Why India has only a fifty percent chance to succeed!

By Koomitara

After a decade of satisfactory global economic growth, thanks largely to very rapid growth of emerging nations, there is a pall of gloom now when the much celebrated high growth nations too are on the path of slow down. The question is which countries are going to reverse the slow down? Which will be new break-out nations? These questions have been answered in the book under review in highly refreshing manner with convincing arguments and palpable logic.

  The book remained in the chart of the Best Sellers for months together though it is not sufficient to judge its true merit. On the other hand there are a number of reasons to think that this may be the best book on global economic trends, which are puzzling and defying easy explanation.    
  
  Ruchir Sharma not only has deep insights into the economic trends of various countries owing to his profession which requires judicious investment decisions in emerging markets of the world, but also has a flair for lucid writing. He writes regularly for the Newsweek, Wall Street Journal and Economic Times. He is with the global market giant Morgan Stanley.
  
  The author takes his readers on an exciting tour of the world’s two dozen most interesting economies. He spots, describes and analyses forces that are unique to each country and which could make or mar the countries in the future. This he does convincingly as he has been a keen globe-trotter for two decades watching what was happening on the ground in developing countries. He spends one week every month in one or the other developing country.

India is like Brazil, not China

With these credentials his judgments carry conviction. His first major conclusion is that China's growth will slow sharply. The trend will be even more negative in the case of India, according to him. He thinks India is much like Brazil, not China. He observes: political elites of India and Brazil share a deep fondness for welfare-state liberalism, even though their economies do not generate the necessary revenue to support this. ‘India’s government expenditure has been increasing by 20 percent per year which is much more than the economy’s growth. The result is India’s total fiscal deficit has ballooned to 9 percent of the GDP from 6 percent. And total public debt to GDP ratio is now 70 percent, the highest for any developing country.’ If it goes on like this, India is going to face the same fate which Brazil confronted in the 1970s. The book says, it is easy to increase welfare spending during the boom, but the trouble is, it continues to rise even during a period of slowdown.

  One bigger problem he cites is the high cost of doing business in India. This makes Indian businessmen reluctant to invest in their own country; their investment has declined from 17 percent in 2008 to 13 percent now. At a time when Indians should invest more in India, they are looking for greener pastures abroad, he moans. Foreign operations now account for 10 percent of their overall profits: it was just 2 percent five years ago.

  The book is candid in theorising that corruption and crony capitalism lowers the growth as it kills competition. The book makes interesting observations on political leadership and its impact on national growth, and explains why the Congress now rules only in 2 of the ten major states of India. By citing the example of Bihar, he asserts: if people elect right leaders, the growth follows.

  Jairam Ramesh may be an ardent admirer of MNREGA, but he proves how it is damaging the country overall as it is pinning people to farms in low productivity jobs and restricting their migration to higher productivity employments in urban areas. This Indian strategy is just opposite to that of China which converted its growing labour force into an economic miracle just by helping migration. In India people living in urban areas rose from 26 to 30 percent only while in China they went up from 35 to 46 percent.

  The author finds great merit in the population explosion of India. ‘By 2020 average age of the Chinese would be 37, average Indian 29 and average European 49. China would be old before it gets rich and India would be a middle-income country and still young.’ Conventional view is, India will be able to put this young generation to work because of its relatively better educational system, entrepreneurial zeal and strong link to global economy. Still the author gives only 50 percent probability for India to emerge as a break-out nation as it is ham-strung by various risks like bloated government, crony capitalism, falling turnover of capital and the farmers’ disturbing tendency to stay on the farm. The book makes a quick survey of the global scene: Brazil will grow only at half the rate of China if it did not reform. Mexicans are migrating abroad for fear of being fleeced by petty officials and the police. (Mexico saw a net outflow of 2.4 million people during 2006-10, the largest exodus in the world.) Brazilians, very much like Indians, eagerly look for state-funded social welfare, resulting in high inflation and low growth rate-- four percent per year during 2003-07. Brazil has one of the highest interest rates in the world. As for Russia, despite having been the first into space and produced 27 Nobel laureates in science, mathematics, and economics, it has no global manufacturing company on its stock exchange. It has one of the world's worst aging population problems. In Russia there is room only at the top and things would not improve with the existing czarist mindset. 

