Though India is growing we are nowhere close to Chinese. Though we have a democracy, China has a nationalist government which can take tough decisions. India needs a govt like that. The biggest problem is social. Most of the people are more obsessed with religion and superstition. The country is so divided skin colour, religion, language, customs, ethnicity. The only way to unite the people is modern education. Only uniting factor in India is the English language. Unfortunately many children in rural India dont get access to good primary education. Education and healthcare is getting privatised. The Indian govt biggest failure has been the failure to provide education and health security to the poor. Yes India is growing but only the city and the upper class. The way things are going India has a long way to become a middle income economy. I don't want to compare India with China or any other country. I dream of the day when every India will have access to health, house, power and education. But one day we will be there. Maybe after 100 years. After 1000 years we have freedom. It's been only 70 years. We have a lot to learn from China. But India will surely eliminate poverty one day
Such comments are seldom heard from PDF RSSers. I especially agree with you on the education part. One thing China has done before 1980 was the compulsory education. Now in China, every child no matter in more developed or less developed pluses is well educated. Vocational education is free for the children from the countryside. In my class, nearly all students from the countryside have received some sort of scholarships, and life on campus is subsidised (Dorm on campus per year is less than 1500yuan per year.
@Chinese Bamboo How about your new college? )
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@Dungeness Thanks for the link. A very interesting article written in 1997!
http://articles.latimes.com/1997/aug/10/news/mn-21296/2
Quotes (It was written in 1997)
By the late 1970s, even before the economic reforms introduced by Deng took effect, China began to surge ahead of India in almost every measure of economic and social development.
"China has been described as a 'closed system with open minds,' " commented Kito de Boer, a New Delhi-based consultant with McKinsey & Co. "India is often described as an 'open system with closed minds.' "
(life expectancy and education)
Since 1960, for example, China has added more than 20 years to its citizens' life expectancy. Chinese men live an average of 69 years, Chinese women 71 years. Life expectancy in India, while up, averages 62 years.
In literacy, the differences are more pronounced. Despite a decade of turmoil--the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when many schools were shut--China has achieved an adult literacy rate of 81% of its population, compared with 52% for India.
Meanwhile, China's young are moving close to the once seemingly impossible goal of universal literacy. In China, only 3% of adolescent boys and 8% of adolescent girls are illiterate. In India, more than a quarter of adolescent boys and almost half of adolescent girls are illiterate.
(land reforms)
But for a few exceptions--notably agriculturally rich Punjab and Communist-led West Bengal--land reform never came to India.
"In contrast with China," said Delhi University's Mohanty, "India's developmental strategy did not ensure that the land belonged to the tiller, so absentee-landlordism, sharecropping and concealed landlordism are still the norm in most areas."
India's two most populous states--Uttar Pradesh and Bihar--are still plagued by a near-feudal system of absentee landlords and tenant farming.
(employment of labor from the countryside)
"The Chinese," he said, "have an integrated approach to job creation between the farm and off-farm employment which we have not had in this country. The result in India has been the proliferation of urban slums as landless poor people migrate to the big cities of Bombay and Calcutta and Madras, living in utter squalor and deprivation."
China's population increase and agricultural modernization have also produced surplus labor. An estimated 80 million to 100 million people--the "floating population"--are internal migrants, manual laborers, construction workers and curbside vendors in the major cities. But several studies report that an additional 100 million of these people were absorbed by outlying "township enterprises" that India has never developed.
I am especially interested on the last point.
When there are excessive labor because of the reforms in agriculture or losing land, the results are completely different in China and India.
In China, we have plenty of jobs in industry for the non-skilled labor from the countryside. Not just big factories and service sector in Coastal China, but also small and medium enterprises owned by village/township/county can absorb surplus labor. It results in large scale of urbanisation at every level, village/townships/county/city, and it provides an easier way for the non-skilled labor from the countryside to move up to a well-off life. In the mean time, we provide the same public education opportunities for the migrant workers' children. All these aspects ensure a society of huge mobility, from the lower underprivileged class to the well-off class, even middle class and upper class. Our society of meritocracy is underpinned by such mobility.
Provide public education for the migrant workers' children
What I am concerned about the landless migrants in India is that they lack a certain easy pathway to enter a higher bracket. You can't really find the same phenomenon in India like what we can see in China: so many migrants from the countryside become millionaires or billionaires, their children become well-respected doctors and scientists. If migrants in India mostly end up in the "slums" (pls don't ban me
), then the land reforms in India will become a chaos and a recipe of social unrest.
