Sunday, September 03, 2006

India an economic super power? Fat chance.

This blog links to an interesting article on the economies of India and China. I especially liked the comment posted at this blog by Danese Cooper (Formerly open source community manager at Sun, now will Intel. She also gave a talk at FOSS.in this year).
She says, "Still, I'd rather live in a future where India keeps China's rapacious growth in check."

Its rather ironical that the world expects so much from India when we're going from bad to worse - caste based reservations in universities, poorly taught undergrads being churned out by the ten thousands every year by the universities, corruption, red tape, lack of access to good quality higher education, fast vanishing flora, fauna and natural resources, attempted withdrawal of the right to information act etc. Such pseudo democracy is only slightly better than communism country. Only slightly.
Just this evening, it took me 2.5 hours to negotiate 12 KMs because a huge rally was organized by the ruling Congress party in Bangalore. Villagers were brought in 9000 buses to "participate" in the show of "strength" by that political party. Apart from the physical stress I went through, my car also suffered a few scratches thanks to the bumper to bumper traffic. TV channels reported a 40 KM long traffic jam on the highway connecting Bangalore and Tumkur(60 KM away) due to this event. Even the cops were mute spectators (as usual) to this event.
Some democracy we have. Who the hell would want to live in such a country?
And we hope to give China a run for its money, huh?

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