India has a long way to go before it can be categorised as a regional power, let alone a global power. The reality is that there is an enormous pass between India and the developed world. According to the World Bank, India’s Gross National Income (GNI) in 2009 was $793 billion, compared to the US’s $12.95 trillion. India, with 17 per cent of the world’s population, accounts for less than 1.7 per cent of the world’s income. Thus India’s per capita GNI was $1180, compared to the US’s nearly $47,240. Even South Korea’s per capita GNI was over $19,880. India’s situation is slightly better in terms of ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ (PPP) but even India’s PPP per capita income is ranked 154th in the world [1] . For all the optimistic projections of rapid growth by India and other Asian countries by 2020, the US’s National Intelligence Council admits that “per capita income in most (Asian) countries will not compare to those of Western nations.”
Poverty and Employment
The reality of the situation can best be appreciated in terms of ‘Human Development’. In the UN’s International Human Development Index, this is calculated based on an amalgamation of various factors, such as health, education and income. When compared with the countries graded, India ranks 119th among a total of 177 countries. India’s mortality rate per 1,000 live births is 69, which is to say that one in fourteen children die before the age of five. Its maternal mortality ratio per 100,000 live births is 230 as compared to 38 for China [2] .
Politicians and bureaucrats alike portray India as a rising power and proclaim that poverty in India is declining. However, by reframing the definition of poverty as to whether or not people get their minimum requirements of calories, various government institutions have “proved” that poverty in India is on the decline. The official National Sample Survey of 2005 revealed that 3/4th of India’s rural population and ½ the urban population are under nourished. This is confirmed by other health surveys, which bring out the following:-
Half of India’s women are anaemic.
Half its children can be clinically defined as malnourished
2/5th of the adult population suffer from chronic energy deficiency.
Within India – half of our rural population or over 350 million people are below the average food energy intake of Sub-Saharan Africa countries. [3]
Ironically the National Sample Survey further brought out that employment growth dipped considerably between the last two surveys conducted in 1999-2000 and 2004-05. This is contradictory to stating that poverty has reduced, when unemployment has risen sharply. Despite this, certain fields have taken off which include software services and BPOs (Business Process Outsourcing) services to foreign firms. However, these sectors make up just about 0.23% of the labour force. Nearly half of India’s total working-age population, between 15-59 years of age, is unemployed, most of it not even counted as part of the labour force. While agriculture continues to employ the majority of those considered employed, it accounts for just about a quarter of the national income, and that share continues to shrink [4] .
这种情况的现实，最好是在“人类发展”的条款。在联合国国际人类发展指数，这是基于一个合并的各种因素，如健康，教育和收入。与国家分级相比，印度在177个国家中排名第一百一十九。印度每1000个活产婴儿的死亡率是69，也就是说，有十四个孩子中的一个在五岁之前就死了。它的孕产妇死亡率每100000个活产婴儿为230，比银川地图的2 [ 38 ]。
政治家和官员们都把印度描绘成一个崛起的大国，并宣布印度的贫困人口正在下降。然而，通过重新界定贫困与否的人得到他们的卡路里的最低要求，各政府机构已经“证明”在印度，贫困率在下降。官方的全国抽样调查显示，3的2005 /第四的印度农村人口和城市人口在滋养½。这是通过其他健康调查证实，这带来了以下：—
印度的妇女有一半患有贫血。
有一半的孩子可以被定义为营养不良的临床定义
第五/ 2的成年人口患有慢性能量缺乏。
在印度-我们的一半的农村人口或超过3亿5000万人，低于撒哈拉以南非洲国家的平均食物能量摄入量。[ 3 ]
具有讽刺意味的是，全国抽样调查进一步提出了就业增长大幅下降近两调查在1999-2000和2004-2005之间进行的。这是矛盾的，指出贫困减少了，当失业率急剧上升。尽管如此，某些领域已经采取了包括软件服务与外包（业务流程外包）的外国企业服务。然而，这些行业占劳动力的0.23%左右。印度有近一半的总劳动年龄人口，15-59岁之间，失业，大多数都不能算作劳动力的一部分。农业继续雇佣大多数被认为是就业的人，占国民收入的四分之一左右，而这一比例继续缩小[ 4 ]。
Industrialisation
A nation’s income is primarily sourced from agriculture, industry and services. At some stage, developed countries transitioned from agriculture to industrial economies. Following this transition, these countries could manage to stockpile surplus commodities and these economies could sustain growth in the share of services. Today, industry accounts for the largest share of GDP in the economies of China, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, as much as 56 per cent in the case of China. In India’s case, however, the share of industry is low — just 28.2 per cent in 2009. Industry has never been the dominant sector of the Indian economy. Its share of GDP has not been increasing, but is stagnant or shrinking. And Indian industry’s share of employment is just 17.6 per cent [5] . Indeed, in the two commodity-producing sectors – agriculture and industry – one cannot find any miraculous takeoff in growth during the period of ‘reform’. But one should beware of drawing sweeping conclusions on the basis of two or even three years’ figures. And while the services sector has led growth over the past two decades, so that it now accounts for 54.6 per cent of GDP, much of the services sector (e.g. growth of police and armed forces, the explosion of financial sector and real estate activity) has no tangible benefit for the people at large.
