The Global Leaders are dead. Long live the new Leader.The balance of power is definitely going to shift towards Asia. China is going to be a major player. India is not very far behind.
One hears of strides being made by Asian companies on the global arena. Lenovo, a Chinese company is now the proud owner of IBM's PC and laptop division. The TATA conglomerate is going global like never before. Indians like Mittal have never had it so good before.IBM has announced India/South Asia as a region. It originally had only 5 regions. This is its sixth. I believe that is ominous.So it's time for India to rock and roll, right? Hold on for a sec.
There is one thing that can (and i suspect will) impede India's growth - its infrastructure. I often think the growth that India has been showing over the past several months is built on a very weak foundation. India being such a vast country, growth has not been uniform; and I'm not just talking about the geography or the urban-rural divide here.Just to give an example, u need just one good storm in a city like Bangalore/Bombay for all communication to get snapped. Telephone lines get broken, airports get marooned and the railway network just collapses, not to mention anything about electricity. For industries like BPO where communication lines are the lifelines, this spells disaster. They lose face in front of thier clients.Bangalore came to a stop when Dr.Rajkumar died. Bundhs are commonplace in Calcutta. You can't let such things happen regularly and yet hope to continue to get MNCs to invest here.
Another example. Its common sense that broad and good roads are essential to a city. But has anybody noticed how roads are planned even in new cities that are coming up? They are narrow and as badly planned as ever. We just refuse to learn. And the drainage system ! Don't even get me started !
I often hear of 'intellectuals' comparing the growth story in India and China. They say China is streets ahead and that India is not doing things the way China does. To them, i have only one thing to say. India is a democracy unlike China. In China, the government has only to feel something for it to be made a law. No consensus is taken and concerns of citizens are given the go by. We all know what happened in Tiananmen sq.It is not like that in India. The route is circuitous and peppered with hundreds of hurdles-real and imaginary. And on top of that we have coalition governments at the center.So when u compare India and China, the effort that we need to make is hundred times more for the same results to materialise.
And that is India's real problem.
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