In spite of the Gods – India is tops!

By Vijay Kumar

The C.I.A. has projected that India will become, within the decade, the fourth most powerful country in the world. Yet, the Indian government, beset by twenty-four party coalitions, is “fragmented and often incoherent”; fewer than forty million of India’s citizens have “formal” employment and pay any income tax; and three hundred million people—more than a quarter of the population—live in poverty.

These are the contradictions of the subcontinent with a mixture of respect, bemusement, and exasperation by Edward Luce in his book In spite of the Gods. He traverses vast amounts of territory, and supplements personal encounters—he meets corrupt officials, aggrieved diplomats, Hindu-nationalist adherents of “biofuturology”—with exhaustive economic data. Look at the following facts:-

1. India is poised to become the world's third largest economy within a generation, outstripping Japan.

2. It will surpass China in population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than the United States by 2050.

3. The booming tech sector employs no more than one million of India's 1.1 billion people.

4. Only 35 million people, in fact, have formal enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the country lives in extreme deprivation in India's 600,000 villages.

5. Yet amid all these extremes exists the world's largest experiment in representative democracy--and a largely successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with horrifying corruption.

6. India is an economic rival to the U.S. in an entirely different sense than China is.

7. There is nothing in India like the manufacturing capacity of China, despite the huge potential labour force.

8. An inept system of public education leaves most Indians illiterate and unskilled.

9. Yet at the other extreme, the middle class produces ten times as many engineering students a year as the United States.

10. Notwithstanding its future as a major competitor in a globalized economy, American leaders have been encouraging India's rise, even welcoming it into the nuclear energy club, hoping to balance China's influence in Asia.

11. India still has only 84 television sets per 1,000 people (America has 938); 7.2 personal computers for every thousand people (Australia has 564.5); and the internet reaches only 2 per cent (Malaysia's figure is 34 per cent).

12. While becoming an important political and economic force, it has remained 'an intensely religious, spiritual and, in some ways, superstitious society'.

13. Only about 35 million Indians pay income tax.

14. In a country as complex as India, figures do not always tell the whole story, but at least they hardly ever lie. For instance, even in 2006, almost 300 million Indians can never be sure where their next meal will come from.

15.India has huge opportunities as well as tremendous challenges that make the future "hers to lose”.

What is your budget all about Mr. PC?