As a US-raised Indian I'm not familiar with the macro details. But I've been living in India for the past few years working for a startup, so let me identify some low-hanging fruit.
1) Incredibly, shockingly poor hygiene. Dirty black rags being used repeatedly to dry plates at restaurants. Idlys being cooked on plastic sheets inside hot streamers. Infernoes of uncollected trash burning on streets. Rats and cockroaches everywhere including your toothbrush at night.
2) Utterly horrifying road conditions. Potholes large enough to cause motorcycle crashes every 100 feet. A culture of not giving the other motorist more than 6 inches on any side. Driving on the wrong side of the road, including on highways. It's incredibly stressful to think about your odds when you leave the house.
3) A political system that no-one is optimistic about. Stories are rampant of politicians buying votes by giving free household appliances away to the poor, and then doing nothing in office to help them.
4) An education system that isn't remotely good enough. Miserable professors, antiquated curriculums that churn out the IT coolies we're so famous for.
5) Congestion so bad you hardly ever leave a 5-mile radius. People tend to hang out based on which neighborhood they live in, because a trip to a friend's place more than 5 miles away can turn into an hour-long slog on terrifying roads.
6) A culture of being cheap. If you're only willing to tip your waiter 10 rupees, it may help out your savings rate, but it certainly won't help the waiter buy his kid a computer someday. Same goes for our beloved household servants, who get paid $150 per month at best, $40 at worst to clean our floors.
But to voice a conflict that everyone who lives here talks about, I'm not a pessimist about India by any means, because it's amazing how much the people of this country have achieved through individual hard work in the face of so many poor institutions.
I'm a kid who came over to the US for higher studies.
All these problems are deep-rooted in our culture. The culture doesn't encourage innovation and curiosity is shunned in most of the schools. Kids get into this rat race of scoring high grades without even realizing it.
(I'm going to go off on a tangential rant here onward):
Sadly, it looks like most of us are proud of it. And the ones who come over to the US are bringing this culture over with them. I was a TA in a top 10 university for a Compilers course and the number of these purportedly 'smart' kids that you could observe the Dunning-Kruger effect on was laughable. Most of them were frankly deluded into thinking they were these amazing engineers. Their primary goal was to get a job at Microsoft/Google/Amazon. None of them had the curiosity to find out how a compiler actually worked. They just did the bare-minimum necessary to get a good grade. And not surprisingly almost all the students I busted for cheating were Indians.
My plea to the kids coming over to the US at the risk of sounding unpopular: You're culture has failed you. Our culture doesn't encourage scientific thought and reeks ignorance. Please leave that behind with you.
Understand, observe and get inspired by the great scientific culture the Americans have built here. Let's not ruin that.
>> Understand, observe and get inspired by the great scientific culture the Americans have built here. Let's not ruin that.
Say that in India, and some guys will fly into a rage and say:
1) All the great scientists in America came from other countries, so many are Indians
2) We had levitating Mars-visiting Rushis before Neil Armstrong ever "supposedly" landed on the moon.
3) The Europeans lived in filth while we had an advanced civilization in the middle ages. Therefore we are inherently better.
Of course you WOULD fly into a rage if you could never leave and establish yourself in a more "luxurious" country that "isn't your own". Until then, for the sake of your own sanity, you have to believe there's nothing wrong with your country and that you weren't failed.
I've definitely met those types of Indians, for whom a job at a big company is the holy grail, and the majority of them come from a position of financial insecurity.
On the other hand I've met others who have a much more scientific bent, so I don't think its "Indian culture" that forces people to be anti-innovation.
It's the conservative strain of Indian thought which naturally dominates the brains of people raised in financially insecure conditions. Poverty breeds materialism.
> The culture doesn't encourage innovation and curiosity is shunned in most of the schools. Kids get into this rat race of scoring high grades without even realizing it.
I'm not trying to take anything from what you're saying, but my experience is that applies just as well to US school (high school, at least.)
Having been to both places - the similarity may be there, but America has just started on the path of wiping out the ability to think from its children.
We've been 'teaching the test' for decades now. No child left behind has just started for you in comparison.
The Indian education system is busy creating mental athletes who are literate, but incapable of actually working outside of their experience set - essentially training fencers instead of fighters.
If we continue slashing arts, music, woodshop etc. in favor of more AP classes you'd end up being somewhat right, but still, you have no idea the difference in education quality
Your problem with the culture is the problem with almost every culture of the world( including USA). The "great scientific culture" of USA is to lure the smart people all around world. "And not surprisingly almost all the students I busted for cheating were Indians"- on side note, my personal observation is Indians are extreme harsh on other Indians if the first one is part of system. I actively avoid immigration line checked by Indian looking staff whenever going to USA or UK.
>> because it's amazing how much the people of this country have achieved through individual hard work in the face of so many poor institutions.
Well we don't have any other options. We need to work, or we will be wiped out. You have no clue, what a person can do- or how hard he can work when he is faced with a such a situation in life. I've personally been there, and I can tell you throughout my teens I've had situations where it was doing good in the next exams or going back to poverty.
When you go through that, you don't complain of lack of sleep or rest, you don't complain you just have a pair or clothes, or that your home is just a room where the whole family sleep packed and you get one small little corner where you need to your studies under a dim bulb to compete with a million people.
