the real Q is, why does abdali have such an inferiority complex?
coming from a country that has significantly lower socio-economic indices than india, how is this jealousy helping feed his poor starving illiterate countrymen?
here's some food for thought - pak has 15% more of its population below the poverty line in comparison with poor starving india.
not to forget, pakistanis who need cheap but complicated medicare often end up coming to - u guessed it - poor starving india.
Wow!! Indian absession with bad Pakis is astronomical
cannot help drag bad Pak in every thing..
Hey queer do you know how your country men reduce poverty? yes they reduce poverty indian style! here is how they do it.
How Indians reduce poverty.
Globalist Interview > Global Economy
Poverty — By the Numbers?
By Angus Deaton
Global economic policymakers like to give grandiose speeches about
helping "the poor." But how many people are really "poor"? Like all
attempts at economic measurement, that question is difficult to
answer. In a conversation with Prakash Loungani, Angus Deaton — a
Princeton University professor who has studied Indian poverty
statistics intensively — explores the difficulties.
India has long used a 30-day recall period. In recent years, the
statistical authorities in India experimented to see what difference
the recall period makes to the estimate of the number of poor.
They found that shifting to a one week recall period would essentially
halve the number of poor in India. That must be the most successful
poverty-reduction program in the world!
Shifting to a briefer survey period would essentially halve the number
of poor in India. That must be the most successful poverty-reduction
program in the world!
Now here is another one for you.
For 1100 million give us a breakdown of:-
Rich
middle class
poor
lets see. :)
If you want to know how many farmers starved to death and how many committed suicide last year in the indian paradise just ask.
These are clear signs of a potential superpower.
abdali, in the end of it all, you are just a pakistani - from a country whose poverty levels make india look good.
Queer you cannot help draging Pak in every thing.. That obsesssion has no equal. Now lets get back to the gist of this thread, to make life easy for you lets say Pak is right at the bootom of the list not that it matters since this is about India a "super power" on its way.
So so so so so 2002/2003 GDP growth was 4 percent... When mother nature is harsh you don't have contingency plans.. That is just one more attribute out of zillion.
if you think 4.3% GDP rise after droughts is bad, think of what 3% is. thats what our glorious neighbour without any issues from mama nature scores. given this trend, wouldnt be too tough seeing india as a superpower in comparison with its starving neighbour.
I pray that my neighbors have more than me to eat - at least they won't come across the border then. In fact I pray that my neighbor gets so prosperous that all our bhookas go across to get fed by Abdali.:)
Ah yes cannot survive without draging bad Pak in every thing..!!!
Oh well if agri based economy can day dream of becoming a super power why not every Tom Dick and Harry. A partial drought and 4 percent growth what is the impact of full scale drought? -4 percent..... LOL...... What does 10 percent makes you... God !!! Perhaps you MUST check bad Paki growth rate for the same period.. BUT BUT on second thought keep bad Pakis out and concentrate on the attributes of a wannabe superpower.
Here is a simple question for you AGAIN... (repeat)
Give us a break down of 1100 million
Rich
Middle Class
Bhookas
Keep Professor Angus Deaton in mind. :)
Ahan 
will u mind to clear ur fair&balance point of view more clear?
Did you’ll check the article on INDIA in Wall Street Journal (Thursday 2/5/2004). It says India is now exporting TATA INDICA cars. India is not just concentrating in software development and maintainence or call centres and BPO (Business process outsourcing) but also in pharmacaticals, manufacturing, GIS etc.
Also check this article from Australian newspaper.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,8673526%255E25377,00.html
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/business/7890440.htm
India’s Tata group takes big step onto global stage
By Joanna Slater and Jay Solomon
WALL STREET JOURNAL
BOMBAY - A row of shiny compact cars in cherry red and pale gray recently rolled off an assembly line near Bombay. Made from scratch in India, the cars were bound for Britain, where they would be sold under the Rover brand name.
Ten years ago, nobody would have believed this was possible. Indian cars, like many other Indian manufactured products, were so low quality that they could barely satisfy local consumers, let alone buyers abroad.
