how is India, equally populated country to China, is nowhere near the economy level China (EVERYTHING is made in here) has achieved with its manpower.
In: Economics
The british came and destroyed india… its gonna take more then a generation to get back to where it used to be…
From wiki:
“India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule,[10] which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India’s share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950,[11] and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900.”
Two major reasons:
– British had colonised India and ran them dry for centuries
– India is a free democracy. China is a dictatorship.
India and china both have many languages and dialects, if you go to another province, you won’t understand them. China made schools only teach in mandarin and simplified the Chinese writing and the literacy rate are now 99%.
Nobody is mentioning corruption and crony capitalism in India. It’s become worse no matter the ruling government or their ideology.
India is moving towards an oligarchy, with a handful of big businesses controlling all vertical and horizontal levels of production. (Can check examples of telecom industry in India, and the farmer’s protest for some context.)
And despite the government giving a freehand to a lot of corporates (wrt labour laws), India is not a business friendly economy. The profitability and share of Small, medium and micro enterprises are also shrinking.
When it comes to corruption, it’s nearly impossible to deal with. Why will they build good long-lasting roads if they can mint money off of building it every 3-4 years?
India’s middle class is also shrinking. So a lot of people barely reaching the surface of being middle class are falling back into being poor, or being closer to it.
That affects the disposable income of a large chunk of people.
Communism. It’s an evil idea for sure, but having a centralized power with total control does have its benefits.
tl;dr India’s government is corrupt, nationally parochial, and the people have been conditioned to accept their lot. Rote repetition is prized over critical thinking, making them passable labourers but not exactly excellent scientists or physicians.
They did not redeem.
India is beholden to an incredibly rigid caste-based society and dharmic faiths teach them that the world is fair; everyone genuinely gets what they deserve thanks to karma. This does wonders for the longevity of their society at the cost of R&D. Furthermore, the Indian people have overall spent large portions of the early modern and industrial era under the sway of foreign powers, starting with the Mughals and ending with the Portuguese and English. I clarify English as the Honourable East India Company was founded in 1600.
India’s status as being property of the Bri*ish saw improvements imported (Ghandi was saying that the Empire had an excellent system of governance and wanted more of it, in India) but the caste system mostly staying static because appeasing the top of society encourages them to keep everyone else down. They have been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age with Iron Age traditions. Compare to China. China’s sorrow would flood like clockwork and trigger dynasty changes because it was a sign they had lost the Mandate of Heaven. The Jurchen tribes to the north were a constant threat, unlike an India with the Himalayas, desert, and ocean.
Every 30 years or so, MBAs get the bright idea to invest in India to then get scammed big time when the government nationalizes their investments. India, culturally, has a massive “screw you, got mine” mentality specifically because it is a rat race. It is genuinely more profitable for an individual Indian wanting to get ahead to simply be a plague of scammers, welfare leeches, and H1B fraudsters abroad because foreign money is worth so much more than the rupee. China also wisely focused on heavy industry and shrewd playing of the market with a unified vision under the Party, while India’s upper echelon is a rat race of snobby rich power brokers butting heads.
People are forgetting that the British pilfered trillions upon trillions of wealth and resources from India.
They also murdered tens of thousands, many who were well educated.
Think of a private equity take over, extract all the value and sell off the broken left overs.
Once the British left, that power vacuum was largely filled by many with the same point of view as the British (even some still loyal).
China got the ball rolling before India, and then economies of scale took over. Back when globalization was in full push, everyone wanted to offshore manufacturing, and China became the primary destination for a number of reasons, not least of which was the Chinese government heavily stepping in and making offshoring to it cheap and easy. The West then spent 30 years helping China build their industry because it was cheaper, and thus it got cheaper and cheaper to continue manufacturing in China; economies of scale are very important, and once China got the infrastructure set up for massive manufacturing, no other country could keep up. By the time India opened up and was ready to accept more Western investment, China was too far ahead.
I appreciate your innocence OP, for thinking a question that necessarily is ideological, can be answered on this sub.
India, in the 80s, saw that it could not compete with the Chinese in manufacturing so they tried to speed run by going from an agriculture-based straight to a service based-economy. And the thing about the service based economy is that there is no where near enough white collar jobs to accommodate its 1b population so the people who can’t get a white collar job have to fall back to farming which contribute little to personal and national wealth. And no manufacturing means no skilled workers which mean no foreign investment, and even if foreigners want to build a factory in India, the infrastructure was incredibly inadequate which inhibited the transportation of goods and materials. Recent administration had realized the error of their ways and invested heavily into infrastructure development and manufacturing base and India is beginning to attract foreign investment as cost of manufacturing is going up in China.
Latest Answers