(Having lived in India for 13 years, I have seen India "progress" through the years, and visiting India last December after a mere span of three and a half years, it definitely shocked these pair of eyes)
I was reading Atanu Dey's blog on India's Development, and this one particular post about Employment vs. Production got me thinking- so what is India essentially doing wrong? We've been hearing that the country is a developing country, but for how long? I know this is not an easy task with a population of 1.04 billion and still counting, but we should be doing something right to show hope to these people, or is it too much to ask(and here's where my free traders hate me, since I am trying to be fair)? To sum up what Dey was saying (and I could have misconstrued it) was that India needs to start focusing more on production rather than employing people for a while since only with increased production will we have increased output to distribute to the people to help the country in general develop more. Agreed! Sounds like a good plan (and no sarcasm intended whatsoever), but in a country with such a huge population with an ever increasing work force, how do we solve the problem of employment? We talk about enhancing the IT sector to push the economy towards being more organized, but then what are we going to do with the unemployed? (I know this is a circular problem where a clear cut solution is not possible, lets consider for a while that we are all in a Devil's Advocate situation, or atleast I am).
As banal as this might sound, why is creation of jobs a forgotten concept? Didn't FDR do it when the US was spiraling downwards during the Great Depression? FDR's motto- "Find some job". If not the sole reason, it did help bring the nation back on track. And how much of this employment drain is due to outsourcing of jobs into India? Is specialization just another trait that needs to be forgotten, or is it needed even more so that we can screen the all rounders and make monotonic workers? Is finding something to do and getting paid minimum wage that hard to do in such a big country? Like I said, I am all for advancing tech and R&D, but what about those people who get replaced by hi-fi computers, by machines that INCREASE production in a matter of minutes? We definitely have to find them some decent replacement, or maybe we could start giving them unemployment insurance? Well then again, we are going to have some serious drain on the funds, because a work force this large, with so many unemployed is going to chew away those funds in no time!
So yes, what is India doing wrong? India Shining went down the hills like a setting sun, never to shine again! It doesn't seem like we have an economic policy that is going to help the poor rise from the ashes! We talk about Africa being under a poverty trap, I think we need to look in our own yard first. We have a huge population that is living under the poverty trap. But no matter what we do, the middle class has been and will be paying the price for a while. Every bit of their hardwork, either goes to helping the downtrodden or surviving themselves or making up for the mistakes that the rich have committed? Do we stop insourcing or augment it? Multinationals have been gaining increased access into the country, but other than increasing consumerism, aka, materialism, I don't see any util of their investment. (Again, please correct me if I am wrong in this analysis!) We are all about the cliche ideas, but implementing them is way out of the league. We are always competing but never stepping back and looking back if any of our policies are working or not. A couple of people the other day were mentioning how India had grown 9% in GDP, but completely forgot to mention the 5.6% inflation that India faced in the last quarter! An alarming fact but completely forgotten, since we are trying to mask the flaws~ the number of chain mails I receive saying India is going to be a super power by 2015 or something (the year keeps changing everyday), it drives me nuts. Poverty is not going to run away in the next 8 years, its a near impossible task~ be it allowing the markets to work on their own or have government intervention. You cannot be a super power if over 30% of your population is under shackles. You need to bring the people be at a comparable range of standard of living. 2015 or 202o is nuts for that matter. Its like the Millennium Development Goals wishing that by 2015 all of the poverty is going to be washed away like it were some dirt that was stubborn and thats it. No! Thats not how it works! But that is a different story all together!
I am actually running out of things to say, and am sorry if this all seems incoherent, but like I mentioned before these are ramblings but with due thought in them. So bear with it please.
Later
Shreya
I was reading Atanu Dey's blog on India's Development, and this one particular post about Employment vs. Production got me thinking- so what is India essentially doing wrong? We've been hearing that the country is a developing country, but for how long? I know this is not an easy task with a population of 1.04 billion and still counting, but we should be doing something right to show hope to these people, or is it too much to ask(and here's where my free traders hate me, since I am trying to be fair)? To sum up what Dey was saying (and I could have misconstrued it) was that India needs to start focusing more on production rather than employing people for a while since only with increased production will we have increased output to distribute to the people to help the country in general develop more. Agreed! Sounds like a good plan (and no sarcasm intended whatsoever), but in a country with such a huge population with an ever increasing work force, how do we solve the problem of employment? We talk about enhancing the IT sector to push the economy towards being more organized, but then what are we going to do with the unemployed? (I know this is a circular problem where a clear cut solution is not possible, lets consider for a while that we are all in a Devil's Advocate situation, or atleast I am).
As banal as this might sound, why is creation of jobs a forgotten concept? Didn't FDR do it when the US was spiraling downwards during the Great Depression? FDR's motto- "Find some job". If not the sole reason, it did help bring the nation back on track. And how much of this employment drain is due to outsourcing of jobs into India? Is specialization just another trait that needs to be forgotten, or is it needed even more so that we can screen the all rounders and make monotonic workers? Is finding something to do and getting paid minimum wage that hard to do in such a big country? Like I said, I am all for advancing tech and R&D, but what about those people who get replaced by hi-fi computers, by machines that INCREASE production in a matter of minutes? We definitely have to find them some decent replacement, or maybe we could start giving them unemployment insurance? Well then again, we are going to have some serious drain on the funds, because a work force this large, with so many unemployed is going to chew away those funds in no time!
So yes, what is India doing wrong? India Shining went down the hills like a setting sun, never to shine again! It doesn't seem like we have an economic policy that is going to help the poor rise from the ashes! We talk about Africa being under a poverty trap, I think we need to look in our own yard first. We have a huge population that is living under the poverty trap. But no matter what we do, the middle class has been and will be paying the price for a while. Every bit of their hardwork, either goes to helping the downtrodden or surviving themselves or making up for the mistakes that the rich have committed? Do we stop insourcing or augment it? Multinationals have been gaining increased access into the country, but other than increasing consumerism, aka, materialism, I don't see any util of their investment. (Again, please correct me if I am wrong in this analysis!) We are all about the cliche ideas, but implementing them is way out of the league. We are always competing but never stepping back and looking back if any of our policies are working or not. A couple of people the other day were mentioning how India had grown 9% in GDP, but completely forgot to mention the 5.6% inflation that India faced in the last quarter! An alarming fact but completely forgotten, since we are trying to mask the flaws~ the number of chain mails I receive saying India is going to be a super power by 2015 or something (the year keeps changing everyday), it drives me nuts. Poverty is not going to run away in the next 8 years, its a near impossible task~ be it allowing the markets to work on their own or have government intervention. You cannot be a super power if over 30% of your population is under shackles. You need to bring the people be at a comparable range of standard of living. 2015 or 202o is nuts for that matter. Its like the Millennium Development Goals wishing that by 2015 all of the poverty is going to be washed away like it were some dirt that was stubborn and thats it. No! Thats not how it works! But that is a different story all together!
I am actually running out of things to say, and am sorry if this all seems incoherent, but like I mentioned before these are ramblings but with due thought in them. So bear with it please.
Later
Shreya
1 comment:
Perhaps you are just confused. Try educating yourself.
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