You just realize you have no other option, you work, work and work until success becomes inevitable- indifferent to the circumstances. That is something like a small glimpse of what I and some of friends went through to get where we are today.
Not sure if teens in US go through the same thing. But sometimes when I hear about the pain US citizens talk of when IT outsourcing is mentioned, those are not easy chances we are getting. For many of us, those have come after going through toughest situations you can probably can't even imagine.
I'm not a pessimist about India by any means, because it's amazing how much the people of this country have achieved through individual hard work in the face of so many poor institutions
Well, the Indian people are ultimately responsible for the institutions of India. So why don't the institutions get fixed? Potholes, uncollected trash, rats - these are not particularly hard problems. Plenty of societies have figured it out. Why have these problems persisted for so long in India?
Because these are not the problems, just the symptoms. The problem is a deep class divide between the haves and have-nots. Those who climb out of poverty never look back. Those who are already rich feed on people staying poor, uneducated and miserable. That's the vote bank easiest to manipulate.
I am not from India, but neighbouring Pakistan. We just had our national elections and the only hope, Imran Khan's PTI lost. Nearly everyone I know in Pakistan has voted for PTI, but through a combination of election rigging and a mass of poverty-stricken people being coerced into voting for the wrong guy resulted in the status quo being maintained.
The problem is a deep class divide between the haves and have-nots.
Britain of 1850 had a deep class divide, but they managed to keep the trash off streets. The rich do not have an interest in sewage running into the rivers or slums that are breeding supergerms. The upper class in England and America drove all the public health measures (such as sewers, clean drinking water, vaccination campaigns, etc.) in the 1800's that made cities livable. What is different about India? Why is this not happening?
Well I bet the Indian cities would've been better if there wasn't Europe and US to live in. Most people who can't stand the filth and the misery of others, just leave.
To an extent, this is also about the poor man's education, specially about values. Out of planet, people and profit, just profit matters for most. Of course this also leads to corruption. I feel this stems from a general feeling of injustice in the country, where people feel they've been wronged in general, and now doing the wrong thing is the only right thing to do.
If a solution to this problem of values is to be sought, it would lie in the long haul route of educating people. A different type of education where values and morals are asserted more than skills and achievements.
Why the upper class is displaying a complete apathy towards these mass problems is a belief that things are not going to change, no matter what. The class divide plays a role here, a distinct detachment of feelings about the average poor man and their living conditions.
Personally, I don't have the energy for a monumental struggle with local government to get potholes filled and streets cleaned. I'd have to convince a bunch of regular people first that the streets are miserable, a fact that they attenuated a long time ago for their own sanity.
I'm also not inclined to just go fill the potholes myself.
All of them very true. One of the biggest problems is corruption is rooted in the culture. Every person believes every other person can be bought. And its true as well. The people making laws are corrupt to their bone but if the people in charge of enforcing are corrupt as well that leads to hopelessness.
Missing the trees for the forest. The "hard-working" Indians come from well off families, who can afford private school education for kids. Very few actually move from desperately poor to middle class. I take exception to IT coolies desc. Back when I was in India, my first it coolie salary was more than both my parents combined salaries. At some point before moving to school, I was making more money than the president of India , being an it coolie. It's not how much inr transalated to dollars I was making that mattered. The salaries, low compared to here would bu you a lot of things that you can never afford in us. Like a maid to clean your house, a chauffeur for your car and the like. What is expensive is, real estate in cities because of absense of city planning and anything imported, like cars, gasoline, electronics etc.
1.) Everyone in the thread is ignoring a huge point raised by the author: this is the last biggest bubble we will ever witness in our lifetime (and possibly for many lifetimes) due to
a.) unpeg of gold standard
b.) shift from farm to factory work
c.) shift from one income to two income household
d.) machine/software advances
and many other factors has produced the greatest economic growth we have ever seen in history. However, due to
a.) unsustainable financial gambling
b.) wealth growth only in top 1%, mostly through rentier effects
c.) robots, automation and artificial intelligence resulting in jobs destruction
d.) population slowdown, shift to older demographics
the second dip in global economic depression is happening. and will induce so much deflation soon that 99% of the world population will be very very poor. for 3-4 generations.
2.) due to the lack of hygiene/lack of transportation/too many people/bad weather/trash everywhere/homeless everywhere/fecal matters on the streets/too many doctors prescribing antibiotics, resulting in super-resistant viruses, there will be a huge epidemic sooner or later that might wipe out millions of people, and nobody will be able to do anything about it because the crash in the economy.
3.) Growth in IT outsourcing is no more. Foreign investments are down big. There are better countries for companies to invest in that have better infrastructure and speaks better english.
>>Growth in IT outsourcing is no more. Foreign investments are down big. There are better countries for companies to invest in that have better infrastructure and speaks better english.
No and I thing you've got it wrong.
We are soon hitting a stage where we don't have to depend of foreign investments. Its happening, software is but just one aspect of foreign investments. There is real estate, retail sectors, education, manufacturing, automobile etc. That list can go endless.
Nearly every global company today understands if they don't come to India now, the local companies are going to eat their lunch big time and leaving all doors of making a entry later permanently shut.