There is no doubt that in the export market, certain Indian companies or MNCs have held their own, in terms of qualitative output. However the success of these limited companies has led to a general misconception that the Indian economy has seen a dramatic transformation without having actually understood the reality that these firms are generally dependent on imported capital goods and are strongly linked to export markets and are restricted in their contribution to the rest of the Indian economy. They remain islands in the large sea of underdeveloped India. What is really required at this stage is an inward looking policy that caters to domestic demand for daily consumables. This would have a effect that is many fold, in that there would be a demand for raw materials and indigenous capital goods, increased employment and a chance for home grown technological to flourish. Anyway, India accounts for less than 1%of world exports with high end technology items comprising just 5% of its exports.
一个国家的收入主要来源于农业、工业和服务业。在某些阶段，发达国家从农业经济向工业经济的转变。在此过渡之后，这些国家可以管理库存过剩的商品，这些经济体可以维持在服务的份额增长。今天，在泰国、韩国、台湾、马来西亚、印度尼西亚和银川地图的经济中，工业占GDP的比重最大，在银川地图的情况下，占了56。然而，在印度的情况下，该行业的份额较低-只有2009，在28.2。工业从来没有成为印度经济的主导部门。它的GDP份额没有增加，但停滞不前或萎缩。印度工业的就业份额仅为17.6 % [ 5 ]。事实上，在这两个商品生产部门-农业和工业-一个找不到任何奇迹般的起飞，在“改革”时期的增长。但是，在两个甚至三年的数字的基础上，人们应该谨慎的得出结论性的结论。在过去的20年里，服务业带动了经济增长，现在占GDP的54.6，大部分的服务业（如警察和武装力量的增长，金融部门和房地产活动的爆炸）对大百姓没有明显的利益。
毫无疑问，在出口市场，一些印度公司或跨国企业自己举行，在定性输出。然而，这些有限公司的成功导致了一个普遍的误解，认为印度经济已经看到了巨大的转变，而实际上，这些公司通常依赖于进口资本商品，并强烈地与出口市场，并限制在他们的贡献，其余的印度经济。他们仍然在欠发达的印度的大海里的岛屿。在这个阶段，真正需要的是一个迎合国内需求的内向型政策。这将有一个影响，是多方面的，在那会有一个原材料和本土资本货物的需求，增加就业和本土技术蓬勃发展的机会。Â无论如何，印度占不到1%的世界出口只有5%出口高端技术项目。
Energy Crisis
Over the last two decades, India’s rate of consumption of oil has increased drastically, which has been construed by many as due to its burgeoning economy. However there are two sides to the coin, in the sense that this increased demand or consumption in oil may be due to a lack of under developed mass transportation infrastructure in the country. This rapid increase in oil consumption has primarily been due to the surge in automobile industry coupled with a lucrative car loan deals and a growing disparity in income within the masses. Although the government has tried to improve the transportation network of the country, for example, the development of the Metro in the major cities etc, it has nevertheless proved inadequate. Better planning would ensure curbing of oil consumption by providing better laid out commercial transportation infrastructure for the common man and goods, promotion of use of eco-friendly measures in transportation like alternate fuels, e-vehicles etc. Furthermore, there is a need to also curb the wasteful utilisation of our oil, gas and coal resources with stricter measures. Alternate sources of power generation such as harnessing wind energy, hydel energy and nuclear energy all contribute only a small percentage of the total power requirement of the country. All these measures would aid in firstly, reducing our colossal oil imports and secondly would reduce our dependence on oil imports to a great extent.