  The book surveys the world to examine which nations are likely to flourish or disappoint, and which may emerge as break-out nations. Really interesting read!

What has Manmohan Singh done!

And on achievements of Manmohan Singh, he says he opened Indian market to foreigners and lowered import tariff from 85 percent to 25 percent. Yet, in the 1990s Indian growth rate was only 5.5 percent, not much faster than in the 1980s. India took off only during the global boom of 2003. It was not triggered by local factors. Singh remained just a figurehead, did not push any reform measure though he raised high hopes.



( The book review was first published in the monthly magazine of political affairs the ' Lokayat' (May, 2013 issue) 

Impressions of an Indian Diaspora

By MR Dua

These are the changing faces of India seen through the eyes of a person of Indian origin. He rushes into wrong first impressions, but soon corrects—yes, India has changed, is changing though through  messy, trial and error methods…. Who could say where it was headed…..

Impressed, perhaps deeply influenced by the post-1991 economic boom, many a highly educated and successful Indian youth in the United States of America and other western countries, have returned to their motherland after long absence.

  They thought ‘India was booming, with seductive options and possibilities’, but on closer view, they found that even though it had made fantastic  transformations in every field, its innate environment still needed to go much forward. The so-called economic revolution had effected no significant modification of the ancient Indian society.

  This is the gist of what Akash Kapur relates in this readable volume. Born to an Indian father and American mother, Kapur spent his ‘formative years and early adulthood in the US’. Consumed by a desire to understand the true India and witness its multitudinous faces, he settles down in Auroville, a small salubrious hamlet, near Pudducherry, with his American wife and two young sons.

He chose a spot not far from Chennai where he had been earlier, to be able to move around, make new friends and speak with villagers. And then he started noting the changes that had occurred while he was away. He found that India was definitely shedding the asceticism and austerity that had marked it for far too long, and becoming an acquisitive society.

  But despite the 1991 barrage of radical reforms, Kapur finds pervasive poverty side by side affluence, everywhere. To learn more about the paradox in the social milieu he travels to interior villages and digs into personal lives of some individuals. He meets his boyhood friend, R Sathyanarayanan, or Sathy, who lives in the village Molasur where he owns thousands of acres of land. Sathy’s wife Banushree Reddy, an MBA prefers city life, and stays in Bengaluru with their two children. Kapur learns that dalits are no longer a suppressed section of society.

  The author meets a young IT worker Hari, whose ‘gay’ life in the conservative Indian society flummoxes him. He then runs into a young IT-trained workaholic girl Selvi, who believes that ‘if you rest, you rust.’  Her parents are uneasy about her contacts with boys who might harm her. But she is confident of protecting herself--she will stay ‘faithful to her parents.’

  Kapur also met a highly educated divorcee, Veena, who had gone through an unhappy married life. She was co-habiting with a boyfriend, Arvind. In interaction with the author, she expressed her resolve to stay single, but he (the author) convinced her of the desirability of marrying Arvind whom she liked so much. He accepted his advice but after marriage she became a victim of cancer.    Luckily she was nursed back to health. Once she became a mother, she gave up her highly-paid job to lead a happy married life. 
After his kaleidoscopic experience around Chennai and later in Bangalore, Kapur shifted to Mumbai where he felt that development was being unkind to the city. He was dismayed by the sights of congested neighbourhoods and acute poverty all around in the metropolis.

