Total Myth. British Railway was limited to very small area and has not played any vital role in unification of present India.
Really.
Then just listen to what our late Singapore PM Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, an
international respected statesman had to says about India.
What constraints does India's culture impose on its long term prospects?
India is not a real country. Instead, it is
32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line. The British came, conquered, established the Raj, incorporated under their rule an amalgam of 175 princely states, and ruled them with 1,000 Englishmen and several tens of thousands of Indians brought up to behave like English.
I am against a society which has no sense of nurturing its best to rise to the top. I am against a feudal society where your birth decides where you stay in the pecking order. The example of that, par excellence, is India's caste system.
India is an established civilisation. Nehru and Gandhi had a chance to do for India what I did for Singapore because of their enormous prestige, but they could not break the caste system. They could not break the habits.
Look at the construction industries in
India and China, and you will know
the difference between
one that gets things done and another that does not get things done, but talks about things. . . .
It is partly because
India is such a diverse country - it is not one nation, but 32 different nations speaking 330 different dialects. . . . In China, it is 90 per cent Han Chinese all speaking the same language, with different accents, but reading the same script. If you stand up in Delhi and speak in English, out of 1. 2 billion people, maybe 200 million will understand you. If you speak in Hindi, maybe 250 million will understand you. If you speak in Tamil, 80 million people will understand you. So there is an enormous difference between the two countries . . . . We are comparing oranges and apples. . . . Let me not be misunderstood. The upper class in India is equal to any in the world but they face the same hurdles.
The average Indian civil servant still sees himself primarily as a regulator and not as a facilitator. The average Indian bureaucrat has not yet accepted that it is not a sin to make profits and become rich. The average Indian bureaucrat has little trust in India's business community. They view Indian businesspeople as money-grabbing opportunists who do not have the welfare of the country at heart, and all the more so if they are foreign.