Story link: http://www.goodnewsindia.com/index.php/Supplement/article/india-v-china-debate-contd
Over the last two years GoodNewsIndia has resolutely refused to sway with the growing numbers in India who visit China and return starry-eyed, muttering : “Why can’t India etc...”
The reason for that was not any hard economics but a fierce commitment to democracy. GoodNewsIndia believes that development without democracy is like having brilliance without character. Andre Malraux records Nehru in his ‘Anti-Memoirs’: “I want to build a just state by just means”. One can scarcely put it better.
Democracy is in the end just, even if it is slow and exasperating. Now Indian minds that ought to have known better are beginning to realise that democracy is also good economics. It emerges that India’s free society has created questing spirits that are original, innovative and bold. And these are beginning to pay off in the global market place.
You can get on GoodNewsIndia’s thread on this subject by clicking this link. Now along comes confirmation from learned pens. Yasheng Huang an Associate Professor at the Sloan School of Management and Tarun Khanna, a Professor at Harvard have published an article on the subject in ‘Foreign Policy’. The article asks, ‘Can India overtake China?’ and concludes thus: “China and India have pursued radically different development strategies. India is not outperforming China overall, but it is doing better in certain key areas. That success may enable it to catch up with and perhaps even overtake China. Should that prove to be the case, it will not only demonstrate the importance of homegrown entrepreneurship to long-term economic development; it will also show the limits of the FDI-dependent approach China is pursuing.”