Rahul Gandhi's CII speech today...

[dial_100]

In what sense you dont see Guj too far ahead. Ahead of whom?? These kind of Inforgraphics are seen in various places. What I understand about State economy is that how much a state contribute to nations economy. Take top 10/12 states and figure out how much each state contributed in 2005 and compare that number to 2012 to know which state has grown in these last 7-8 years at what proportion. Bihar grew highest in that sense. Its economy grew by 3.4 times of its size in 2005. The other states Guj (3.05), AP (3.01), TN(2.89), MH (2.81) and so on. But then look at how big is the actual economy of the state and per capita GDP of that state to get a realistic idea of the growth. Like in this case, even though Bihar grew so fast, the P.C. GDP is only 1/4th of Gujarath and Mah. Same thing goes for UP which is only 1/3rd of these big states. The second highest economy was 130% that of Guj in 2005 which is now reduced to 109% only. The top economy of MH which was 203% of Guj back then is now at 187%. Guj will certainly surpass the economies of TN and UP for sure and get very close to AP at 2-3 position from 6-7 position 10 years ago. ****I dont claim to be an expert in economics but whatever little I understand I tried to put here. All the calculations are done based on numbers available on WiKi and great level of rounding off is done for the ease of calculation.

[Crookbond]

Since 2005-06 according to the GSDP% the only states/UTs ahead of Gujarat are - Puducherry, Delhi, A&N, Uttarakhand and Sikkim. Bihar is substantially picked up since 2010 and is as good as Gujarat.

[dial_100]

@DM they are talking about Per Capita GDP. Because the states or UTs you mentioned are very small, their per capita is very high but not significant contributor to the country’s economy because of their sizes. Like Sikkim and Pondicherry are like 1 & 2% of Gujarat's economy. In that sense the bigger state ahead of Guj is MH only. A&N is slightly behind Guj. Bihar is at the rock bottom, the last state in that index. That gives us an idea of where Lallu has left the state. If Bihar or rather Nitish manages to get more like 50% of Mah or even Guj then I would say we will have totally different picture of N-E region. Currently it is 25% of Guj. But true, its growing fast and it can make huge difference. If it starts to contribute substantially in the nation’s economy then our national GDP will show sizable growth just because of Bihar alone. I hope this helps.

[BeautifulGame]

they won the 2009 election more due to a fragmented opposition than due to their good governance/good policies. Uttar Pradesh is the biggest state in the country and Pappu has led the Congress campaign in 2007 and 2012 and both times the party has come last among the 4 big parties and more importantly, lost nearly all the seats where he campaigned. He went to campaign in Bihar and Cong won a grand total of 4 seats out of 243 they contested. At every point in his career he has shown that he is not capable of being a National level political leader so the furore over dynasty politics is not wrong in this case. How can you say that he is acceptable to all of India when his party has a presence in just 1 state?

Not true.They won mostly based on the developmental agenda and welfare schemes in 2009 . And u can say the same about Modi too.Routed in almost every state he campained outside Gujarat.Scared of even campaining in Karnataka. The fact is most elections will be mostly fought on issues within the states.National leaders are gone have very little impact and will be based on the strength of their regional leaders in 2014.Doesnt matter Modi or Rahul all that matters is they have acceptance within their party and coalition. Rahul is in a much better footing here than Modi fortunately or unfortunately

but it was Congress that showed them the way both in promoting members of the same family and in corruption and they are still leading the charge in both even now. Talking of other parties, BJP and Communists are the only large political parties in the country where the leadership is not passed on from father to son - they do have members of the same family active in the party but its not like the Congress where you have to have a particular surname to have any claim towards the leadership of the party.

It isnt because they have Gandhi surname they claim leadership towards the party.More like people in India only accept Nehru family as Congress leader unfortunately. People had a straight choice btw Indra congress and National congress in 1977 and they went for Indira over the grand old leaders. Similarly there was a 10 year vaccum in 90s in congress without any Nehru clan yet Congress couldnt produce a single leader of National acceptance.The only leader from Nehru family who promoted to PM based on only family credential is Rajiv.

[Sachin=GOD]

Rahul Gandhi’s dragon cliché The Congress vice-president would do well to ponder why China has outperformed India on every social and economic indicator