Every time I see somebody good leave India I feel bad for them. They have no clue what they will miss over the next decades. With hardly any competition in a country where demands are rising so rapidly, almost anything you make people want will sell. Even if you make it badly.
Consider this with settling down in US, something like next half of your life will simply go in 'getting somewhere'. You will simply going there for your kids. And consider yourself lucky if they value your sacrifices and do something big out of it. Else there will be a situation where post 30 years your kids might want to come to India to settle there kids.
I think you overestimate how much people are willing to live in shitty conditions in exchange for business opportunities. The US may not be a boomtown but it has opportunity to live a comfortable life if you can add value. Most people would prefer quality of life + "just getting somewhere" (the American standard) over living in a dump + business opportunities.
There no 'shitty conditions'. Not by what I perceive and experience.
People who opted to stay in India to reap the benefits of the IT boom in the 90's are in something like a million times better conditions than the guys who left to the US in the 90's.
If you want to be super rich, this is the time to be in India. And it will be at least for the next half century, there is too much room to grow and there is far little genuine competition.
Business opportunities, money, being rich is not what life is all about. Clean air, clean water, good work culture, honesty and respect for other human beings is what is missing in India. There is somebody in every corner looking to con you here in India. Conditions are very pathetic. Its a rat race in the cities, with every person trying to outrun the next guy. People are aware of the money they can make and are blinded by it. All they see and respond to nowadays is money.
Based on my 2 trips to India - Mumbai and Chennai - this is either naive or dishonest.
I'll go further, and say that out of all the roughly 50 countries I visited, which include Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Indonesia, Phillipines and Solomon Islands, conditions in India were The Shittiest. Sorry.
I think you are overestimating the demand for talent here. Recently Infosys announced that they are going to change the workforce ratio to 70% freshers and 30% seniors. There are very few companies which value true talent in India. You have to fight and pay bribe to get anything that has interaction with a government organisation. Broken or no roads, fly over and metro that are taking years together to complete. As far as I am aware only very few percentage of people became rich in the IT boom of 90s but most of the people who went abroad during that period are well to do today (this from random sample among my relatives and friends).
I will prefer to be "not so rich" in a country where majority is "not so rich" rather than be "super rich" in a country where majority is "super poor".
I've lived half my life as a kid in Bangalore and half in the US. All I can say is if you're willing to eat Chapati and Dal and never go out to "do" things while living in the San Francisco area, basically, if you live like an Indian, you won't have trouble "getting somewhere". It's not like rent is cheap in India, and getting your kid into a decent college is way harder.
Actually, I'm back in Bangalore now working for a startup. The work is interesting, but the pay is only $18,000 for the same product management role that netted me $60 grand just out of college in San Mateo. Sure, I face absolutely no competition, since there is very little product talent here. Doesn't mean I'm going places in terms of a lifestyle or financial security. If I live like a peasant compared to my life back in the states, I save less money. What's disheartening is that so many goods and experiences are hitting dollar prices in this city right now. (Meat, nice produce, beer, good clothes).
There are better countries for companies to invest in that have better infrastructure and speaks better english.
You might want to reword that. :)
More seriously, I am optimistic because 1) the older generation will die off and 2) almost 50% of the grad students in any top US university are from India. (This includes programs in AI and Robotics. Count me in that too.)
1.) the young generation is still corrupt and apathetic and spineless
2.) assuming your number is correct (which I doubt), 90% of those students who overpaid for a masters are staying in the US
I am curious about this. Other than the US, UK and a few Scandinavian countries, what countries do you think speak English better than India?
1) The younger generation is much much less corrupt.
2) Almost nobody pays for a masters in science and engineering. Those who do startup eventually end up doing it in India. I know a bunch of my friends running profitable startups.
Look at those rankings for outsourcing. Also, we should look outside of outsourcing: there is a reason why the top research labs of IBM, MSFT, HP, GE etc have labs in India and not in those countries. More Indians will move out of business process outsourcing and into hard core technology and research outsourcing.
You missed the biggest thing IMO -- there isn't much nationalism or national unity. I don't see Indians being particularly proud of India.
Some of the smartest people I know are from India and Pakistan. Most of the folks I know came from modest backgrounds, and none of them look back at all.
Most of the points above are hyperbolic and quite silly, to be frank. For example - "robots, automation and artificial intelligence resulting in jobs destruction" - I suppose just like the personal computer lead to "jobs destruction"?
Actually, yes. Just like advances in agricultural technology lead to job destruction in agriculture. We went from a majority of the global human population working in agriculture to a tiny minority in a few centuries. That labor was largely absorbed into industrial manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs have also been destroyed by automation (e.g., why a growing manufacturing sector in the US is not adding new net manufacturing jobs). The service sector has absorbed much of that labor, but on the low end, those jobs tend to be much more poorly paid and stable (which explains no income growth for the bottom 80% of the US population in 30+ years, despite a growing economy). Computers and automation are starting to eliminate service sector jobs as well (and not just on the low end). It isn't clear which "sector" will absorb this new labor unlocked by growing productivity, but it is clear to see how these change can create a growing economy but also growing inequality which can lead to a less pleasant society overall...
> 2.) due to the lack of hygiene/lack of transportation/too many people/bad weather/trash everywhere/homeless everywhere/fecal matters on the streets/too many doctors prescribing antibiotics, resulting in super-resistant viruses, there will be a huge epidemic sooner or later that might wipe out millions of people, and nobody will be able to do anything about it because the crash in the economy.
