Crouching Tiger, Problem-ridden Dragon
India is booming, and the Asian tiger has a few advantages that could give it an edge over the Chinese dragon. Canada should pay attention
Kevin Steel - April 23, 2007
When Mira Kamdar woke up early in the morning on March 30, the first thing she did was go to the window. From her luxury suite in the Amarvilas Hotel in Agra, India, she had a postcard-perfect view of the Taj Mahal rising out of the mist off the Yamuna River in the sunrise. But the foreground was a little less spectacular. In between the sumptuous gardens of the hotel--with its fountains and marble arches--and the near mythic beauty of the Taj, was a modest residential neighbourhood, and in front of that a large barren stretch of ground. "There were a lot of neighbourhood boys and men coming out to relieve themselves there," Kamdar says with a laugh; not a pretty sight. However, the reason for using this giant outdoor toilet was pretty easy to guess: the neighbourhood simply lacked an adequate sewage system.
The day before, in another city, Gurgaon, where she was visiting relatives, Kamdar noticed a similar lack of basic infrastructure. Gurgaon, she says, typifies the exploding India. "It was mall mania. Within three kilometres of where we were staying, there were at least six malls in various stages of construction," she says. Between the malls, with cows and feral dogs wandering the streets, amid bleak poverty, there were no sidewalks; there were sidewalks directly in front of the malls but they ended abruptly on either side. She found this strange in a country where most people get around by foot, bicycle or cycle rickshaw.
Kamdar is no casual observer. The Seattle-born writer of Indian descent is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and an associate fellow of the Asia Society based in New York, where she now lives. She has just published Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy is Transforming America and the World, a book about the impact of India's rocketing economy.
The lack of basic infrastructure is evident everywhere, Kamdar says, and it's not just sewage and sidewalks. "The Achilles heel in the India story is the infrastructure lag. It simply has not built up its infrastructure at any kind of a rate to keep up with the explosion in the economy. There are a number of industries that are just going to run into a brick wall if they can't ramp up their electrical supply, ramp up roads, ports and airports, because they simply won't be able to manufacture or move the goods that are fuelling the growth," Kamdar says.
The Indian economy grew more than nine per cent last year, putting it on pace with rapidly expanding China, and economists predict it will continue to grow by at least eight per cent per year for the foreseeable future. Anywhere you get that kind of growth, there are problems. In India, where the citizens number 1.1 billion, those problems are compounded almost beyond comprehension. Factor in that about two-thirds of Indians live on less than two dollars a day but have rapidly rising expectations, and you've got a potentially explosive situation.
But Kamdar is optimistic. India, she believes, can handle its problems. "The mood in the country is by and large very bullish, and that filters down even to the poor who believe life is going to get better," she says. It is an ancient civilization, but it is a member of the Commonwealth, and as a modern nation it is founded on enlightenment values and institutions, particularly British values, including parliamentary democracy. So it can absorb shocks without stepping backward. "If people grow dissatisfied with the government, they can just throw them out, and they do regularly," Kamdar says.
That's actually where India has the advantage over its regional competitor, China, in its ability to absorb the shock of the transition from a relatively backward economy to a modern economic powerhouse.
It's why James Bennett gives the edge to India. The Colorado-based technological entrepreneur and author of The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-first Century believes, politically, India is about a half a century ahead of China. "India has made the transition to rule of law a long time ago, and they did it under very difficult circumstances," says Bennett. Just before India's 1947 independence, in the partition of that year, they had pretty close to an all-out civil war. Over the years, they had three major wars with Pakistan, several quasi wars with China, domestic insurrectionism and the period of emergency under Indira Gandhi. Indian democracy and rule of law have survived all these. Most Third World nations have not managed to maintain rule of law or democracy through far less disruption.
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