchy]

Originally Posted by DasJa

Fuckin-A hommie

[DasJa]

Originally Posted by Sketchy

it's called pride

[Sketchy]

Originally Posted by DasJa

it's called pride

I know...but do you really believe it?

[DasJa]

Originally Posted by Sketchy

I know...but do you really believe it?

Sincerely speakin.... YES!

[Space-Cowboy]

Yes, India is the next key Global Power, and it's only a matter of time.

[paulie walnuts]

god, these india articles are so painfully formulaic.

over the past 4 years, i've read the same rehashed article hundreds of times by hundreds of different authors in every major newspaper or business/economic publication.

this particular one is probably the most unique one i've read in a while and i could've still written half of it verbatim before the author himself did.

[JOHNNY K-BAR]

Oh yea that is absolutely true. By 2040 Global warming will be in castastrophic attack mode and wipe out all of Europe. The Middle East/Central Asia (muslim World) will still be in turmoil. Mexico will become the next USA after what's left of the Amreeka invades and occupies it. Most of Southern africa will taken over and saturated by the refugee white man and be renamed Jesus Land. The Real Eskimos/descendants of the Ice Man will be sharpening thier harpoons, cautiously waiting to take back their world once world powers, China and India begin to obliterate eachother.

[rex_maximus]

Originally Posted by JOHNNY K-BAR

Oh yea that is absolutely true. By 2040 Global warming will be in castastrophic attack mode and wipe out all of Europe. The Middle East/Central Asia (muslim World) will still be in turmoil. Mexico will become the next USA after what's left of the Amreeka invades and occupies it. Most of Southern africa will taken over and saturated by the refugee white man and be renamed Jesus Land. The Real Eskimos/descendants of the Ice Man will be sharpening thier harpoons, cautiously waiting to take back their world once world powers, China and India begin to obliterate eachother.

[rex_maximus]

India the Superpower? Think again
India should put aside pride about its growing economy and concentrate on improving the lives of average citizens, argues Fortune's Cait Murphy.
By Cait Murphy, Fortune assistant managing editor
February 9 2007: 9:19 AM EST

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Plug in the words "India" and "superpower" into an Internet search engine and it's happy to oblige - with 1.3 million hits. I confess that I did not check each one, but I suspect that almost all of these entries date from the last couple of years.

This is understandable. For the first time ever, India has posted four straight years of 8 percent growth; since it cracked open its economy in 1991, it has averaged growth of 6 percent a year - not in the same league as China, but twice the derisory "Hindu rate of growth" that had marked the first 45 years of independence.




India has gone nuclear, and even gotten the United States to accept that status. Its movies are crossing over to become international hits. The recent $11.3 billion takeover of Corus by Mumbai-based Tata Steel was the biggest acquisition ever by an Indian firm.

No wonder the idea of India as the next superpower is fast becoming conventional wisdom. "Our Time is Now," asserts The Times of India. And in an October survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs, Indians said they saw their country as the second most influential in the world.

Sorry: India is not a superpower, and in fact, that is probably the wrong ambition for it, anyway. Why? Let me answer in the form of some statistics.

* 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.
* The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name.
* Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.
* The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.
* About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world's hungry live in India.
* More than a quarter of the India population lives on less than a dollar a day.
* India has more people with HIV than any other country.

(Sources: UNDP, Unicef, World Food Program; Edward Luce)

You get the idea.

The 2006 UN Human Development Report, which ranks countries according to a variety of measures of human health and welfare, placed India 126th out of 177 countries. India was only a few places ahead of rival Pakistan (134th) and hapless Cambodia (129) and behind such not-about-to-be-superpowers as Equatorial Guinea (120), and Tajikistan (122).

As these and other numbers suggest, Indian triumphalism (a notable 126,000 hits on Google) is not only premature, it is misguided. Yes, growth has been brisk, and of course growth is necessary to make a dent in poverty. But as Edward Luce, author of the excellent, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India," noted in a recent talk, poverty in India is not falling nearly as fast as its brisk rate of growth might anticipate.