Haha. No. Lack of hygiene does not actually result in super resistant viruses. If at all, it results in people who a stronger to existing viruses and bacteria since they are able to live in such conditions. We rather see that tourists going to India tend to fall sick very often because they are not used to the viruses and bacteria there.
And lack of hygiene is not something new. We've had lack of hygiene for like millenia in Human Kind history, yet the human race still thrived. I'm not worried about that.
He meant that over-prescription of antibiotics will lead to resistant viruses (probably meant bacteria) not that the conditions themselves will lead to such an outcome. Not saying I agree or disagree, just clearing that up.
"India has lost the war against the toughest forms of antibiotic resistance, largely because of poor sanitation, unregulated use of antibiotics and an absence of drug resistance monitoring, according to the man who discovered a type of drug resistance in bacteria in New Delhi."
"Because India's population will surpass that of China in 2030 or so, even as India's population will get gray at a slower rate than that of China, India may in relative terms have a brighter future. As inefficient as India's democratic system is, it does not face a fundamental problem of legitimacy like China's authoritarian system very well might."
with 8.3T GDP... are you serious? Could you describe the scenario where China has an economic collapse?
If such a scenario were to happen... it'd would be pretty catastrophic the world over. GIven how tied the US and China's economies are tied, I don't think the US would allow a USSR style collapse... :\
Every single one of your pessism factors was true in 1932, and we all know how the world economy did after that.
The economic potential in genetics, robotics, nanotechnology, nuclear energy, space exporation, etc. are enormous. We just need to keep moving forward.
I'm not saying that you're wrong about the negative factors; they are all risks to a better future. I'm just saying that they can be overcome; it's been done before.
I am optimistic about India, in spite of all the problems. First, almost all the problems are accounted for by the $1200 GDP per capita. It is hard to visualize just how scarce resources are to solve problems when you are that poor. At the municipal level, annual budgets of $20-$30 per capita would be considered good in India, even in a relatively prosperous city (by Indian standards) like Chennai. Lack of hygiene and sanitation are almost entirely explained by that $20 per capita.
If you read the history of cities like New York and London a century and a half ago, they had very similar problems to what a city like Chennai is going through.
Now the reason for optimism: the skill level among young Indians is growing rapidly, thanks to the spread of basic education and growing aspiration among all classes of Indians. That is the foundation on which economic growth is built, and economic growth is the only way we are going to solve our other problems.
To get India going, we need to do all the the article is saying - spend on food, health and eduction. But I would add the state needs to do that, private sector will just screw the poor further - no deliberately, but shit happens.
All of the problems were much worse 35 years ago. Yet, in spite of all that, India has made progress. I assume you are very young - I am approaching 45, and I am more optimistic now than when I was at 25.
I am not just being optimistic, I am putting my money and my time where my mouth is.
>The average age of cabinet ministers is 65. The country has never had a prime minister born in independent India.
>One man who might buck that trend, Rahul Gandhi, is the son, >grandson and great-grandson of former prime ministers.
>India is run by gerontocrats and epigones: grey hairs and groomed heirs.
Aside from that wonderful turn of phrase, this may well be the key concept: India has long been run by entrenched interests for their own benefit and the situation shows no signs of abating.
This being said, it's unusual for a democratic head of government to be anything other than a grey-hair. Other movers and shakers, sure, but to climb to the very top in a democracy generally takes a while.
I don't think this is true in Western democracies, where age can be a liability during an election. Advisers yes, but the guy running on the ticket needs to project charisma and vigor as well as some wisdom. The funny thing about elections: the electorate doesn't look at your CV so much; Obama was just a 1 term senator before he became president. Having more political experience would have actually been a liability for him as he would be seen as more of an insider.
This is definitely true in the directly elected presidential system we have in the states (definitely true post Clinton, even Reagan was an exception). Parliamentary systems are a bit different since the prime minister is elected indirectly, but even there we are seeing some fairly young heads of states in the UK and Germany (Cameron is 40 something, Merkell has been their 7 years and hasn't even hit 60 yet).
Perhaps New Zealand's an outlier, but the majority of Prime Ministers here (functionally the head of government) during my lifetime came to the office in their 40s. I note Cameron and Blair in the UK were in the same age bracket.
What I have learned is that Indians severely lack "social intelligence". I am not talking about the kind which makes you good with people. I am talking about, how much a person thinks that What is good for people surrounding you is also good for you. I think average indian's such intelligence is perhaps is in negative.
I have seen people throw trash on the streets without any regard for others. Same goes for every other resources and issues. Each indian lives in a bubble of their own home, which is perfectly clean but total disregard anything outside the walls.
It may be a lack of "social intelligence" as you say, but it could also be a result of Broken Windows Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory). What incentive does one person have to organize his/her trash when there are already massive burning piles in the street?
I feel that the concept of the "Tragedy of the Commons" more closely mirrors this aspect of "social intelligence" that the original commenter referred to.
Thats also a major cause. In fact Ugly Indian group has noticed similar effect. When they clean certain areas of the streets and improve it aesthetically, it stops being degraded to its original state more often than not.