在过去的二十年中，印度的石油消费率急剧上升，这已被许多人解释为由于其蓬勃发展的经济。然而，有两个方面的硬币，在这个意义上说，这种增加的需求或石油消费可能是由于缺乏在该国发达的大众运输基础设施。这种快速增长的石油消费主要是由于汽车行业的激增，加上利润丰厚的汽车贷款交易和不断增长的收入差距在人民群众。虽然政府试图改善该国的交通网络，例如，在主要城市的地铁的发展等，但它已被证明是不够的。更好的规划将确保遏制石油消费提供更好的制定商业交通基础设施为普通人使用的商品，如替代燃料运输的环保措施推广电动汽车等，此外，还需要同时遏制我们的油气和煤炭资源的浪费使用，有严格的措施。如利用风能发电的替代能源，水电能源和核能都只有一小部分国家的总功率要求。所有这些措施将有助于第一，减少我们巨大的石油进口量，其次将减少我们对石油进口的依赖很大程度上。
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In the last few years, large foreign capital inflows and the booming foreign exchange earnings of the IT sector have resulted in the rapid growth of the country’s foreign exchange reserves. As a result, the Government has liberalised foreign investment by Indian firms. Thus a number of Indian firms have been investing abroad, in many cases acquiring foreign firms. This phenomenon has generated considerable excitement in the business press, which point to it as further evidence of India’s new global status: now, they claim, Indian firms too are multinational corporations.
However, much as this may be good business sense for the firms which are making them; but in general they run contrary to the requirements of national economic development. India is not a capital-surplus economy, but an underdeveloped, capital-starved one, with large resources lying idle for lack of investment. It makes no economic sense to export capital from such a country. Indian capitalists may earn financial returns from their investments abroad, but such returns will give paltry stimulus to the Indian economy, whereas investment in manufacturing within the country stimulates demand, productive activity and employment in a number of sectors, with far-reaching benefits for the whole economy.
India- A Knowledge Economy?
In our projection of India as an emerging power, there is a fallacy about the Indian economy that is growing within the population, that India is a ‘knowledge economy’, an ‘information technology (IT) superpower’. The truth is that adult literacy in India is just 53.6 %; on this score, it ranks 146th out of 177 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index (that is, many countries with much lower per capita income had much higher literacy levels than India – for example, much of desperately poor sub-Saharan Africa). In recent years, on the recommendation of the World Bank, the Indian government has focussed its meagre education expenditures increasingly on primary education, largely abandoning secondary and higher education (as if they were a luxury). Yet official data tells us that 42 per cent of children enrolled drop out before completing primary education (I-V). Another 19 per cent, according to official data, drop out before completing upper primary education (VI-VIII). And according to Census data, 43.5 per cent of the children between the ages of five and nine are not in school [6] .
More perturbing is the quality of education that is being imparted in government schools. It is so dismal that half the children in Class IV in government schools in Mumbai cannot do the arithmetic calculations required of a Class I student. When put to the test, 18 per cent of students attending Classes II to V in Andhra Pradesh couldn’t do single-digit additions while only 12 per cent managed single-digit subtractions. Higher education, which the Government has increasingly abandoned to a rapacious private sector, is out of the reach of all but a small section. At any rate, the infrastructure and staff of many of the new private institutions are appalling, and thus the degrees imparted to a large percentage of graduates may not be worth the paper they are printed on.
Research And Development
According to the official publication Research and Development Statistics, India’s expenditure on R & D has been falling as a share of GDP, from 0.87 per cent in 2000 to 0.77 per cent in 2005. 80% of the R & D expenditure was accounted for by the government, largely (65%) for military purposes including India’s space program, atomic energy and the missile program [7] . But what fruits has it borne? The Arihant nuclear-powered submarine has not been armed as yet, and the indigenous Tejas LCA has yet to be operationalised. Our missile program pales in comparison to that of China’s, offering a weak deterrence capability that a Regional Power should possess. The Main Battle Tank, Arjun, has been inducted but has thus far performed below par and is as good as being termed a failure by the operators themselves, the Army. And that after the expenditure of billions of rupees each. As a consequence, the IAF is now in the process of procuring 126 fighter planes from a foreign countries at a cost of over US $6 billion. How then can we call ourselves a Regional Power? In order to progress towards indigenisation, we need to ensure that expenditure on R & D should be many times the amount we invest in the transfer of technology from other nations, so as to be able to fully exploit the situation and further develop our own technologies.
By conventional measures of scientific output, India’s performance is dismal. The standard database in this regard is the US-based Science Citation Index (SCI). In 1980, around 40 Indian journals were indexed in the SCI; this figure has fallen to 10, or just 0.3 per cent of all SCI-indexed journals. In 1980, nearly 15,000 scientific papers from India were indexed in the SCI; this figure fell over the next two decades to just over 12,000 (China’s figure grew from under 1,000 to over 22,000 during the same period). India’s share of the world’s total research papers published in SCI-indexed journals was just 1.79 per cent in 2002. Finally, India’s world ranking in the SCI’s citation impact (the number of times a paper is cited by others) has fallen to an abysmal 119 out of 149 countries listed [8] .