In his speech to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on April 4, 2013, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi said his advisers had told him to “not go into the India-China cliché.” Mr. Gandhi should have paid heed to them. For the heir-apparent of a major political party — and a possible prime ministerial candidate — Mr. Gandhi, during his more than an hour-long interaction, came across as worryingly ill-informed about a country that is not only India’s biggest neighbour and single largest trading partner, but also set to emerge as possibly India’s most important, and difficult, diplomatic challenge in the next decade. “There is no complexity in China,” he declared, going on to present an anecdote which, he suggested, reflected life in the People’s Republic. “A friend of mine who came from China, an Italian guy, was in shock,” he recounted. “He said, ‘I was in a bus in China. A bus hit a man. The driver picked up the man, put him on the side of the road and we carried on’.” “There is no complexity there,” Mr. Gandhi concluded. “Simple, [China] is.” Mr. Gandhi used this rather strange anecdote to make the claim that as India and China were fundamentally different countries, their development experiences and growth stories could not be compared. Hit-and-run incidents are no more commonplace in China than they are in India, and arriving at a simple conclusion about a billion people based on the testimony of one foreign visitor would be a misguided venture in either country “There are two types of systems, centralised and decentralised,” he argued. “China is a centralised system. They call it, the dragon. You can see it, it is very clear. It is big, it is powerful, it builds big structures that are visible.” India, he went on to say, was “a beehive.” His apparent argument was that unlike China’s centralised and organised development model, India’s growth story was entirely a bottom-up process driven by creative energy and the spirit of entrepreneurship, and not by the state. The real lesson There was much about Mr. Gandhi’s rather sweeping and simplistic characterisation of what he called the “India-China cliché” that does not bear scrutiny. The argument that a decentralised democracy slows development and hinders the delivery of good governance, and that China’s remarkable growth story over the past three decades was more the result of a strong one-party state than any other factor, has been made frequently — including by China’s own ruling Communist Party, as well as sections of India’s business elite with cases of China-envy. This is despite the fact that the widely popular perception of China’s economic development being the outcome of an entirely top-down, State-driven, centralised process has been disproven by compelling evidence to the contrary. The ubiquitous caricature of China’s growth story — decades of double-digit growth and rapid State-led infrastructure development driven by Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and a thriving export sector — is limited to the country’s experience in the 1990s. As economists such as Huang Yasheng of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and others have pointed out, China’s growth story began a decade earlier in the 1980s preceding the infrastructure boom. As Mr. Huang has argued convincingly, growth in the 1980s was as much “bottom-up” as “top-down,” driven by rural entrepreneurs who benefited from the loosening of State controls, more liberal policies and decentralisation. China’s record of reducing poverty, Mr. Huang has shown, was the highest during the 1980s, when the number of poor fell by 154 million. The following decade of FDI-led growth saw a reduction in the number of poor by a relatively fewer 62 million. China’s growth in the 1980s was underpinned by investments in human capital — in boosting health care and education. That, according to Mr. Huang, is the real lesson from China’s growth story – not a superficial fascination with skyscrapers and high GDP. India and China certainly have vastly different political systems. A strong party-state has, no doubt, allowed China to enact policies rapidly. Yet, one-party rule has also imposed huge burdens on China’s development. Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, which claimed more than 30 million lives, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), set China back by at least a few decades. Today, China’s political model is seen, even in Beijing, as stifling innovation and creative industries. No sensible person would suggest following China’s authoritarian model, which would have no place in India’s diverse and plural society — a stark contrast from China’s Han-dominated society which offers far from adequate protection to minorities. Comparing social indicators Mr. Gandhi was, however, wrong to dismiss out of hand the lessons from China’s growth story, and to simply attempt to explain away India’s development problems using questionable assumptions, rather than put forward new ideas or a vision for the future. Mr. Gandhi, correctly, mounted a passionate defence of India’s pluralistic and democratic political system. But implicit in his comments was the troubling suggestion that the expectations of people in decentralised, “beehive” India could not be held to the same levels as those in centralised, authoritarian China. Foreigners who were “driven crazy” by India’s chaos could succeed in doing business “even on the moon” if they succeeded in India, he said almost proudly, rather than suggest how he might perhaps help improve the environment for business and investment. He would do well to ponder why China has done far better in providing its people with basic necessities, why China continues to outperform India on every social indicator; and most importantly, and why the gap between both countries has widened — and not narrowed — following a decade of the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) rule. According to the United Nations Human Development Report, China is far ahead of India on social indicators ranging from life expectancy (73.7 years against 65.8), mean years of schooling (7.5 years against 4.4), adult literacy (94 per cent against 74 per cent), under-five mortality (19 per 1,000 against 66) and maternal mortality (38 per 100,000 against 230). Mr. Gandhi has, as yet, not put forward any concrete vision for addressing India’s many domestic challenges, let alone those on the external front. While he acknowledged China’s rising national power in his speech, he offered no ideas as to how India should respond to the challenge even as China continues to spread its economic and political influence, including in India’s neighbourhood. Instead, he appeared almost content with a notion of “Indian power” that was reflected in the fact that “there are people doing yoga in New York, dancing around” and that “you go to a nightclub somewhere in Spain and there is Amitabh Bachchan on the screen, dancing around.” Mr. Gandhi would do well to pay closer attention to a country that India will have no choice but to engage with increasingly, as the world’s second-largest economy and a neighbour that cannot be wished away. The work of economists like Mr. Huang, rather than the unreliable testimony of an Italian tourist on a bus, might perhaps be a good place to start.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/rahul-gandhis-dragon-clich/article4599091.ece?homepage=true

[Crookbond]

No one has put a concrete vision for the future of India - no one wants to get their hands dirty.