This week has been a newsworthy one for India, since the Ayodhya verdict has been announced. While the Indian newspapers will devote large amounts of newsprint to the analysis of this verdict, the British newspapers have been full of the Labour leadership elections, the impending “savage” cuts to public finance and of course, India’s lack of preparedness for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
The British press seems to have two very different views about India. The first is respectful – one that holds that India (along with China) is becoming an economic superpower in the 21st century. The second is dismissive – an older, established view of India as an uneducated, impoverished, backward nation. A recent newspaper article (I think it was in the London Evening Standard), claimed that 800 million Indians (80% of India’s population) lived on less than £ 1 a day. This is rubbish. The number of Indians living below the poverty line is about 350 million, or 35% of the population. In this day and age of course, it is a tragedy that so many Indians are still so poor. Between the two opposite views mentioned above, there is no middle ground.
Regarding the adverse coverage in British newspapers regarding the Commonwealth Games, the editorial in the London Times last week got it spot-on when it said that there were two Indias – one led by a vibrant, competitive, efficient private sector which is rapidly becoming a world-beater, and the other led (if that is the right word) by a slow, corrupt, incompetent public sector that isn’t accountable to its citizens or anyone else.
Unfortunately the Commonwealth Games is being organized by India’s public sector, which consists of discredited politicians, and their corrupt minions – the bureaucrats. If this organizational exercise had been handed over to a private sector group such as Reliance or Tatas to manage (with government funding), these Games would have been the best in the world, and would have cost far less.
Why? Because I am extremely optimistic about most companies in India’s private sector. Many of them are better run than their Western counterparts, and I am confident that in ten years, India’s private sector companies will be major global players in automobiles, banking, medical research, pharmaceuticals, life sciences and engineering goods, just like their counterparts already are in information technology and computing.
India’s private sector will boom and bring prosperity to India’s teeming millions only if it is allowed to do so by an obstructionist, corrupt government.
So while India’s private sector grows from strength to strength, the country’s public sector languishes. If anything, the public sector is getting worse. Apart from being corrupt, it is also unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve – the citizens of India. While foreign media commentators have been concerned by the shoddy preparations for the Commonwealth Games, they have been dismayed at the callous, uncaring attitude of the Indian government officials who created the mess in the first place. Indians on the other hand, have not been surprised by either the incompetence or the attitude of their government representatives. That is because the Indian government does not view itself as being there to work for its citizens, and we as Indians, know this. It is as simple as that, and it is a situation that has actually gotten worse over the last few decades.
Therefore, when people talk of China and India emerging as the new superpowers of the 21st century, I agree as far as China is concerned since this is a stated objective of the Chinese government and they are concertedly working towards it. I am not so sure about India. While Indians have the intelligence, industriousness and gumption to eradicate poverty and become a superpower (as our private sector so aptly demonstrates), the Indian government and its’ corrupt, incompetent and apathetic administration is like a banana skin, on which our national aspirations could slip up on at any time.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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