Notes on tech

A New York Times op-ed titled "The Myth of the New India" states:

INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story." So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor.

This sounds persuasive as long as you don't know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia's imminent economic superstardom.

Here is the eye-opener part:

Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.

I would say that within this one geographic India, there are several socio-economic Indias. There are the ultra rich that drive Bentleys and there are ultra poor that cannot even afford the two meals per day. And everyone else falls in some vignette in between. Now having stayed in India for the past 6 months, I have seen that not everything is as rosy here as portrayed by the media (both Indian and foreign).