The reason for this is that Indian growth has been capital-intensive, driven by the growth in high-value services such as IT. This is a good thing, but what it does not do is create stable and reasonably paid employment for not particularly skilled people - and this matters a lot, considering eight to 10 million Indians enter the labor force every year. Luce estimates that there are 7 million Indians working in the formal manufacturing sector in India - and 100 million in China.

To look at it another way, the 1 million Indians working in IT account for less than one-half of one percent of the entire working population. This helps build reserves (and national confidence, and tax revenues) but is not the poverty buster that labor-intensive development is. As Prime Minister Singh told Luce, "Our biggest single problem is the lack of jobs for ordinary people."

The problem with India's self-proclaimed (and wildly premature) declaration of superpower status is that it reflects a complacency about both its present - which for many people is dire - and its future. Eight percent growth for four years is wonderful, but as the saying goes, past performance is no guarantee of future results. And India is not doing what it needs to in order to sustain this momentum.

Consider the postwar history of East and Southeast Asia. The comparison is appropriate because India started at about the same point, and has watched just about every country in the region get ahead of it on the economic curve. All these places developed by being relatively open to trade; by investing in primary and secondary education; and by building pretty decent infrastructure (not only roads and ports, but health clinics and water supplies). India has begun to embrace one leg of this triangle - freer trade.

Even here, though, many of the worst features of the swadeshi ("self-reliance") era remain intact, including an unreformed state banking sector; labor regulations that actively discourage hiring; abstruse land laws (and consequent lack of land titles); misshapen subsidies that hurt the poor; and corruption that is broad, deep and ubiquitous. Nothing useful is being done about any of this.

As for the other two legs of this development triangle - education and infrastructure - these are still badly broken. About a third of teachers fail to show up on any given day (and, of course, are unsackable); the supply of both water and power is expensive and unreliable.

These facts of life too often go unremarked in the current euphoria about the state of the nation. "We no longer discuss the future of India," Commerce Minister Kamal Nath told the Financial Times in a typical comment. "The future is India."

Hubris, of course, is the stuff of politics everywhere. But the future will not belong to India unless it takes action to embrace it, and that means more than high-profile vanity projects like putting a man on the moon or building the world¹s tallest tower. It means showing that the world's largest democracy can deliver real progress to the hundreds of millions who have never used the phone, much less the Internet. And in important ways, that just isn't happening.

India has many reasons to be proud, but considering it remains a world leader in hunger, stunting and HIV, its waxing self-satisfaction seems sadly beside the point. Top of page


http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/08/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes

[JOHNNY K-BAR]

Originally Posted by rex_maximus

That Al Gore scared me for once, in his fight to educate people on Global Warming.

[Space-Cowboy]

Originally Posted by rex_maximus

India the Superpower? Think again
India should put aside pride about its growing economy and concentrate on improving the lives of average citizens, argues Fortune's Cait Murphy.
By Cait Murphy, Fortune assistant managing editor
February 9 2007: 9:19 AM EST

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Plug in the words "India" and "superpower" into an Internet search engine and it's happy to oblige - with 1.3 million hits. I confess that I did not check each one, but I suspect that almost all of these entries date from the last couple of years.

This is understandable. For the first time ever, India has posted four straight years of 8 percent growth; since it cracked open its economy in 1991, it has averaged growth of 6 percent a year - not in the same league as China, but twice the derisory "Hindu rate of growth" that had marked the first 45 years of independence.




India has gone nuclear, and even gotten the United States to accept that status. Its movies are crossing over to become international hits. The recent $11.3 billion takeover of Corus by Mumbai-based Tata Steel was the biggest acquisition ever by an Indian firm.

No wonder the idea of India as the next superpower is fast becoming conventional wisdom. "Our Time is Now," asserts The Times of India. And in an October survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs, Indians said they saw their country as the second most influential in the world.

