Prasad requested a bit more on the distinction between development and growth. Consider the life-cycle of a normal human being. The initial stages are marked by growth and development; the later stages by a cessation of growth but continued development (hopefully). Growth, apart from that required in the initial stages, is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. One can have one without the other.
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Abolishing Natural Laws
Like a bad penny, articles on BPO and its backlash keeps turning up again and again. The best I have seen so far was a New York Times article by Hal Varian of UC Berkeley called What Goes Abroad Usually Comes Back, With Benefits. (Thanks to Reuben for the link.)
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Shifting Focus from Bharat to India
Thomas Friedman is a one-man factory churning out outsourcing stories by the dozens. He asks and answers the question below in his latest column.
How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to the brainy country that is going to
take all our best jobs? Answer: good timing, hard work, talent and luck.
I would have asked a slightly different question:
How did India, in 15 years, go from being perceived as a country of massive poverty to being perceived as the brainy country that is going to take all our best jobs? Answer: Spin, racist zenophobia, and ignorance.
Let’s take the last one: ignorance. People are generally ignorant of the fact that there are two distinct Indias. Sharad Joshi distinguised them by calling the urban, rich, educated one India and the rural, poor, uneducated one Bharat. I will borrow that nomenclature. India is small, say about 100 million people at most. India has programmers and BPO call centers and cars and Baristas and McDonalds. Indians get educated at IITs and IIMs and travel abroad and talk to each other in Hindi sentences such as, “mera sleep bahut disturbed ho raha hai these days.”
In contrast to that, Bharat is a huge country of about 900 million, most of whom live in rural areas. They are largely illiterate, poor, have little education, don’t speak in English, do manual labor in farms, wouldn’t know what to do with a computer even if one came and bit them on their skinny behinds, have no illusions about anything shining and are generally ignorant about feeling good.
Ignorance about the existence of Bharat is widespread in India. Examine any magazine published in India and you would learn that the most pressing problems in India include what to do about a waist-line, which car to buy, where the hottest shopping spots are in the world, which movie star is sleeping with whom, and how India is shining.
How foreigners perceive India depends on what they have been fed by the news media. Sometimes the news media concentrates on Bharat and the focus is therefore on poverty and hunger. Then for some reason, Bharat is ignored and India comes into the limelight. The focus is then on the IT industry and all BPO and call center and job loss to brainy Indians. The reality is pretty much what it was before.
The other two factors — spin and racist zenophobia — I may take up later or leave it as an exercise for the interested reader.
Lajja
This one is to be filed under “INDIA IS A SUPERPOWER” category.
The newsletter from US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) contained this:
We need support and financial contribution from at least 50,000 Indian Americans by March 2004 to persuade the US government to support India in its fight against HIV/AIDS. The US government has already funded 14 nations in curbing the HIV/AIDS menace. With your support, India can become the 15th country to receive the much-needed US funds for fighting the epidemic.
Begging bowl all shiny and ready, I suppose. What the heck is wrong with these people? Do they have no shame? Begging for their living? Because I don’t doubt that they fly first class from one end of the country to the other shiny begging bowl in hand.
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What I Believe
It is easy to defend the view that resource scarcity is a crucial causal factor in most conflicts. And since scarcity of resources increases with increasing populations, a greater balance between resources and population numbers could reduce strife.
I see the result of extreme imbalance between resources and populations every day in Mumbai. People lose their dignity in the face of dehumanizing poverty. I have also seen the other extreme — of affluence. I have lived in the US for over a couple of decades and witnessed their profligate over-consumption which is also unsustainable. Somewhere between the thoughtless affluence of the few and the de-humanizing poverty of the many, is the middle-path of sustainable development of all humanity. The problems of our system are easy to see and are stated easily enough though they are hard to solve.
Although I am not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, I hold some things sacred. I believe that life in the universe is the most profound mystery second only to the mystery of why something, rather than nothing, exists. And that mystery of life is deserving of our most profound respect and wonder. Preservation of all life on Earth, therefore, is the most sacred of duties. Not just preservation but to see that it flourishes in all its infinite variety and diversity. I believe it is a moral imperative that every human being born to this life should have the opportunity to live a life of dignity, purpose, and meaning. Living in harmony with nature and with other fellow life on earth is axiomatic to a good life.
My interests lie in the interaction between the environment, the world economic order and humanity. I have spent some time thinking about growth, development, sustainability and the environment. I recognize that there is a distinction between growth and development. The natural evolution of any system in the initial stages requires growth but that there is a natural limit to the growth past that stage. Development could go on without limits at all stages without it being linked to growth. I feel that if in a system growth is a necessary condition for its continued development, then the development of that system is unsustainable due to the limits to growth in a world of finite resources. How to develop without growing is one of the greatest challenges that faces India.
We need to understand the meaning of progress, what its implications are with respect to the impact on the ecological systems we inhabit and what are the limits to growth: of populations, of the economic system’s physical throughput and other related factors.
Education as the linchpin
Rajesh Jain is continuing on his series of posts on As India Develops. His focus is on education and it set me thinking.
India is a land of opportunities. By that I mean, that we have so much to accomplish, so much to get done, so much has been neglected for so long, that everywhere we look, we find things that need to be done. There is a veritable surfeit of opportunities and one has a hard time figuring out where to begin. The whole set of opportunities is overwhelming. More so because we have severe resource limitations. So much to do, and so little to do it with. Consequently, one has to prioritize the tasks. To my mind, one issue wins hands down when it comes to priority. It is education.
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A Set of Hard Problems — Part 2
An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth –in short, materialism– does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful
THE ETHICS OF POLICY
Economist Thomas Schelling defined the ethics of policy ‘as what we try to bring to bear on those issues in which we do not have a personal stake.’ It can be convincingly argued that there are no issues in which we do not have a personal stake. Every action in an interdependent global system has far-reaching consequences. My desire for cheap hamburgers could translate however indirectly to rainforest destruction.
One has to grapple with the notion of social obligations and what we owe to the poor and the disadvantaged who have legitimate claim to the resources that are required for a decent human existence.
Biodiesel
An email exchange with Reuben got me thinking about biodiesel. I wrote saying:
I am not sure what ‘biodiesel’ is. I am assuming that it is some sort of oil that is extracted from some plant that is grown for the purpose and which oil can be used to fuel a diesel engine.
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As India Develops
Rajesh Jain on his Emergic weblog has been writing a series of articles called As India Develops.
In these set of articles, he traverses a wide range of topics and lays out a road map for India’s development. (Disclaimer: I am necessarily biased in favor of his point of view because of two reasons. First, he quotes from my writings. And, second, he is my business partner.)
Also of interest is his series he calls Tutorials on Development. There are four of them, the first of which is here.
India’s Shining New Clothes
Of course India is shining. Just ask the guy who is raking in the stuff from his BPO company. Or ask the those who are buying all the electronic gizmos from the mega stores in the mega cities. India, defined strictly as those people at the top of the heap who make a shining living because the supply of people at the bottom of the heap is so abundant that they work for next to nothing, is shining and how.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 