India's predatory growth

Over the last two decades or so, the two most populous, large countries in the world, China and India, have been growing at rates considerably higher than the world average. In recent years the growth rate of national product of China has been about three times, and that of India approximately two times that of the world average. This has led to a clever defence of globalisation by a former chief economist of IMF (Fisher, 2003). Although China and India feature as only two among some 150 countries for which data are available, he reminded us that together they account for the majority of the poor in the world. This means that, even if the rich and the poor countries of the world are not converging in terms of per capita income, the well above the average world rate of growth rate of these two large countries implies that the current phase of globalisation is reducing global inequality and poverty at a rate as never before.

Statistical half truths can be more misleading at times than untruths. And this might be one of them, in so far as the experiences of ordinary Indians contradict such statistical artefact. . . .

After several years of high growth along these lines, India of the twenty first century has the distinction of being only second to the United States in terms of the combined total wealth of its corporate billionares coexisting with the largest number of homeless, ill-fed, illiterates in the world. Not surprisingly, for ordinary Indians at the receiving end, this growth process is devoid of all hope for escape.