Sorry: India is not a superpower, and in fact, that is probably the wrong ambition for it, anyway. Why? Let me answer in the form of some statistics.

* 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.
* The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name.
* Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.
* The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.
* About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world's hungry live in India.
* More than a quarter of the India population lives on less than a dollar a day.
* India has more people with HIV than any other country.

(Sources: UNDP, Unicef, World Food Program; Edward Luce)

You get the idea.

The 2006 UN Human Development Report, which ranks countries according to a variety of measures of human health and welfare, placed India 126th out of 177 countries. India was only a few places ahead of rival Pakistan (134th) and hapless Cambodia (129) and behind such not-about-to-be-superpowers as Equatorial Guinea (120), and Tajikistan (122).

As these and other numbers suggest, Indian triumphalism (a notable 126,000 hits on Google) is not only premature, it is misguided. Yes, growth has been brisk, and of course growth is necessary to make a dent in poverty. But as Edward Luce, author of the excellent, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India," noted in a recent talk, poverty in India is not falling nearly as fast as its brisk rate of growth might anticipate.

The reason for this is that Indian growth has been capital-intensive, driven by the growth in high-value services such as IT. This is a good thing, but what it does not do is create stable and reasonably paid employment for not particularly skilled people - and this matters a lot, considering eight to 10 million Indians enter the labor force every year. Luce estimates that there are 7 million Indians working in the formal manufacturing sector in India - and 100 million in China.

To look at it another way, the 1 million Indians working in IT account for less than one-half of one percent of the entire working population. This helps build reserves (and national confidence, and tax revenues) but is not the poverty buster that labor-intensive development is. As Prime Minister Singh told Luce, "Our biggest single problem is the lack of jobs for ordinary people."

The problem with India's self-proclaimed (and wildly premature) declaration of superpower status is that it reflects a complacency about both its present - which for many people is dire - and its future. Eight percent growth for four years is wonderful, but as the saying goes, past performance is no guarantee of future results. And India is not doing what it needs to in order to sustain this momentum.

Consider the postwar history of East and Southeast Asia. The comparison is appropriate because India started at about the same point, and has watched just about every country in the region get ahead of it on the economic curve. All these places developed by being relatively open to trade; by investing in primary and secondary education; and by building pretty decent infrastructure (not only roads and ports, but health clinics and water supplies). India has begun to embrace one leg of this triangle - freer trade.

Even here, though, many of the worst features of the swadeshi ("self-reliance") era remain intact, including an unreformed state banking sector; labor regulations that actively discourage hiring; abstruse land laws (and consequent lack of land titles); misshapen subsidies that hurt the poor; and corruption that is broad, deep and ubiquitous. Nothing useful is being done about any of this.

As for the other two legs of this development triangle - education and infrastructure - these are still badly broken. About a third of teachers fail to show up on any given day (and, of course, are unsackable); the supply of both water and power is expensive and unreliable.

These facts of life too often go unremarked in the current euphoria about the state of the nation. "We no longer discuss the future of India," Commerce Minister Kamal Nath told the Financial Times in a typical comment. "The future is India."

Hubris, of course, is the stuff of politics everywhere. But the future will not belong to India unless it takes action to embrace it, and that means more than high-profile vanity projects like putting a man on the moon or building the world¹s tallest tower. It means showing that the world's largest democracy can deliver real progress to the hundreds of millions who have never used the phone, much less the Internet. And in important ways, that just isn't happening.

India has many reasons to be proud, but considering it remains a world leader in hunger, stunting and HIV, its waxing self-satisfaction seems sadly beside the point. Top of page


http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/08/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes

The article makes quite a few valid points......... but it assumes India is somehow on the verge of declaring itself a superpower. It isn't... But the prospects over the next 50 years [if trends continue.... many have faith that it will], should paint a very different picture about the standard of living in India.

[rex_maximus]

Originally Posted by Space-Cowboy

The article makes quite a few valid points......... but it assumes India is somehow on the verge of declaring itself a superpower. It isn't... But the prospects over the next 50 years [if trends continue.... many have faith that it will], should paint a very different picture about the standard of living in India.

