This book review addresses a lot of the points you raised in SCC about
India's competitive position.
BOOK REVIEW
A comparative failure
Infrastructure Growth in India and China: A Comparative Study edited
by Dhandapani Alagiri
Reviewed by David Simmons
September 22, 2007
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/II22Df01.html
HUA HIN, Thailand - There's a tongue-in-cheek rule of headline writing
on the Asia Times Online newsdesk that if an article is deathly dull,
an editor shouldn't try to sex it up by writing a headline that's more
interesting than the article, thereby misleading the reader. [1]
The title of this book, Infrastructure Growth in India and China,
certainly meets our criterion of matching the content for dullness.
But it's a bit misleading nonetheless, for there are few useful
comparisons therein of China's versus India's progress. Here's one
example:
Roads are just the biggest of India's public-private infrastructure
projects. The government is also inviting private investors and
contractors to build airports and ports, water systems and electricity
distribution networks. The idea is to match China, which is leagues
ahead of India.
"Compared with China's infrastructure spending of 20% of its gross
domestic product," says Chetan Ahya, an economist at Morgan Stanley's
Mumbai offices, "India spends just 6%. It needs to increase that to at
least 10% to prime economic growth further." (pp 113-114)
That is the entirety of a section subheadlined "Chinese example" in an
article promisingly titled "Can Indian Roads Compete with Chinese?"
It's the only specific mention of China in the entire article (other
than throwaway lines such as "India needs [to do such-and-such] if it
is going to compete head-to-head with powers like China" (p 113). And
it's typical of how Indian and Chinese infrastructure development is
compared throughout the book: very few relevant examples of Chinese
versus Indian projects, and few if any genuine analyses of what China
is doing better than India and why. Some of the articles, in fact, do
not mention China at all.
What this book really consists of is a long moan by Indian business
writers about how shockingly bad most infrastructure in their nation
is: the roads are packed with automobiles, motorbikes and assorted
animals avoiding potholes the size of small countries, the trains and
the tracks they run on are falling to pieces, and the airports barely
function. About the only thing that works pretty well is the
communication network, a product of India's world-class software
industry.
Well, okay; is there anyone who didn't already know this before the
book was published?
With a couple of notable exceptions such as the first article, "Why
India's Economy Lags behind China's" by Ramtanu Maitra (and reprinted,
by the way, with permission of Asia Times Online), there is very
little useful analysis of India's well-known infrastructure problems.
Instead, the reader is lulled to sleep by two-year-old (at least)
reportage cluttered with statistics.
This would perhaps be forgivable if the book were trying to make a
point to non-Indians thinking of investing in the country, but that
does not seem to be its purpose. Most of the articles are written by
Indians for Indians, and no effort has been made to edit the book to
make it more comprehensible to non-Indians.
We should digress here for a moment to note that Indian English
differs markedly from standard British and, even more so, American
English. This should not be surprising, as India now has the largest
number of English speakers of any country on Earth - possibly more
than in the United States and the United Kingdom combined. [2] So of
course Indians have their own dialect, and have evolved their own
standards of journalism.
But the fact remains that very few non-Indians have bothered to learn
Indian English, and most Americans, Britons, Canadians or
Australasians will therefore find it a challenge to wade through this
book's florid verbosity, strange word orders and mysterious slang,
haphazard usage of "the", merrily mixed metaphors, and so forth. The
tiny few who might actually be interested in its myriad charts and
outdated statistics will be doubly flummoxed by bizarre numeric
constructions such as 1,94,430 (p 97) and, of course, the infamous
"crore" and "lakh" (keep a calculator handy).