Now, MG Rover Group Ltd. is aiming to import 20,000 cars a year from India’s Tata conglomerate, a century-old industrial empire. The deal illuminates an arresting change in the world’s second-most-populous country. Its vast manufacturing sector, long sluggish and inefficient, is becoming a new global force. By seizing upon economic reforms and tapping the country’s cheap labor and engineering talent, top manufacturers are taking the nation’s economy beyond its well-known strengths in technology and back-office outsourcing.
India’s Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. is becoming one of the generic-drug industry’s fastest-growing players. An Indian auto-parts company, Bharat Forge Ltd., gobbled up a German firm to become the world’s second-largest forging concern. The Tata group’s own Tata Iron & Steel Co. has become one of the world’s lowest-cost producers, selling specialty steel to Toyota Motor Corp., Hyundai Motor Co. and other multinationals.
Before India’s dramatic economic opening began, local companies needed government approval to engage in virtually any element of business in what was known as the “License Raj.” High tariffs kept out foreign goods. In steel, for example, import duties were as high as 80 percent. Large areas of the economy, from insurance to telecommunications, were the sole preserve of government-run monopolies.
It took a financial crisis in 1991, when India’s foreign-exchange reserves dipped to a dangerously low level, for the government to admit the system was literally bankrupt. Since then, the government has slashed tariffs and removed restrictions on many imports. It has stopped requiring companies to seek approval to enter a new business, expand or engage in foreign-exchange transactions.
The changes brought a flood of local and international competition. That was a big challenge for Tata Sons Ltd., the parent company of a conglomerate founded in 1868 by traders originally from Persia. The group spread its reach over the next century and a half into every corner of the Indian economy, from tea to tourism, steel to software. The Tata group founded the country’s first steel and airline companies, funded its premier institute for science and even supported the struggle for independence from Britain.
When Ratan Tata, now 66, became chairman of the parent company in 1991, he took over an unwieldy group of more than 80 companies that lacked even a common logo to tie them together. Trained as an architect at Cornell University, Tata says he knew he had to radically restructure – or flounder in the ensuing competition.
“We needed to shed the flab of protection,” says Tata, from the group’s Bombay headquarters where portraits of his forebears line the boardroom walls.
Tata eliminated tens of thousands of jobs and rolled back benefits at one of his companies where children of longtime employees were virtually guaranteed work. To encourage innovation, he departed from his firm’s rigid hierarchy to pose cost-cutting and design challenges to a reservoir of talented young engineers.
It paid off. Last year, the stock prices of two major companies in the conglomerate – Tata Motors Ltd. and Tata Iron & Steel Co. – both tripled in value.
Many Indian groups failed to make the transformation, and Tata, along with most other Indian manufacturers, still face obstacles to compete in the top tier globally. They’re pushing the government to improve India’s old power and transportation infrastructure. They’re lobbying for policy changes to reduce red tape, cut taxes and relax labor laws. Tata executives acknowledge their group needs to become more aggressive in recruiting talent and developing new ventures.
Before India’s economic reforms, cost-cutting was barely on the radar screen at the Tata group’s truck-making arm, now called Tata Motors. Demand for the vehicles surpassed supply, so the company took for granted that almost everything that came off the production lines would be bought. There was little thought of increasing capacity because the government set a ceiling on the number of vehicles the company could manufacture. Salaries weren’t tied to performance, company officials say. Any change came from the top down.
When economic liberalization arrived, Tata saw a chance to expand into automobiles. But friends warned he would be in over his head if he decided to build his own car just as international auto giants such as Ford Motor Co. and Hyundai Motor Co. were entering the market, he says. These companies had deeper pockets and greater experience in cars and competitive environments.
Instead of backing off, Tata devised an ambitious expansion plan, drawing on the breadth of engineering talent at Tata Motors to leap into the car business. The company’s technical prowess reflects an important advantage for India: a deep reservoir of home-grown engineering muscle that goes well beyond software. In the 1950s, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, made technical education a priority, starting an elite cadre of universities that together form the Indian Institute of Technology. Hundreds of lesser-known engineering schools also serve as magnets for young people in a culture that views mathematical and scientific expertise as a prerequisite for economic advancement.
Tata and his team put engineers at all levels to work on designing the small passenger car that would become the Indica. (The name combines “India” and “Car.”) One team designed the Indica’s parts. Another division developed the conveyors for the assembly line. Yet another group built the machines to stamp the parts, and another churned out the software.