The IT sector
India has earned a reputation as a fore runner in the IT sector comprising the software development sector and the ITES (IT-enabled sector). However, the truth of the matter is that we have been in the fore front for developing software already done so in the western world which in fact has been outsourced by these nations to India only as means of cutting costs in their own countries.
As regard the Information Technology Enabled Services, which include BPOs, mass data entry, ticketing, credit card administration etc require just the ability to converse in English, does not require any special skills or higher educational qualifications. Rapid advances in the fields of Optical-character-recognition software, natural-language speech recognition, E-ticketing etc have ensured that even these miniscule sources of employment will soon be all but eliminated. The primary reasons that these countries decided on outsourcing such work was that the cost of labour was far lesser by having it outsourced to India, in the bargain resulting in tremendous savings and thus these firms are able to drive their costs even lower.
Despite the fact that India churns out far more IT engineers than US, these engineers are utilised mainly in low yield software development. In the hierarchical order of the ‘software pyramid’ on top come the ‘architects’, followed by researchers, consultants, project managers, business analysts, and finally basic programmers, all in descending order of skill and pay. The last categories are the foot soldiers in the information economy, who are involved in bug-fixing, updating and testing codes, and routine programming tasks which is what has been ‘off shored’, much of it to India.
Indian software firms develop virtually no patented software programmes which are a source of revenue; instead, both the hardware and the software they use are imported. India is thus not a ‘knowledge economy’ but a low-wage economy. It does not command increased international status by virtue of its economic strength; rather, the publicity about its ’emergence’ as a ‘power’ is an outcome of conscious US policy.
Naxalism
In Oct 2007, PM Mr Manmohan Singh had described Naxalism as the ‘single biggest internal security threat’. First making its appearance in 1967 in the Naxalbari village in West Bengal with a peasant uprising, the Naxals are now active in 20 of India’s 28 states. More than 10,000 people have been killed in past five years in naxal attacks [9] . Naxalism has cropped up primarily in the under-developed regions of the various states due to widespread poverty, unemployment and poor governance. The Government of India’s basic approach has been military-oriented, with a poor socio-economic outlook, while the problem requires to be dealt with a multi-pronged approach as it is more a multi-dimensional social and political problem than a law and order problem.
Terrorism
Terrorism and insurgency have plagued our nation right from the time of our independence. The difference between the two is that insurgency is understood as an armed uprising against the country’s security forces and other government agencies with the aim of achieving territorial gains, while terrorism, also an armed uprising against not just the government but non-government agencies as well, is however, not with the aim of acquiring territorial gains.
India has been plagued by terrorism and insurgency in Punjab and J & K, along the border with Pakistan, in the northeast, along the Myanmar and Bangladesh borders; in Bihar, along the Indo-Nepal border and also in the hinterland in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya and Orissa, states that do not share an international border. Tamil Nadu too, has had to deal with terrorism with the LTTE targeting the government as well as the opposing political elements residing in the state.
Factors that have given rise to insurgent/terrorist movements in India are varied for the different regions of the country and include political, economic, ethnic and religious reasons. Failure of the government to control large-scale illegal immigration of Muslims from Bangladesh in WB and Assam, absence of land reforms, rural unemployment in the central states of MP, AP, Orissa and Bihar, feeling of ethnic isolation and deprivation in the North East, feelings of anger amongst sections of the Muslim youth over the government’s perceived failure to safeguard interests in J & K, demands for cessation from the state in Punjab etc have been the root causes for violent uprisings leading to acts of terrorism and insurgency in the country. These are internal issues and the role of external agencies in promoting and propagating these acts, especially Pakistan and other Islamic states, is a separate topic itself.
A majority of the acts of terrorism have been due to religious fundamentalism. It has involved the indiscriminate use of IEDs, suicide bombers, targeting of communities and resorting to methods such as hijacking/blowing up of airliners, hostage situations etc. The main sources of funding for terrorist and insurgent groups have been primarily by contributions from Pakistan’s ISI, religious, fundamentalist and Pan-Islamic Jihadi organisations in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, from trans-national mafia group led by Dawood Ibrahim operating from Pakistan, extortion of local populi, drug trafficking etc. Religious terrorist organisations have their main external sanctuaries in Pakistan and Bangladesh, while non-religious terrorist organisations look to Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. Some northeast non-religious terrorist groups also operate from Bangladesh, while certain religious groups get sanctuary in Nepal [10] .
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