Re: India might overtake China
[quote=“nicols_john”]
June 8, 2005
Bangalore: Hot and Hotter (NY Times Editorial)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Bangalore, India
[QUOTE]
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Thomas Friedman’s Imaginary World
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
If it’s Monday, it must be Bangalore. Thomas Friedman’s back in India
and the mysterious subcontinent exercises its usual sorcery on the
wandering pundit, eliciting paragraphs of ecstatic drivel, as it has
from so many Times-men.
My favorite remains a post-Christmas dispatch, published onDecember
27, 2002, by the NYT’s resident correspondent in India at the time,
Keith Bradsher. It was a devotional text about neoliberalism’s apex
poster boy at the time, Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of the state
of Andhra Pradesh, Time’s “South Asian of the year”, hailed by the
Wall Street Journal as “a model for fellow state leaders”.
After composing a worshipful resume of Naidu’s supposed achievements,
Bradsher selected for particular mention a secret weapon that the canny
reporter deemed vital to Naidu’s political grip on Andhra Pradesh.
“Naidu and his allies”, Bradsher disclosed to the NYT’s readers,
“speak Telugu, a language spoken only in this state and by a few
people in two adjacent states.” What Bradsher was saying was that Naidu
spoke the same language as the nearly 80 million other inhabitants of
Andhra Pradesh. It was as though someone ascribed Tony Blair’s
political successes in the United Kingdom to his command of English.
Apart from Naidu’s wondrous fluency in his native tongue, Bradsher
fixed upon other achievements likely to excite an American business
readership: “Mr. Naidu,” he confided, “has succeeded in raising
electricity prices here by 70 per cent” and “has enacted a law
requiring union leaders to be workers from the factory or office they
represent Andhra Pradesh has also relaxed some of the restrictions on
laying off workers”.
A couple of years later, in May 2004, the posterboy pal of Bill Gates,
Bill Clinton and the World Bank’s then chief, John Wolfenson, endured
the verdict at the polling booth of his fellow Telugu speakers. The
verdict was harsh. The very poor, the not-so-poor, farmers, rural
women, inner city-dwellers, all stated conclusively that life had got
worse in Andhra Pradesh, prices were unconscionable and the Naidu was a
fraud. Naidu’s elected coalition plummeted from 202 seats to a quarter
of that number. He and his party were ignominiously tossed from
office.
I remembered Bradsher’s excited commendation of Naidu’s hikes in the
price of electricity and his anti-union rampages when I read the
reports filed by U.S. correspondents and pundits from Paris, after the
French Non! to the EC proposed constitution a couple of weeks ago. It
was striking how many of them, presumably without any direct orders
from the owners of their publications, started lecturing the French in
the tones of nineteenth-century Masters of Capital.
The “Non”, they howled, disclosed the cosseted and selfish laziness of
French workers. On inspection this turned out to mean that French
workers have laws protecting their pensions, health benefits, leisure
time and other outlandish buttresses of a tolerable existence. No one
was more outraged than Friedman, a man who, we can safely surmise,
does have health benefits, enjoys confidence about his retirement
along with a robust six-figure income plus guaranteed vacations plus a
pleasant ambulatory existence living in nice hotels, confabbing with
CEOs, and lecturing gratified businessmen on their visionary nature
and the virtues of selfishness.
From Bangalore Friedman issued a furious rebuke. “French voters are
trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian
engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Next to India, Western
Europe looks like an assisted-living facility with Turkish nurses.” I
guess it does, though “engineers” is rather a dignified label to fix
on the cyber-coolies underpaid clerical workers who toil night and
day in Bangalore’s call centers. But if you want a race to the bottom
of the sort Friedman calls for, you don’t have to travel too far from
Bangalore, maybe though any direction will do north-east into the
former realm of posterboy Naidu to find an Indian reality compared
with which the so-called IT breakthroughs in India are like gnat bites
on the hide of one of those buffaloes you see in photos in articles
headlined “Timeless India Faces Change”.
In the Naidu years at least 5,000 Indian farmers committed suicide.
Across India, they’re still killing themselves. (A Kisan Sabha
farmers’ union survey of just 26 households in Wayanad, in northern
Kerala, that had seen suicides shows a total debt of over Rs. 2
million. Or about Rs. 82,000 per household (which is the equivalent of
just under $2,000. The average size of these farms is less than 1.4
acres. And a good chunk of that debt is owed to private lenders.)
