In another recent article that was much debated and often criticised, Fortune’s Cate Murphy blew the fantasy of India as a superpower. This is what Cate had to say:
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)
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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.
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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.
Cate’s summary captures the challenge ahead of us in 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 worlds 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.
Tomorrow: Atanu Dey
TECH TALK India’s Challenges+T