I think the better term is "lack of civic sense". I don't think there is a lack of social intelligence or such thing,
I see it more as a plain apathy to anyone other than self and one's kins.
>Worryingly, a growing share of household saving is bypassing the financial system altogether, seeking refuge from inflation in gold, bricks and mortar.
This is great. It means it's a kind of sustainable. 1) In case of a crisis (which will come) It won't be thrown back too much.
1) I think India is anything but sustainable due to their enormous population growth.
Why does their population growth have to be a negative? They are currently as big as China, which will have the biggest economy in the world within a decade. They should invest in the population and rise to the top.
I have the impression that the landmass of India is insufficient to sustain its population. Let's say the food supply is managed perfectly (it isn't) and no one is going hungry. How about the fact that 60% of the population does not have access to reliable electricity? How about the fact that most big cities have scheduled power-cuts (mostly in summer) for 2-6 hours each day? Energy needs are just the tip of this iceberg. I think of India's population as one of the most significant factors in keeping the country poor and underdeveloped.
Do keep in mind the reason the explloding population is bad is not exclusively because of the raw number of people or the lack of food or power availability (both can be improved with tech) but more because the population explosion is in the poorest Indians in the most isolated areas who suddenly came into contact with basic medicine and health practice in the last 30 years.
Population explosions at the bottom always hurt economies, and you just never see them happen at the top for a plethora of reasons.
India does not have a big problem with food production. It has a problem with the storage and dispersal of food. The problem is not with the tech, but with management (in turn, with corruption). Power: The only tech that can fix it is cost-effective solar power, which is a long way off. Otherwise India imports coal, petroleum and uranium. India's resources cannot sustain its power needs.
Population explosion will be at the bottom in India. Improving healthcare (by charities also) and worsening (or non-existent) education points only in one direction.
India reminds me a lot of what Taiwan used to be. About 10-15 years ago, they were a big joke when he came to cycle manufacturing. The quality of the bikes they produced and the factories there were horrible sweatshops.
Then, they started getting better. They updated their technology, they had better trained workers to run the new machines. Then bike manufacturers started to see what was going on, and started moving big chunks of their manufacturing over there. Last time I checked, companies like Giant, Trek, and Specialized all have some of their manufacturing over there now. Their factories are some of the most advanced manufacturing plants in the world.
I think India has the same potential, but its still about 3-5 years from realizing its own potential. It will be interesting to see if it can make the jump, or remain a great "what if. . " story line.
Taiwan and SK also had strong dictatorships until relatively recently; we aren't really talking about democracy until the 80s. Now, dictatorships are bad, but as long as the dictators are somewhat responsible, they do convey some amount of stability and economic development on the country that might not be possible (at that time) with a more chaotic democratic system. I'm not pro dictator, and I'm sure there was a more efficient path to prosperity that involved democracy, but this is just how it worked out.
Today see China, or Singapore if you think maybe the Lee family has a bit too much power than is justified in a real democracy.
India has an English democracy. Everything in India was originally designed to support a wealthy English middle-class (if it was important directly from the UK), or to extract wealth from poor Indians so it could be exported to the UK.
I'm saying, India's institutions are overbuilt. They were originally designed to work in a far richer, and far more orderly country. There are certainly some things which are "one size fits all", but for anything which is only appropriate with a large, law abiding middle class it fails horribly in India.
This is a good point. But I would wonder: what kind of democracy/government would be appropriate for a developing country? It should somehow promote stability and development, and perhaps not focus so much on liberty and freedom. This realization makes me a bit uncomfortable as an American living in China.
Taiwan didn't clean up its pollution until it became a democracy. (I lived there for extended periods both before and after that transition.) Generalizing a bit more, dictatorship was not strictly necessary for Taiwan's progress, as we know from two lines of evidence:
1) Some countries in other parts of the world developed AS democracies, even earlier than Taiwan.
2) Taiwan has continued to develop and improve most aspects of its living standards since it became a democracy.
Dictatorships miss out on the valuable reality-checks on public policy provided by free and fair election campaigns.
> 1) Some countries in other parts of the world developed AS democracies, even earlier than Taiwan.
I don't get this point. Sure some countries developed as democracies, but effectiveness is contextual.
> 2) Taiwan has continued to develop and improve most aspects of its living standards since it became a democracy.
No one is arguing here that democracy is not eventually the best form of government, only when democracy is appropriate. Once a country is solidly middle class, I think democracy is a solid win and the people will demand it anyways.
Your timeline of bicycle manufacturing in Taiwan is off by at least fifteen years. (In other words, it has already been a good thirty years that you have been able to count on good bicycle manufacturing there, after an era when one would think of Japan, but not Taiwan, when thinking about a place in Asia where good bicycles are made.)
What's the ownership and history of Giant, by the way?
I did a research a while back. For an entrepreneur, there are only two things he can make broadly, products and services. While services is a another thing, new products depend on a major workforce of prototyping industry.
Product Development in short is: Idea --> CAD File -- Prototype
It appears, that most of the prototyping firms, do not pick up from in the middle, i.e, If I had a Idea, no firm was ready to produce a CAD file. Even China based prototyping companies only take CAD files, and do not help you, with the CAD generation.