It doesn't make the said assumption. IMO, it sends a potent reality check to all the hubris and immaturity that is clearly floating around with regards to India's recent growth.

I mean c'mon, how many thread have there been in RD itself with puff-chested Indians making claims to an inevitable and imminent superpower status?

[Space-Cowboy]

Originally Posted by rex_maximus

It doesn't make the said assumption. IMO, it sends a potent reality check to all the hubris and immaturity that is clearly floating around with regards to India's recent growth.

I mean c'mon, how many thread have there been in RD itself with puff-chested Indians making claims to an inevitable and imminent superpower status?

Well, most people on RD are over zealous anyway But on the whole, I think economists, and anyone really with some common sense, will realize India's got a whole host of problems to deal with. But on the whole, the trend looks promising. My personal wish is to have more PMs like PM Singh, who has a vast array of economic insight and credibility, and with him and men like him, India has a bright future ahead. And you're right, first and foremost on India's 'to do list' should be engaging India's standard of living problem.

[Atharvan]

All the growth in India that we see is basically in urban India, that too a handful of cities like the metros, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Gurgaaon.Even these cities are full of slums.If you want to see the real face of India then visit villages in eastern up/bihar.Forget Superpower, India don't even have power to control its people.States like Orrisa, Bihar, and some of the north eastern states haven't improved one bit for the last 20 years!Those states have picked up guns because the central govt. don't care about them.

[Atharvan]

Originally Posted by Space-Cowboy

Well, most people on RD are over zealous anyway But on the whole, I think economists, and anyone really with some common sense, will realize India's got a whole host of problems to deal with. But on the whole, the trend looks promising. My personal wish is to have more PMs like PM Singh, who has a vast array of economic insight and credibility, and with him and men like him, India has a bright future ahead. And you're right, first and foremost on India's 'to do list' should be engaging India's standard of living problem.

No doubt he is one of the most qualified PM in the world as far as his past experience and academic qualifications goes. But he has not performed as a PM so far.He is just a puppet in Sonia's hands.But I would rather have him than some others...India just does not have too many honest people.

[Space-Cowboy]

Originally Posted by Atharvan

No doubt he is one of the most qualified PM in the world as far as his past experience and academic qualifications goes. But he has not performed as a PM so far.He is just a puppet in Sonia's hands.

He's performed. I highly doubt Sonia has any hand in India's current success.

[Atharvan]

Originally Posted by Space-Cowboy

He's performed. I highly doubt Sonia has any hand in India's current success.

no he hasn't...what has he done for farmers suiciding in Maharashtra & Andhra Pradesh ?...last week 11 farmers committed suicidewithin 48 hours.Infact during the last 3-4 years it has grown from a marginal movement in two or three states to constitute the biggest internal security challenge in the country affecting 14 states... What about North east state terrorism ?It is going the Kashmir way with ethnic cleansing of Hindus on a daily basis.He is chasing an unrealistic dream of changing Mumbai city into shanghai although there is no electricity, no transport, no law order in rural India.

[Space-Cowboy]

Originally Posted by Atharvan

no he hasn't...what has he done for farmers suiciding in Maharashtra & Andhra Pradesh ?...last week 11 farmers committed suicidewithin 48 hours.Infact during the last 3-4 years it has grown from a marginal movement in two or three states to constitute the biggest internal security challenge in the country affecting 14 states... What about North east state terrorism ?It is going the Kashmir way with ethnic cleansing of Hindus on a daily basis.He is chasing an unrealistic dream of changing Mumbai city into shanghai although there is no electricity, no transport, no law order in rural India.

I'm talking strictly in terms of economics. The farmers/rural rejuvenation are precarious issues, but other than that, I would infact say that he's the best PM India has ever had.

India and Pakistan are hopefully on the verge of a new found peace, so hopefully Kashmir will be resolved soon.

We'll see what happens in the next several years.