India Matters

Googling India

India for sure has arrived on the global scene. It's no longer the snake charmers and maharajas who form the centre-piece for any story on India. It's not even the socialists in India or the bad roads and dangers of getting a Delhi-belly which are the topics for any discussion in any foreign media. It's the IT industry, the economic potential, budding entrepreneurs which are the focus for most stories on India and here I must add that surprisingly some of them do go overboard at times. Any anti-outsourcing story has India as the centre-piece and most writers who mention China also try and make a cursory reference to India.

A good thumbrule I found out to check on which topics/names are most popular in the global media is doing a search on Google News. A search for China returns on an average 90,000 hits -roughly meaning that many unique stories across 4500 news sources mentioned the country in the last one month. India returns around 80,000 where as Singapore or even Korea is manages roughly in 20,000 articles. This method doesn't count the quality of exposure but just the quantity. Yeah, that may include a fair number of negative stories, but even then, India matters.
I came across one more indicator that may act as a thumbrule. The hoary Economist has a People section where it profiles people who have been in the news. Ofcourse, the selection of the people who are going to be featured must be going through a rigorous process (I presume this though going by own experiences in journalism, it might not be so). And in the last three weeks, three Indians have been featured consequitively. It started with Padmasree Warrior, Motorola's CTO, next was Azim Premji of Wipro and the last was Veerappan in the obituary column. Well, Veerappan is not of the same league, but Economist took the pains to note that an obscure person (by global standards), but a big newsmaker in India had died. Again, I am not debating on the quality of exposure, but that India matters.



North Of East

One of the key issues and this is something that has been close to my heart ever since my school days is the way, we as a country treat the North East. Almost anyone with a mongoloid features walking down the street is termed a 'chinki' - a nigger like term meaning that he/she comes from the China or somewhere further east.

It fails our collective imagination to accept that people of the mongoloid race inhabit a large part of the country. They may be far flung provinces (and here I just can't figure out which state is far flung and which is not) but all of us in so called 'mainland' India share a lot of common history and culture with states like Manipur, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and the rest. Two incidents proves my perception.
One was the entire controversy on whether the Armed Forces Special Act should be discontinued in Manipur. First of all, as a sovereign federal nation, why do we need to impose such draconian measures on one of our own provinces? And even if we assume that the government in Delhi is composed of fools and megalomaniacs, why didn't the civil society and so called NGOs and human right activists (who incidentally are photographed more in Page 3) take up this cause? We should hang our heads in shame on the fact that it needed a couple of brave women in Manipur to protest naked in order to draw attention to this problem. It was only then that it became front-page news and attracted cover pics. What happened to celebrity journos who fly down to Gujarat or Kashmir at every small incident, but didn't bother to even make a small stopover in the North East? Or do they apply the same reason that politicians do - North East doesn't send enough MPs to the parliament to matter; Kashmir, Gujarat, Bihar does.
The other incident was the serial bomb blast in Assam that killed over 50 people. Again it didn't make front-page headlines in plenty of newspapers across the country, including Times of India. Any incident like this, if it had happened in Bombay, would have generated reams and reams of newsprint and get prime-time coverage on national news networks for weeks. Does the life of an Assamese matter less than that of a Bombayite? Why do we turn a blind-eye to North-East and treat them as second-grade citizens? Probably as a nation, while we have been able to assimilate the Dravidian race with the Aryan, we have failed to do so with the Mongloid. And then after all this, we squirm at the fact that US is a racist country and racism just doesn't exist in India!


State Of The States

The recent India Today survey called State of States, ranks Indian states on various parameters. Interestingly, it once again supports the fact that smaller regions are always better governed. Though the magazine doesn't seem to appreciate this point (this time, unlike last year, they had separate rankings for big and small states), it comes out pretty clearly. Smaller states like Pondicherry, Goa and Delhi seem to perform much better than larger states.
Even among the big states, its Punjab and Kerela which lead the list, where as UP and Bihar are at the very end. Utranchal, which was separated from UP recently fares much better than the parent state. Last year, when there was a combined ranking, Goa was the topper.
This underscores the point that smaller administrative regions are better managed. Looking at an international perspective, Singapore experienced higher rates of growth once it broke away from Malaysia. Smaller regions like Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan performed much better than mainland China. Therefore, does the solution for achieving high growth rates in India, lie in creating a thousand Singapores or at least a thousand Delhis or Gurgaons across the country?
However, the counter argument is that creation of smaller states increases government expenditure. Its true, but its more because of the fact that the current fad of carving out smaller states generates from political demands. A new state means a whole new set of politicians can become MLAs and ministers and that increases government spending.
Politics shouldn't dictate such measures, its economics which should. Another interesting perspective, which the survey threw up, was the good performance of the states in the North East, a region that is often ignored. Mizoram and Sikkim top the charts in health, education and law and even with a treacherous terrain, Sikkim's 70% of households have access to tap water. No mean achievement by any means. It's the same for all the other states. And once again, the largest state Assam, lags behind in the North East. That's on all counts, including the fact that only 9% of households in Assam have access to tap water.