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“INDIA IS WORLDS BEHIND CHINA”

Jim Rogers

Commodity Online, September 9, 2008

India is a land of contradictions. The country produces some of the world's brightest minds and the single most successful immigrant community in the United States. Yet roughly 50 per cent of its own population is illiterate. It's a country recognised by global leaders as a high-tech superpower. Still, I often couldn't make a local phone call. There's a lot of talk among those in power in India about how the Internet super-highway will speed them to prosperity. Meanwhile, endless traffic jams and a deteriorating national highway system kept us creeping along at a snail's pace as my wife and I traveled through countryside. Goods carrying trucks can only average about 10 miles an hour crossing the country and often can be held up for days by the bureaucracy just trying to cross state lines.

I came to India prepared to find a nation about to take over the world. China has long been my call as the coming superpower for the 21st century but I figured India might give it a run for its money. There are, after all, many similarities. Both countries have emerged after decades of restrictive political and economic systems. Both have motivated and sizeable workforces. Both are leaders in the new high-tech world. More importantly, though, leaders in both countries talk a lot about change. But while China has embraced economic reform and capitalism, rebuilding its infrastructure, India still hasn't quite made up its mind what it wants to be. As I drove through the cities and small villages and talked to politicians and local business people, I got the sense that it's a country that's still uncertain if it's ready to move beyond the protectionist and anti-foreign sentiment that drove it to the brink of bankruptcy just over a decade ago when it had only three weeks of foreign currency reserves in its coffers. We constantly ran into the holdover protectionist and anti-foreign practices during our trip. Of course, China has always had a bit of a lead on India. China began embracing a more free-market economy as early as 1979 while leadership in New Delhi only began abandoning their socialist system back in 1991. I last visited India in 1988 when the country was still following the protectionist and socialist policies. Communism around the world was collapsing and the Berlin Wall would fall the next year. Countries were opening up.

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