Speaking of statistics, a rare article that uses them to some good end
- to underscore a point - is the one with the enthralling title
"Private Sector Participation in Transport Infrastructure Development:
A Study of the Port Sector". Here we learn:
The average ship turnaround time, which is about six to eight hours
for Singapore, is about six to eight days for Indian ports. Similarly,
the number of containers handled per ship-hour for Colombo, Bangkok
and Singapore is 35, 38 and 69 respectively; for Indian ports it is
only seven to 15 containers per ship-hour. The existing Indian port
infrastructure suffers problems owing to operational constraints like
breakdown of port equipment and use of obsolete cargo handling
equipment, inadequate facilities for dredging of berths and channels,
inefficient and non-optimal development of port equipment and
excessive reliance on labor-intensive methods of bulk handling of
cargo. (p 189)
After another half-page of horrific but terse and well-presented
port-related facts and figures, the article continues:
The consequences of these shortcomings are severe for the Indian
economy. Indian container cargo is transshipped to Colombo, Dubai or
Singapore, resulting in additional costs and transit times ... It has
been estimated that the annual incidence of these various factors such
as demurrage charges, transshipment costs, pre-berthing delays and
vessel turnaround time could be as high as US$1 billion per annum. (p
190)
The question left unanswered - even unasked, at least by this book -
is, if the ports, and the airports, and the roads, and the railways,
in fact just about everything in the country more complex than a
street vendor's cooking grill is as dysfunctional as claimed (and
there is substantial evidence that it is so), how can the Indian
economy function at all? And yet it not only functions, its gross
domestic product has been growing at rather startling rates for years.
Something like China's.
Ah yes, China, that other vast Asian country mentioned in book title.
What about China?
Well, as noted above, there is not much helpful information in this
volume on what India could actually learn from the experience of its
giant neighbor. But really, can it practically be otherwise?
It is indeed always tempting to make comparisons between India and
China. They have both tapped into the globalization phenomenon at a
pace that has surely caused sleepless nights for not a few of the
Western corporate fat cats who started that whole game with visions of
slave-wage-generated profits dancing in their heads. Both countries
have vast populations and, although hundreds of millions of their
people have not benefited from the "economic miracle" but remain in
squalor, significant proportions have indeed experienced greatly
improved wealth, to an extent that pressure on the Earth's resources -
especially energy, in which neither country is anywhere near
self-sufficient - is expected to multiply at rather frightening rates.
However, for the purposes that allegedly motivated this book, China
and India are not particularly comparable. Their systems of governance
are utterly different, and governance, after all, is at the root of
relative progress in infrastructure development in any country, not
just these two. The blame for India's decrepit infrastructure can be
laid squarely at the doorstop of its democratically elected
governments, hobbled by lethargy and incompetence at the federal level
and by inefficiency and corruption at all other levels, with very few
exceptions.
Similar charges can be made in China, especially at the provincial
levels and below, but where it matters, the fact that China is not a
democracy tends to make it more efficient. Theoretically, in a
dictatorship, if some bureaucrat or job foreman or ditch digger
doesn't do as the leaders say, they can just shoot him. Of course that
doesn't happen much anymore in modern China (as far as we know from
that mine of information that is Xinhua), but the point remains valid.
In a democracy, if the bureaucrats and job foremen and ditch diggers
simply don't do as they are told, there is not that much you can do
about it even if the leadership has the will - which, alas, has
evidently been lacking at the highest levels through much of the
six-decade history of independent India.
A more interesting and helpful - because less apples-and-oranges -
comparative study might be to compare India's progress with those of
other Asian democracies, some of which have faced similar obstacles to
India's and yet, in varying degrees, handled them more efficiently.
There is the occasional useful, even entertaining (if you're the sort
whose idea of a fun evening is microwaving some popcorn and watching
the Bloomberg channel) fact to be found it this book, and it appears
to have been compiled with good intentions. It has also been formatted
in a manner that can be helpful to the reader, such as the summaries
that appear atop each article, which are so well condensed and
comprehensive that they can function as much more readable substitutes
for the articles themselves, thereby cutting down reading time by at
least 90%. Now that's efficiency.
By and large, though, it is little more than a statement of the
obvious.
Notes
1. A recent example of an editor apparently taking this precept
literally is Consumption boosts China stocks, Asia Times Online,
September 19.
2. It is estimated that at least one-third of India's 1 billion-plus
population can carry on a conversation in English with sufficient
competence to be classified as "English speakers", albeit always as a
second language. That works out to 300,000-350,000 people.
Infrastructure Growth in India and China: A Comparative Study edited
by Dhandapani Alagiri. The ICFAI University Press, 2006. ISBN:
81-314-0306-8. Price US$17; 228 pages.
David Simmons is a regional correspondent for Asia Times Online based
in Thailand.
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