Meaning, if you don't undergo, a extensive training in software like Solidworks or AutoCAD which is both expensive and time consuming, or not find a engineer already well trained in them, you have no scope of converting your idea into a reality.
That's because there's a step missing in your model, which goes like this:
Idea --> Engineering/Design --> CAD File --> Prototype
And the reason it doesn't get done that well in places like India and China at the moment is that it's not easy or quick to create a sustainable engineering sector that can reliably take ideas to a working prototype stage.
China, and to a lesser extent India, will slowly develop this over the next 10-15 years I think, since Western companies are gifting them a huge amount of engineering knowledge in exchange for cheap engineering, or so-called High Value Engineering (HVE), but there are a few hurdles even so:
1. Education.
2. Cultural issues around problem solving.
India is too large a country with dysfunctional democracy and bureaucracy which is hard if not impossible to fix. Indian states are liguistically, culturally and ethnically separate republics. The true way out for India is to follow an EU style governance formula, where ethnic states become autonomous republics with a common parliament, common currency and common defence mechanism. Indian states once released from the shackles of a centralized bureaucracy can perform much better and develop faster. States like Kerala, Tamilnadu and Gujarat can achieve developed nation status with in few decades at most. Kerala alone can become a $250B economy from the current $65B if only it is allowed to mend its own affairs.
The biggest problem with India is the lack of nationalism. Most Indians are not proud of India. If they were, all it's problems would get fixed for real. India is like 'Europe' - each state is a country of it's own. My solution to the whole problem is to spin off many states into separate countries. The people would be lot happier that way - most don't want to live together anyway. And then have some sort of schengen visa to enable free movement between states. 'State' level nationalism is a lot lot lot more than 'Country' level nationalism.
I'm not Indian, but I truly hope that India rises above it's current economical level, for the good of the entire world. Having whole generations of very hard-working (too hard working!) young people that have grown with an unhealthy tolerance for very bad working conditions, work abuse and for bad living conditions decreases the quality of working conditions worldwide (or in EU and US at least) and enforces a stereotype that will only turn back to hurt the younger generations of Indians.
My advice to qualified hard-working Indians (or any other qualified and educated people emigrating for a poorer country to a richer one):
1. be PROUD of yourself, don't be willing to work for 2x less just because you've just immigrated to an EU country or to the US (or for 10x less if you're working in your home country for an outsourcer)! you don't deserve less!
2. stop selling yourself with the "I can work really hard" label on your head - every employer and manager will respect you less as a human being if you do so, even if they may value you more (as in "business value", not human value!). (let me tell you something: even if business owners and top managers paint themselves as hard working guys, they just do it to project this image to their employees - 50% didn't get there by working hard, but by working smart an by good delegation and externalizing skills; only 10% probably got there by sheer hard work; and the other 40%... let's just say you don't want them as your role models :) )
3. once you get to a certain skill level, grow a bit of smugness, pride and condescendence for God's sake (it's healthy for you, trust me!), and try to wear the "reluctant genius" hat form time to time instead of the "hard working bee" one, even if it's not who you are - it teaches people the value, scarcity and tricky nature of "high quality wetware", it teaches that they have to pay top dollars for brainpower and accept that it will not always work as they want it and they just have to put up with this!
4. don't be afraid to show Uncle Sam the finger if you get caught in an US VISA trap, like being unable to quit your job because you'll loose your H1B VISA or something - this is demeaning and you shouldn't work in a country that puts you in such a situation, even if you'd earn more and learn more than anywhere else! You shouldn't because you don't have to: the "rich" world is bigger than the US: there's Canada, Europe, Australia, rising economies in South American countries etc.
Be angry, but also be proud and don't sell yourself short even if it hurts you in the short run - by asking for more and doing less you're actually making the world a better place for your children, even if it seems against your intuition and values!
For people who qualify for H1B and other immigration visas, the following are true.
1. Vast majority are from really rich families. Like million dollars in family assets. The education is either very expensive or they were top students in their schools, which usually happens because they went to private schools.
2. People working in India never take low pay after 2 years of experience. It's only during the first few years that we trade an opportunity to gain experience with low wages. Theres a very high attrition rate in all it companies in India and salaries are ever increasing.
3. Young Indians have the opposite problem of being hard working. Most spend extended hours in office to socialize than to actually get stuff done.
4. The part about growing smugness is true. Indians traditionally seldom call ourselves "experts" in any thing even if we know stuff.
5. Losing h1b is big deal. You are given notice to leave country with your family in no time. Technically u need to leave the country within a month if you don't want to be barred from reentry. So in that one month, you have to try and sell all your stuff, cars, house, furniture, discontinue schooling for your kids and collect transcripts, medical records,file taxes,payoff debt. Instead most people would jump into any job to hold onto the status.
What you say at (1) is not gonna be true anymore: with all the open courses and other high quality learning resource available online for free, at least in the IT/CS/Math and even physics are, we'll have a huge number of mostly self educated professionals, and in areas like software where a nice portfolio of projects trumps any fancy diploma they will be very valued and employable! And they will also be put in a position of selling themselves short by comparing themselves with western Europe or US schooled people (the guy with a diploma from a fancy US uni will have the guts to ask for far more than someone with a diploma from an Indian uni, even if he is less competent! ...and this is the best case scenario: if, let's say, a Harvard schooled guy is stupid enough to ask for less than he's worth, anyone else will have to make do with even less than he does!) and they will accept worse deals. And that's the danger I'm talking of: this will make all employers expect more for less, from everyone!
