Sunday Times of India Editorial

Sorry Adi, yesterday, I couldn’t post a blog because server was down. Yesterday I was reading Sunday Times of India's editorial. I found this article from Shashi Tharoor very interesting. So I thought of sharing some important points of this articles with you readers. So today no A to Z, will continue in next post.....

Why the elephant can dance better- Shashi Tharoor
This article is about Sino-Indian economic co-operation, suggesting the two countries had complementarities that could make such co-operation mutually beneficial (as some companies in both countries are already proving). Some facts regarding China...

• Their export of electronic goods now tops $180 billion a year.
• One out of every three shoes exported in the world is made in China.
• They make 75% of the world's toys.
• Foreign direct investment is at the level of $70 billion a year (for comparison, India gets $15 billion).
• Shanghai alone has nearly 4,000 skyscrapers (more than all of India, and exceeding Los Angeles and Chicago combined).
• China has built an estimated 60,000 kilometers of expressways in less than two decades and will soon outstrip the total length of the US highway network.
• Per capita income has risen nearly 10-fold since 1978 to over $6,000 a head, and the number of people living in absolute poverty has dropped from 425 million two decades ago to 26 million today.
• The population is almost totally literate; life expectancy is reaching developed-country levels.
• This year, China is expected to overtake Germany to become the world's third largest economy, behind the US and Japan. It won't stay Number Three for long.

Against this, though, are a number of factors suggesting that not everything is rosy in China.

• Cost of development has not been negligible (population displacement, farmers thrown off their lands, villages flooded by dams, mounting pollution, low-wage labour in appalling conditions, widening disparities between the rich and the poor, an absence of human rights and few checks on governmental abuses).
• The Chinese have seen great and rapid improvements in their Internet access, but Beijing employs some 40,000 'cyber-police' to monitor politically-undesirable activity on the Web.
• It has been estimated that of the $700 American price of a Chinese-made laptop, only $15 remains in China.
• Only four of the country's top 25 exporters are Chinese companies, according to Forbes magazine's Robyn Meredith, who adds that in practice, 'Made in China' really means 'Made by America (or Europe) in China'.
• The financial information provided by China's companies, especially those in the large governmental sector, is notoriously unreliable, and standards of corporate governance are low.
• There are no world-class Chinese companies with sophisticated managers to match Tata or Wipro or Infosys.
• China's capital markets are weak and its banks inefficient: the Chinese banking system carried an estimated $911 billion in unrecoverable loans as of 2006, mainly to government firms.
• State-owned enterprises still account for half of China's economic assets.
• China has yet to master the art of channelling domestic savings into productive investments, which is why it has relied so extensively on foreign direct investment.
• And the world has yet to develop any confidence in China's legal system (where a contract still means whatever the government says it means).

But when you consider India,

• Where India has been running sophisticated stock markets since the early 19th century — and Indians are so skilled at doing so that they got the Bombay stock market up and running within 24 hours of the 1992 bomb blasts — China is new at the game, and not particularly adept at it.
• China lags behind India on the 'software' of development — not just technical brainpower or engineering know-how, but the systems it needs to operate a 21st century economy in an open and globalising world.
• Every Indian has been allowed to feel he or she has as much of a stake in the country, and as much of a chance to run it, as anyone else: after all, our last elections were won by an Italian woman of Roman Catholic heritage who made way for a Sikh to be sworn in as PM by a Muslim president, in a nation 81% Hindu.
• And our largest state is being ruled by a Dalit woman, from a community once considered 'untouchable', who bids fair to rule the entire country if she can make the coalition arithmetic add up right after the next election. She wasn't promoted by the Brahmin elite in New Delhi; she rode to the top on the ballots of her political base.
• Contrast this with Beijing, where political freedom is unknown, leaders at all levels are handpicked from the top for their posts, and political heresy is met with swift punishment, house-arrest or worse. India's politics means its shock-absorbers are built into the system; it has endured major road-bumps without the vehicle ever breaking down.

Bottom line.......................
The dragon could stumble where the elephant can always trundle on.