Bharat, Hindustan, India

I would probably never have discovered this if I wasn't so prone to wasting time reading stuff on the blogosphere. I'll do nothing else some weekends, I'm hooked, I'm obsessed, but I digress. In my quest of finding good economics blogs, I hit the goldmine, a blog about the Indian Economy, and the Indibloggies. I haven't been prone to specifically looking for stuff, I'm more a fan of exploring randomly. Kind of mimics my life really, I have no clue what I really want. Anyway, I have stumbled on to this blog too late if you ask me. Here's the first of what's bound to be many such posts. The others will be less quoting, more analysis.

First off, if you saw the Discovery Channel special about shipbreaking in Alang, which is supposedly a 'growth industry', the government can't sue the people sending the ships, but occasionally...

An asbestos-laden French warship en route for an Indian scrapyard will continue its journey pending a final Indian court ruling on allowing it into the country, France’s defence ministry said. An environmental panel at India’s Supreme Court on Friday accused France of violating the international Basel Convention on the transport of hazardous waste by sending the Clemenceau aircraft carrier to India for decontamination.

FU France! It'll probably be recycled in India anyway... Who new, Poverty+Jobs~=Shipbreaking.

Second Thing: When the title is "Why Does India Have Such Poor Politicians? - 1" the title is a teaser of the worst kind (poor education, not financially poor):

...It showed a Leftist leader, with the usual scowl and world-weariness on his face (remarkably similar to many RSS bigshots), denouncing the finance minister for wanting to divest equity in some [sell off] profit making PSUs (Government owned public sector companies), to get a few thousand crores, when he is sitting on PSU reserves totaling more than Rs 2,60,000 crore. Unfortunately, I could not get his name — but he was not one of the usual suspects like Sitaram Yechuri, Karat or AB Bardhan. He seemed to be under an impression that company reserves are held in the form of currency notes or bank deposits.
...
No wonder also that former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha has remarked, “The quality of people in politics is very poor…very few understand economics and those who do are unpopular. It would be difficult to take up reforms unless the rank and file of political parties believes in reforms.”

Offcourse, this could be actually be, and probably is being counted for reasonable debate. Even if it's just politicians being disagreeable.

This was on Jan 4h 2006:

Technology is such a leveler here, and is bringing so many economic changes that it is a shame that we in U.S. can only boast about how iPod changed our lives.

Ask the farmers of India who are using simple voice technology (well, cellphones) to cut out the middleman (and yes, it is always a man here) out of the agricultural selling and procurement process. People are getting informed, and for once, can take informed decisions about their livelihood. This is the real revolution here, not just the metro-big-cities based outsourcing that we all hear and read about in the media in U.S. and Europe.

The time to invest in India, if you are interested, is now…

Last but not least, there is still stuff like this, which still stupefies me, despite living there for 12 years. To most readers it may be obvious, third world country or developing country, but that was never the way I saw India, well, developing, never third world. I'll admit I'm an outlier when it comes to this. My family was financially secure, but never rich. I lived in Bombay, but had close relatives overseas, and I knew there is poverty everywhere, which rationalized the poverty in India somewhat. I almost think living there I learned less about the pitfalls of Indian life, I was a child though, and sheltered, and I just didn't live there long enough. I was around the 90th percentile according to this, that makes me an outlier, with others, since I went to a private school.

..the Indian school system…has experienced a huge growth in private provision. Since the early 1990s the percentage of 6-to-14-year-olds attending private school has jumped from less than a tenth to roughly a quarter of the total in that cohort, according to India’s National Council of Applied Economic Research...

It's constantly getting better though, I can't wait to go back after 5 years, this summer.