Tata Motors developed the Indica for $350 million. An equivalent project in the United States or Europe would have cost at least three times as much, says V. Sumantran, a 16-year veteran of General Motors Corp., who now heads Tata Motors’ car business. A good part of the savings are in salaries. Indian engineers typically earn a small fraction of the pay that their counterparts in the United States do.
In 1998, after about three years in development, the Indica hit the market. Customers complained about poor suspension, air-conditioning and, above all, after-sales service, company officials say. His employees’ initial response, Tata recalls, was: “‘We haven’t done anything wrong.’”
But the company’s management took the problems seriously. It invited customers into the factory to talk about their experiences and deployed 500 engineers to talk to buyers.
In 2001, three years after the first Indica rolled off the assembly lines, Tata Motors launched the next-generation car. The new version quickly became one of the biggest sellers in the small-car segment in India. In the year ending in March 2002, Tata Motors sold 64,000 Indicas, an increase of 46 percent from the same period a year earlier. More recently, Tata Motors recorded sales of $1.9 billion from April to December 2003, an increase of 49 percent over the same period a year earlier, according to its latest quarterly results.
Getting the Indica on track was only half of the battle. When the company launched the car, an industrial slump in India hit demand for trucks. Tata Motors began posting huge losses, prompting Tata to turn his attention to cost-cutting.
Tata bypassed senior managers and backed an effort to ask young engineers how they’d cut costs. One Tata Motors engineer remembers the company’s executive director summoning him and a group of colleagues to breakfast and presenting a challenge: Within the next 72 hours, find ways to save 20 percent on costs. “We were incredulous,” says engineer Atul Renavikar.
They returned with proposals to cut costs in every part of the business, says Ravi Kant, executive director of Tata Motors. In the ensuing months, they found savings in the cost of personnel, finance, inventory and materials that would reduce costs by more than $200 million over a three-year period.
As he was reshaping Tata Motors, Tata was also recasting Tata Iron & Steel Co. The 97-year-old company, a major force in the industrialization of India, used to make steel at a price and volume set by the government. The company had evolved over the century into a social service agency of sorts. It provided the 700,000 inhabitants of Jamshedpur – its corporate headquarters in eastern India – with heavily subsidized hospitals, schools and utilities.
By 1992, consultants were telling Tata Steel executives that the company was “essentially dead in the water,” says its current managing director, B. Muthuraman.
But Tata and senior managers say they knew they had an unusual resource at their disposal: Jamshedpur’s vast reserves of high-grade iron ore. So they concluded they could compete if they scaled up, modernized and diversified. Drawing, as Tata Motors did, on the depth of its engineering talent, Tata Steel rapidly refurbished old mills and designed and built a new one. It got the new mill on line in just 26 months, a half-year quicker than its Japanese advisers believed possible.
Tata Steel is now one of the five lowest-cost producers of steel in the world, according to World Steel Dynamics, an industry publication in New Jersey.
Morgan Stanley Publication Date: April 2, 2004
India's Awakening by Stephen Roach
New York
First impressions are superficial almost by definition. But more often than not, they end up pointing you in the right direction. Quite simply, I was blown away by what I saw on my first trip to India. It's a land of great contrasts, to be sure strength in human capital and technology coexisting with backward infrastructure and heart-wrenching poverty. But there is no doubt in my mind that the balance has shifted. After decades of stop and go, the critical mass of a new approach to Indian economic development now appears to have been attained. If I'm right, not only would that have enormous implications for the world's second most populous nation, but it could have profound implications for the Asian and broader global economy.
I just spent four days in India at the end of a two-week tour in Asia that also included China, Korea, and Japan. I visited with government officials in New Delhi, software companies in Bangalore, and investors, as well as technology, pharmaceutical, and industrial companies in Mumbai. I also met with several rapidly growing Indian subsidiaries of US multinationals. In addition, I took a long and arduous side-trip to Agra, where I was stunned by the sheer majesty of the Taj Mahal. I asked many questions, gave a few speeches, took copious notes, and recorded hundreds of digitized snapshots that have quickly become boring to my family and friends. There's a fair amount of sensory overload in trying to sort through all the images, conversations, and insights that get filed away in a trip like this. But this visit to India was the missing piece in my Asian education. Up until now, it's been a China-centric journey some 25 trips since 1997. But I have long suspected that there's far more to Asia's remarkable story. India convinced me that my instincts were right.