  He also describes the woeful environment of the world famous Auroville where his own family suffered badly on account of callous dumping of waste in the neighbourhood. ‘India is burning, eroding, melting, drying, silting up and suffocating. Across the country, rivers, lakes and glaciers are disappearing, underground aquifers getting  depleted, air quality declining and beaches being swept away’, he moans.

  On the problem of garbage, Kapur says that a wholesale transformation is required. The way the government worked needs to be changed and education must instill a sense of civic consciousness in children. It was a wonder to him that ‘a population capable of maintaining ritualistic levels of hygiene at home’ dumps ‘its garbage on the streets without any compunction.’

  Finally, love of the country overwhelms him as he concludes: ‘I had returned from America full of enthusiasm. I celebrated what I saw as the rejuvenation of my home. Later, the enthusiasm started eroding; the rejuvenation appeared to be an illusion. My optimism turned to skepticism, occasionally bordering on despair’.  He acknowledged that he had perhaps rushed to judgment. India did not lend itself to easy judgments…modern India was changing…the nation was on a journey, going through the contradictions of a rapid, and inevitably messy, transformation. Who could say where the journey was headed!

( The book review was first published in the monthly magazine of political affairs the ' Lokayat' (April, 2013 issue) 

Global India: Save our girls from rapists !

Global India: Ban porn to save our girls from rapists !: Rape cases are mounting at an alarming rate. Everybody is rightly concerned about it. Since there is hardly any unanimity about the root c...

Save our girls from rapists !

By Vinod Varshney
Rape cases are mounting at an alarming rate. Everybody is rightly concerned about it. Since there is hardly any unanimity about the root causes of this distressing crime hence no consensus on solutions. When feminists protest carrying placards and scream ‘this is our body, we have full rights over it’, they just limit the notion about the magnificent womanhood to their body. This is a mistake: they see and want to be seen themselves only as a body--a sex object--not as someone with a personality, exclusive individuality, dignity, opinion and above all, intelligence. It is sad, even ironic that women activists themselves spread this totally wrong notion.

It is common knowledge that people with a criminal bent of mind, who think they can get anything done by use of force, and easily escape from the clutches of the law, are the ones who indulge in rapes. So, only all-out measures will end rapes. But will it? Odds are great indeed.

In some advanced countries rape is punishable by chemical castration, which is which is nothing but forced medication to control the excess formation of testosterone,the male sex hormone that increases the libido. But feminists in India are against the measure. Rape being a crime of pervert mind and excessive sexual desire, controlling it should start with the mindset. There is a well-known aphorism that sex does not exist between the legs, but in the mind. That means young minds should be helped to develop a balanced mind about sex. However, even a cultured mind can get corrupted by pornography and vulgar novels. These generate an irrepressible obsession about hidden female parts. But there is a strong lobby favouring them.

PIL demanding ban on viewing porn in India 

There is the instance of an advocate who filed a Public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court to ban internet pornography, especially child pornography. But lo, here appeared a spate of articles in the social media against the ban saying that porn is a good thing! A few said it helped sex education. Others thought it released pent up energy which in the case of those who masturbated was probably correct.

Over 20 crore porn videos or clippings are freely available in the net. Two alleged rapists of a 5-year-old child in Delhi admitted that they saw a porn clip before committing the crime.

Few parents are aware of the deleterious effects of porn on their wards. Even if they knew what could they do? The ubiquitous mobile has made it impossible to have any control on porn-viewing, because schoolchildren are routinely provided with mobile phones (or tablets) for the convenience of parents. They do not have time even to check how their children make use of the gadget.

One expected that at least women activists would support the demand for banning pornography, but no; many of them have campaigned against banning it because it curbs the freedom of expression enshrined in the constitution! They say porn is banned nowhere except in Saudi Arabia and China. Some European countries and Iceland have just started debating the pros and cons of banning it. It may be outrageous to make viewing porn a cognizable offence, but at least its availability, especially child porn, on the net should be banned.



 





Note: The article was first published in the monthly magazine 'Lokayat' (May, 2013 issue).