In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

- India graduates over 1 million engineers every year, as opposed to the US and Europe who graduate about 200,000 between the two of them.

- India now ranks third in scientific capacity behind Japan and the US. Yet India's literacy rate is only 65%, whereas China's is 90%. This is explained, according to Luce, by the fact that India remains a very poor and rural country. About 750 million people live in some 680 thousand villages, and about 300 million of them in extreme poverty. There are chronic shortages of land and water making subsistence a daily struggle - under these circumstances education is not even a consideration.

- In another comparison to China, Luce notes that India only has 7 million people involved in manufacturing, whereas China has 100 million. Labor laws in India - some remnants of Nehru-Gandhi socialism - make it difficult for employers to lay-off workers. Therefore many factory owners have invested heavily in high-tech, minimizing the need for manual labor. If anything good can be said about the Communist party in China it is that they have done away with such laws making hiring and firing much easier. This may sound unjust to some but it employs an additonal 93 million workers.

- Luce also points out that India has basically bypassed the industrial revolution, going directly from agriculture to high-tech services. This shows that they invested heavily in higher education for the elite while neglecting the poor. The result is having a middle class about the size of France or Germany and at the same time having an underclass of about 900 million. That there is not enough money for universal education is not surprising since only about 35 million in a population of 1.1 billion pay taxes.

- In 2006, India completed a 3,000 mile interstate highway called the "Golden Quadrilateral" running from New Dehli to Mumbai to Chennai to Kolkata and back to New Delhi. It was a remarkable feat since many of the politicians sitting in the ruling coalition would try to prevent its completion because the highway disrupted many of their constituents' communities. All of it was settled, however, through bribes and the legal system. In China this kind of development is done by decree. In many ways the Chinese system is more efficient but no one would vote for its authoritarian tactics.

- India like China still has many serious problems to tackle, among them energy, environment, poverty, and public health. The fact that they have a democracy is a plus in a country divided by many languages, religion, and caste. On the downside they have a huge bureaucracy that is corrupt and resistant to change. Yet India seems to work, moving slowly toward economic development and great power status inspite of the gods.