With the rupee having broken the 41 mark to the dollar, my exporter cousin is biting his nails while the rest of us rejoice at India becoming the 12th nation in the world to be a trillion dollar economy. Even as the Govt has lowered its estimate of annualised GDP growth down to 8.5%, there is a strong sense of 'future' everywhere - especially in the media and entertainment, telecom, money and travel spaces. We remain a country of contrasts, with more corruption and less discipline than we ought to have. Healthcare and education are still floundering even as copious money flows into infrastructure which shouldn't be a bad thing except for that fact that less than half of that actually makes its way into projects - the rest is quickly gobbled up by graft.
I am not a fan of the SEZ, and hope good sense prevails. Why is there this constant need to compare ourselves or try to copy China? State directed capitalism may work in the short run, but do we really want to poison off the next generation in doing so? 34% of Chinese children are reported to have higher than normal levels of lead in their blood. Lead is a cheap ingredient into most of the Chinese manufacturing units, its effluent resulting in alarmingly high levels of pollution. There are villages where all the kids have black and blue fingers, being slowly poisoned to death.
I met a British gentleman yesterday whose chose to come here to work rather than China, because he believed that we had more humanity. That was a nice thing to hear. Trillion dollars worth of money goes well with a billion minds that never say die, and a billion hearts that still seem to care. Mera Bharat Mahan!
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