About (4), indeed, having a family to take care of greatly restricts your mobility (and I bet this is what the guys doing US immigration policy bet on!) - but you can avoid the issue before it happens: take a better look at other options besides US as most EU countries have more flexible VISAs and such (yeah, having to speak German - Berlin area seems to be shaping up as Europe's SV nowadays - and French and maybe Spanish or something else fluently on top of English is hard, especially for techies with not so good language and social skills, but it opens up a lot of doors and gives you more bargaining power for yourself).
for what it's worth the salary of a mid-level manager in India is half of what an equivalent position will fetch in Korea (this surprised me greatly at first).
with South Korea's GDP per capita being 10x that of India, I would've expected a more than 2x difference. So this would imply a much lower difference between manager and worker incomes in Korea than in India. Basically Korea's better social equality smooths down what should've been a 5x-10x difference to a mere 2x one ...then again, my understanding of East Asian economies is not very good, and they are know to be economically "weird", so I may be quite wrong on this.
The burden of proof is on you; further - I can corroborate everything about manufacturing even after woking in only a medium sized manufacturing firm.
People can't be fired, and as a result few people are technically employees of a firm - they are usually employed with a labor outsourcing firm that moves people out after two years or n-1 years, where n = number of years before automatic entitlement to provident fund/pension plans.
When I last heard it was something like n=3 years.
There is mass absenteeism if there's a festival or someone needs help in the fields, or just if people think that they can't be fired.
Did you know that your cash for payments of salaries of workers has to be within x kilometres of your factory?
It's one of many rules people don't follow, because there is a forest of rules.
Then there's strikes, and corruption.
To provide an idea of what the attitude difference is between people on HN and the people who have so far never really had to think of professional modern commercial systems :
There's a long way to go before the unspoken assumptions on the ground at a labor level closely match anything such as a forum like HN.
A banker went to collect a loan instalment from a farmer. The farmers reaction was "holy hell! Haven't they come up with a debt forgiveness scheme for it already?"
People still think that money can come from thin air, provided you have the connections to protect you or access to votes.
Why work when you can just make sure you won't get fired and are guaranteed an increment because of the union?
And the on the other side you have the firms- hemmed by 100s of laws to,protect labor, they yet find a way to do what they can/want.
The government has created internship program's which can lead to a certification, and I've heard of firms warping the system to convert it into cheap labor.
The article doesn't have numbers because the numbers are a search away and these are a group of known, fundamental facts.
The economist isn't supposed to make every article a phd dissertation or a full fledged wiki on the off chance that someone unfamiliar with the background material is unable to perform a google search themselves.
India is a massive country and all the numbers you look at are huge. The problem with big numbers is they hide many many many little numbers. So what happens in the north east resembles nothing in the south west, what happens in some cities resembles nothing in other cities etc. Yet we have these meaningless pan India number, sort of like measuring the temperature of the universe and getting exited by that number.
The problem with any write up generalizing personal experience up to "India scale" is the same problem we see with "big data". When there is much more information than any single person can actually digest, what ends up happening is people just spot the patterns they are already familiar with...and that is what your post represents.
Well the problem here is that the labor laws strongly favour labor.
This is constant through out the nation due to the current stage of political evolution.
Also my background completely fails at preparing me for my current task set, so I come to this with few a neutral slate. I have no urge to see patterns, if anything I'm pro labor and what I saw left me somewhat disappointed.
Ha! I have seen people getting fired all the time! Did you mean blue-collar workers can't be fired?
> I can corroborate everything ...
With anecdotal evidence?
> automatic entitlement to provident fund/pension plans
We are entitled to that from the very first day of employment, if the company has more than a certain number of employees. When we quit and go to another company, we are given the option of transferring it to the next employer.
> There is mass absenteeism if there's a festival or someone needs help in the fields
Anecdotal. I have not seen this.
> ... off chance that someone unfamiliar with the background material is unable to perform a google search themselves.
I mentioned specific weaknesses. Show me the relevant Google queries that you would use to get the data. It will be a learning experience for one of us.
You are entitled to a PF/pension if you are an employee of,a form. But if you are an employee of a labor firm which then sends you to Mahindra and Mahindra to work - you are not entitled to a pension from Mahindra.
On top of that if you get fired after two years, you haven't worked long enough to be counted as an employee of the labor form or as a de facto employee of Mahindra. Hence no PF for you.
This is the scam people are forced to use as common place because of higher and fire laws heavily favouring labor.
Edit: I must add that firms also,actively try to screw labor over. I used the word forced because I was referring to a firm which did not have malicious intent.
As for searching, try Wikipedia. It will get you to the labor laws in question and from there the laws of the land.
Further the issue with anecdote is when they are extrapolated too far from a single incident.
But I am regurgitating the experience of multiple different individuals who have worked in many different firms.
This is the basis upon which the firms expansion plans are made.
Also, after the murder of the manager at the maruti plant, there's is yet another distinct urge to remove labor from the equation and avoid situations where your managers can be killed.
Heck - Labor management firms exist, and are used in every industry in India. You can see references to them in multiple news articles when the issue of labor is discussed.
