'India shining'?

India is different. People trying to compare the rise of China and Vietnam now, or Japan and Korea in the past face this difficulty of realising that parameters which led to change (like public health indicators) are not changing in India depicting development.

I watched a video from Hans Rosling which depicted rise of various developing countries into developed world. There the life expectancy and education rose first, then the GDP. Its true about Korea. Its about to become true about China and may be of Vietnam and Bangladesh.

But India is different. It is a democracy. And policies set by government in a democracy tend to become populist. India has universal suffrage since its inception. This impacts the policies which tend to become even more populist. Money is spent on giving free food and free electricity to majority of population. Agriculture is exempt from Income Tax. And obviously, there is no money left for improving health system, education or mass transport infrastructure.

Yet somethings have improved in the past. The roads are better. The airports are better. But this largely serves the population with money to own the car and to fly.

But the problems in India are rarely solved by the government. We need to dig deeper to find green shoots. And that's where we will find private enterprise playing the role which government let go.

Private schools are booming. These schools are run by private individuals 'for profit'. This means they do not have any ulterior motive but to give education and make money in the process. And their clientelle are lower middle class and labour class who sometimes invest 30% of their earnings in educating their child. And best of all this is not limited to urban areas. A recent report states over 25% of enrolment in rural areas is to private schools

The mobile communications has changed the face of India. As an unfortunate side effect, more people have access to mobiles than toilets. But what is not obvious is that SMS and missed calls makes communication smoother and information easier to access. Now farmers have access to market rates and it becomes tougher for touts to clinch a killer deal. Internet and broadband are not yet widespread, but that is only a matter of time.

The rate of growth of population especially in south and west India has slowed down drastically.

Banking is largely computerised. So are many services. People are far less tolerant to power cuts and bad roads than they were in the past. And there have been few cases of activism by educated elite. This is the first time since the 60's that educated elite has involved themselves. But this has been too few and far between.

And thus we come to a interesting cusp. Either things will improve drastically, and if so, this would be upside down development with government trying to catch up. If things go bad, we always have hope that we will have government aided development some time in future.