It's tempting to make the China-India comparison trying to figure out which of these two Asian giants has the better approach to economic development. I see no reason to frame this in such black and white terms. In fact, I am inclined to argue that it's not China or India but, in fact, China and India. Each of these two nations has a distinctly different recipe for economic development � recipes that are complements rather than substitutes as they fit into the broad mosaic of globalization. To be sure, China has come first in the sequencing, but this breakthrough has served India well. As the rest of the world has finally come to accept the China miracle, that realization has opened the door for acceptance of the India miracle. As one Indian leader put it to me, It's the flying-geese pattern of Asian development.
As China is to manufacturing, India is to services. That's an over-simplification but it is the key conclusion that I take away from this journey. Manufacturing prowess is typically the yardstick that is used to measure the prosperity of emerging nations. As seen from that standpoint, there's no comparison. China has plowed its huge reservoir of domestic saving about 40% of GDP into some of the best infrastructure you will see anywhere in the world. And it has been brilliant in attracting massive inflows of foreign direct investment as the means to acquire technology, managerial expertise, and factories on a scale and with scope that is hard to believe. China has, in fact, leapt to the fore as the largest recipient of FDI in the world some US$53 billion per year in 2002-03.
India suffers in comparison basically from having none of the above. That's an exaggeration but not all that wide of the mark. India has a 24% national saving rate, only a little more than half that of China. As a result, it has far less in the way of internally-generated funds available to plow back into infrastructure. And it doesn't take much traveling around in India to experience first-hand the seriousness of its infrastructure constraint. The India Infrastructure Report 2004, put out by the 3iNetwork of India's best and brightest engaged in this field, says it all, even relative to our income, our failure in water, roads, sanitation, schooling, and electricity is woeful. Nor can India hold a candle to China on FDI. China�s inflows in 2003 were more than ten times the US$4 billion that went into India.
But that's not the lens through which India should be viewed, in my opinion. Indias strength is elsewhere namely, in an extraordinary stock of human capital. And it has deployed that strength into the creation of world class IT-enabled service companies such as Infosys and Wipro and the service subsidiaries of large conglomerates such as Reliance and Tata. I spent time with each of these companies and was staggered by what they had accomplished in the relatively short time span of the past 10-20 years. The push into IT-enabled services sidesteps what I believe are India's greatest impediments on the road to development its infrastructure and FDI deficiencies. Self-sufficient in electrical power all big companies have back-up generating capacity the only infrastructure requirement in services is telecom. And, here, the Indian government has gotten out the way focusing on telecom deregulation and facilitating connectivity both in domestic markets and to overseas destinations.
The results speak for themselves: By year-end 2003, growth in Indian services was nearing a 10% annual rate, well in excess of the 6% growth in industrial production. For the first time ever, services exceeded 50% of Indian GDP in FY03 at 50.5% this portion is up about ten percentage points from the share in 1991 but still well below the 65% average shares in more developed economies. While the combined sum of IT services and IT-enabled services (ITES) is growing very rapidly, it currently accounts for only 2.0% of Indian GDP as of March 2004; the export portion of ITES is estimated at US$3.6 billion in 2003-04 more than double the level of 2001-02, according to NASSCOM, India's IT trade association. The US is a destination for about two-thirds of such exports. One of India's leading IT companies has a row of flagpoles lining the entrance to its state-of-the art headquarters complex. Each day, national flags are raised for foreign visitors. They tell me the American flag is flying nearly every day.
India's software and IT-enabled services industry currently employs about 785,000 workers � this is up by nearly 60% from the headcount of 500,000 two years ago and projected to increase by around another 50% by year-end 2005. Nor are there any serious worries about hiring constraints. Nearly 290,000 engineers alone graduated from India's high-quality universities in 2002. As one IT executive put it to me, Hiring from campus is a cinch. For new grads, our industry is a godsend. Despite this rapid growth, the level of activity in this dynamic new industry is still low and hardly justifies the outcries of America's anti-offshoring fanatics. But as I argued recently, the trend is emblematic of powerful change at the margin suggestive of new and lasting competitive pressures that are likely to bear down on America's legions of long-sheltered knowledge workers for the foreseeable future (see my March 30 dispatch, Offshoring Myth and Reality). It's called globalization, and that's exactly the way it's supposed to work.