The level of disintermediation required that makes outsourcing labor viable as a business model is in itself a red flag.
Further this is what HR managers and consultants take for granted - they are the ones who named firms which use interns as cheap throwaway labor, and a plethora of,other practices that horrified me but were treated as commonplace and business-as-usual.
If you haven't seen as absenteeism for festivals and so on, I must ask where your factories are located.
> As for searching, try Wikipedia. It will get you to the labor laws in question and from there the laws of the land.
All I see is, "Wikipedia/Google. Therefore, I am right."
I know contract workers are not entitled to pensions from client firms. What relation does that have with the article I was commenting on, or my comments?
Look, your anecdotal evidence does not correlate with mine at all. I will add that the labour/owner dynamics vary a lot from state to state. Tamil Nadu, Kerala, UP, Rajasthan are all vastly different from each other. Absenteeism during festivals? I have heard of that in Kerala. Not in Karnataka, not in UP. Managers getting physically attacked? I have seen that in UP, seen threats in Karnataka, Andhra, not seen in Tamil Nadu. This is exactly why sound analysis based on sound data is important.
You are an ignorant fool. Do some Google search and check it out. Just coming here and typing "Ha" is nothing. As an Indian myself, what the article is saying is so obvious that your comments are laughable.
As usual when someone posts an Economist leader article, someone is indignant that it is a little thin. The actual briefing article, at a couple of thousand words longer, is still journalism rather than a scholarly paper, i.e. it doesn't cite every fact, but it does state the numbers behind its assertions.
Well do you have any figures to back your clam that this is an idiotic piece? Comparison of India and China is a common topic on the Economist (and elsewhere). These are countries with comparable population, demographics, history of exploitation by the West, and they are both in Asia. Sure, theere are large difference in the details but I think the question that, given its tremendous presence in the tech field, very much comparable to China, why has India not excelled as much as its neighbor? This article is trying to argue the thesis that the "Chinese economic revolution" was mostly due to them exploiting their manpower to great effect (even when Mao was in power this was their strategy, it was just done in a misguided and primitive way) while India has
been less successful in achieving this.
> Well do you have any figures to back your clam that this is an idiotic piece?
The article was arguing for "How India is throwing away the world’s biggest economic opportunity". I don't need data to show the arguments were weak. I just need to analyse the arguments presented.
> These are countries with comparable population,
agreed
> demographics
huh?
> history of exploitation by the West
I don't see that coming up in the article
> and they are both in Asia.
How is that relevant?
> Comparison of India and China is a common topic on the Economist (and elsewhere).
My problem is not with the comparison of China and India. My problem is with this comparison of China and India.
This is a leader from The Economist . These are often short introduction and position statements on issues that are discussed in more depth elsewhere in the issue. I wonder if this one came from this winter's issue that included a special report on India.
I have never been to India but I live in Thailand. India sounds like a hot steaming mess, but then many of these countries are. Thailand is extremely corrupt and ruled by a few oligarch families; democracy is bought outright.
But what they have done is recognized the opportunity for foreign investment; the laws to start a business in Thailand are basically impossible for a foreigner - except! - they made new laws under a Board of Investment that can get around all that and make it super easy. If you have cash, you can build a factory here under very favorable terms.
Perhaps the difference is that in Thailand the entrenched powers have a vital interest in attracting foreign investment where in India they dont?
Aside from laws the cultural norms may also be a problem. Laws are really not enforced here but the culture is such that hygiene is excellent pretty much everywhere. Not an issue.
Does Thailand even have an official government today? I also respectfully submit that it is very different from India. But I may be wrong on that.
It is fascinating to me how a functional legal system is like 'software' for a good market economy. I hear in the C.I.S. one can show up to one's business and find the locks have been changed and new tough young men are around to explain you no longer own it.
1) Incredibly, shockingly poor hygiene. Dirty black rags being used repeatedly to dry plates at restaurants. Idlys being cooked on plastic sheets inside hot streamers. Infernoes of uncollected trash burning on streets. Rats and cockroaches everywhere including your toothbrush at night.
2) Utterly horrifying road conditions. Potholes large enough to cause motorcycle crashes every 100 feet. A culture of not giving the other motorist more than 6 inches on any side. Driving on the wrong side of the road, including on highways. It's incredibly stressful to think about your odds when you leave the house.
3) A political system that no-one is optimistic about. Stories are rampant of politicians buying votes by giving free household appliances away to the poor, and then doing nothing in office to help them.
4) An education system that isn't remotely good enough. Miserable professors, antiquated curriculums that churn out the IT coolies we're so famous for.
5) Congestion so bad you hardly ever leave a 5-mile radius. People tend to hang out based on which neighborhood they live in, because a trip to a friend's place more than 5 miles away can turn into an hour-long slog on terrifying roads.
6) A culture of being cheap. If you're only willing to tip your waiter 10 rupees, it may help out your savings rate, but it certainly won't help the waiter buy his kid a computer someday. Same goes for our beloved household servants, who get paid $150 per month at best, $40 at worst to clean our floors.
But to voice a conflict that everyone who lives here talks about, I'm not a pessimist about India by any means, because it's amazing how much the people of this country have achieved through individual hard work in the face of so many poor institutions.