Millions more lives millimeters from ruin and starvation. For hundreds
of millions of poor Indians, Friedman’s brave new world of the 90s
meant globalization of prices, Indianization of incomes. The state
turned its back on the poor. Investment in agriculture collapsed as
rural credit dried up. As employment crashed in the countryside to its
lowest ever, distress migrations from the villages to just about
anywhere increased in tens of millions.
Foodgrain available per Indian fell almost every year in the 90s and
by 2002-03 was less than it had been at the time of the great Bengal
famine of 1942-43. New user fees sent health costs soaring, and such
costs have become a huge component of rural family debt.
Newly commercialized education destroyed the hopes of hundreds of
thousands of women, as families, given the narrowed options, favored
sons over daughters. Farm kids simply dropped out. Even as the world
hailed the Indian Tiger Economy, the country slipped to rank 127 (from
124) in the United Nations Human Development Index of 2003. It is
better to be a poor person in Botswana, or even the occupied
territories of Palestine, than one in India.
Remember, India has a billion people in it. Maybe 2 per cent of them
get to fly in a plane or go online. Around 10 per cent are well off,
another 10 per cent doing okay. On the most optimistic count we’re
left with over half a billion of the poorest people on the planet. You
could build call centers every mile from Mumbai to Bangalore, stuff
teenagers with basic American slang in there working Friedman’s
stipulated 35 hours a day servicing American corporations and you
wouldn’t make a dent in the problem, which is that you can’t dump an
agricultural economy, build a couple of Cyberabads and say with any
claim to realism that a New and Better India has been born. New, yes.
Better, no.
The trouble is, the Indian press, along with the visiting foreigners
forgets about that half billion. A Lakme India Fashion Week gets
450-500 journalists covering it. But with the exception of Sainath, now
at the The Hindu, not a single Indian newspaper has a full time
correspondent on the agrarian crisis beat, or poverty and deprivation
beat.
India has done well in some senses at IT. But this is not a parable of
private enterprise unchained. The topmost – elite of elite Indian
technologists / engineers come from a handful of institutions known as
the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). Most of the Silicon Valley
people are from there.These are entirely state-set up, state funded
institutions. Not a single one of them is private (established or
owned. Now, there are alumni in the US pushing to privatize the very
institutions that gave them everything.
As Sainath remarked to me, "It’s is not as though there’s Indian
genius in software / IT but almost none of this has been directed
towards, has even sought to address basic problems of India. There are
several such areas where Indian expertise (including from that very
state of Andhra) could do wonders for some classes of poorer Indian.
(Eg: traditional fishermen could have their boats fitted very cheaply
with tailor made devicesthat would make a huge and often life-saving
difference. Artisans could bypass middlemen through online exhibitions
and marketing and so on.) To the extent this happens at all, it is
very minimal, extremely tiny. Neither governments nor corporates nor
NRI millionaires have shown much interest in this. On the other hand,
look at the amount of effort that goes into IT trivia.
Most western correspondents only travel south west from Bangalore to
Kerala to deride as “hidebound” a state that elected a Communist
government in 1957, distributed land to the poor, has decent health
stats, near 100 per cent literacy. In recent years the neoliberals have
been running thing there too and in early June this year, in a
by-election, voters gave their opinion on such matters as recent
efforts to privatize education. Normally elections in Kerala are razor
thin affairs. This by-election saw the Congress Party candidate
shattered by a Communist Party (Marxist) in the Left Democratic Front
who won with a margin over the Congress candidate of more than 40,000
votes, a Kerala record. The LDF is reckoned as a cinch to win the
Kerala elections next year.
Take the Kerala result, throw in the rejection of Naidu and the BJP
coalition last year and you get a pretty good picture of what large
numbers of Indians don’t like, namely Friedmanism in any shape or
form, whether they read his columns in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, or
even his crude version of English.
And by the way, Friedman found a grass roots movement, all on his own!
(Of course, it’s not really a grass-roots movement, but hey he tried.)
Barely had Friedman touched down in Bangalore before he discovered
something amazing. People who know that their chances of getting a job
improve if they know English, want to learn English. It beats
starving.
Here’s how Friedman puts it:
Sure, a huge portion of India still lives in wretched slums or
villages, but more and more …