It is important to stress that contrary to widespread impressions there is far more to India�s success in services than an attractive cost arbitrage in low-valued processing tasks. Yes, the cost saving is enormous like-quality Indian talent goes for about 15% to 20% of the Western norm. But the strength of India's IT-enabled services model is not about the inroads it has made in attracting easily commoditized data processing and call-center operations. The successful IT-enabled service companies have been quick to move up the value chain into a wide range of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) activities including purchasing and order functionality, procurement, accounting, insurance management, e-based corporate learning management, human resource and benefits management, and a vast array of internal corporate control functions. More recently, India's BPO efforts have moved into medical, actuarial and legal functions. And then there's India's natural strength in a broad array of IT applications from software programming and multi-media platforms to systems support and network management.
The list goes on and on. But for Indian IT companies, the real breakthroughs come from the development of customized integrated systems solutions. The BPO business is basically the Trojan Horse driven initially by the cost arbitrage that makes outsourcing extremely attractive as a means to enhance corporate efficiency in high-cost countries. But India’s IT-enabled service companies have been quick to take this opportunity to the next level going beyond the functional silo approach that has long plagued corporate structures and exploiting the synergies that can be realized through collaborative solutions that span previously segmented functions. And they attack these integrated systems problems with seamless global networks that pass the management and control functions around the world every 24 hours. This revolutionizes the high-cost cluster model of the global services company made famous by Harvard’s Michael Porter (see The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Free Press, 1998). Porter argued that since services had to be delivered on site, in person, well-supported subsidiaries of global service firms had to be located in close proximity to major customer bases. India’s IT-enabled services model turns this concept inside out. These are real companies, with powerful new strategies and execution models that go well beyond the arbitrage play.
As logical as India’s service-based development model seems to me, I was surprised to find some pushback from the Indian leadership. The country is enormously proud of its accomplishments over the past 12 years in IT-enabled services and justifiably so. But it still believes that manufacturing ultimately holds the key to prosperity. Repeatedly, I heard the argument that manufacturing is critical to resolving India’s long-term unemployment problems. I find this response puzzling. Over the past 50 years, technological change has spurred capital-labor substitution and turned manufacturing into an increasingly labor-saving activity. Services, by contrast, are far more labor intensive, especially in the knowledge-based production activities of the Information Age. For a huge country like India, a services-driven development model seems tailor made both to its greatest strengths (human capital) and its greatest needs (employment and coping with poverty). And the new IT-enabled tradability of services is the icing on the cake. Many moons ago in grad school, I was very impressed by the elegance of India’s manufacturing-based development models. For lots of reasons they never really delivered. India’s new services-based approach is an exciting alternative, but it runs very much against the grain of these powerful legacy effects. Sometimes, old dreams just don’t fade.
What impressed me the most about India is a new sense of focus and determination. Plagued by decades of false starts and government missteps, this Asian giant has now, in the words of one of India’s leading corporate executives, finally absorbed the fixed costs of democracy. Reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s and momentum has built steadily in the years since. India still suffers by comparison with China. But unlike China, India has a well developed banking system, vibrant capital markets, and a new generation of indigenous world-class companies. China has an outward-looking development model with the hope that the benefits will spread inward into home markets. India has much more of a home-grown development model that is now gaining global reach. Both approaches have their virtues and shortcomings. And yet one of the most fascinating things of all is that they both may work. I have long been a big fan of China’s remarkable accomplishments. India’s awakening is equally impressive.
Stephen Roach (New York)
Morgan Stanley
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/8359625.htm
2003
20,000 Farm Suicides
20,000 Starvation Deaths
Yep this is is just one attribute of "the superpower", wait until you hear about "water" the most basic necessity of life! straight from UN.....
I think we should be more concerned about where we would be rather than laughing at India. India is making great progress and it is obvious. Closing eyes from reality will only lead us into believing something that is not true.
What are we doing to compete? Except doing everything America wants from us to do 