The Perils Of The Manmohan Singh-Bush Alliance

[Neo]

How strong is the socalled communist or socialist block in India, can anyone please give me the estimates in percentage to get a better idea? Could it gain power outside the three traditional commie states?

Thanks.

 

[third eye]

The Communists stood up for India. The Manmohan government sold out.

Pls let the Indians decide. Elections ( which are alien to most countries in the sub continent) are not far.

Till then, arm chair Gurus may kindly keep their comments to themselves.

 

[Contrarian]

So the main problem is their support to or liking for China

The main problem is the funding they get from China and their vehement support for China OVER India. They side with China over India-that is the problem-which implies that they are more Chinese than Indian. Having a commie ideology is not the problem.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Pls let the Indians decide. Elections ( which are alien to most countries in the sub continent) are not far.

Till then, arm chair Gurus may kindly keep their comments to themselves.

A communist government in the centre would probably bring peace to South Asia. Instead we have the warmongering Congress and BJP to deal with. A sad fate for India.

 

[Humanoid]

A communist government in the centre would probably bring peace to South Asia. Instead we have the warmongering Congress and BJP to deal with. A sad fate for India.

A sad fate for India..? he he he ..you are truly the one...you want more closed factories..more bandhs...more strike..? thank god ..we dont have them India ...which made us achieve whatever we have made so far...

 

[Vinod2070]

Why not try a Communist government in Bangladesh first and see how it fares!

If it does well, Bangladesh would have shown another path to the region, like with the Grameen bank initiative and the micro-lending schemes. These successes make many Indians proud too, as we have made the sacrifices for them.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

I think the communist experiment is being tried in West Bengal and you also have a Maoist insurgency. We will watch how that goes and then Bangladesh will decide.

 

[Vinod2070]

It has been tried all over the world. WB has tried it for well over 30 years now, China, North Korea, East Germany, Eastern Europe, USSR etc.

The cases of Koreas and Germanies are most interesting. Same people divided only by ideology. Guess what happened after a few decades! East Germany is no more, North Korea, can you compare that with South Korea. China has abandoned the Communist economics decades ago, using the facade only to perpetuate the CCP rule, look at where the rest of the Communist world is!

We can learn from history instead of repeating the same mistakes.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

My point is that a party representing a failed ideology tried to uphold Indian sovereignty and the national interest much better than the so-called secular nationalist Congress and the Hindu fanatical BJP.

 

[su-47]

The main problem is the funding they get from China and their vehement support for China OVER India. They side with China over India-that is the problem-which implies that they are more Chinese than Indian. Having a commie ideology is not the problem.

had this same nuclear deal been offered by china, the commies would go on their knees and beg to have it signed.

 

[Vinod2070]

Anyway, good to see the interest India evokes among the neighboring citizens.

I wish it were not so negative interest though.

Why do even some people from countries, we saved from carnage are so vehemently anti-Indian? I am sure they don't represent the majority of their country as perhaps none of us do. The major challenge for our countries are resolving the multitudes of internal problems than finding faults of others with a magnifying glass.

I agree with Mr. Munshi that it shows a pathetic sense of one's own inadequacy, though he seems to have missed the point completely.

Anyway most Indians are not anti-Bangladeshis by any means. Its only the mass illegal migration, the involvement of many Bangladeshis in crimes in India and the growing Islamization and the resultant anti-India rhetoric in that country that is bothersome.

We wish Bangladesh all the best for a glowing future. That can be much faster if you partner with India. Being masochistic with India will buy you nothing. The outsiders will only use them and throw when done with it.

What interest could the Chinese have in you except for anti-India purproses? They are ever ready to attach the Taiwanese who are fellow Hans!

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Thank you for the offer but I think Bangladesh will stick to China.

 

[Contrarian]

Haha. There, that points to the slavish mentality-'we will stick to China'! I dont think any Indian commenting that we need to 'stick' to any country to be prosperous. We are self-made from the damn Hindu growth rate to the boom of the last decade, and the world wants to stick with us now, not the other way round.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Haha. There, that points to the slavish mentality-'we will stick to China'! I dont think any Indian commenting that we need to 'stick' to any country to be prosperous. We are self-made from the damn Hindu growth rate to the boom of the last decade, and the world wants to stick with us now, not the other way round.

You Indians are delusional –


Reforms and poverty numbers

NEERAJ KAUSHAL

The Economic Times – September 8, 2008

India Inc gets uncomfortable when it comes to counting the poor. Recently, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) released separate reports that made the denizens of India Inc most indignant. The World Bank report upped its benchmark of extreme poverty by 25 cents from $1 per person a day to $1.25 per person a day. The ADB announced an even higher poverty benchmark of $1.35 per person a day. Media commentaries on these reports provide a glimpse of how outraged some people in Emerging India are about the claims that 42% to 55% of Indians, depending on the benchmark used, live in extreme poverty.

It may be a bit hard for us to believe but it looks like the World Bank did not change its definition merely to infuriate the proud inhabitants of India Inc. The new benchmark is “the average of the national poverty lines of the world’s 15 poorest countries”, clarifies a brief report on the World Bank website. The ADB’s benchmark is Asia-specific, based on surveys from 16 Asian countries.

I find the easiest way to swallow these numbers is by further dissecting them. By World Bank’s old measure, 267 million Indians (almost a quarter of the population) lived on less than $1 a day in 2005. Raise the benchmark by a quarter, another 190 million would add to the tally of the poor. The next 170 million earn a mere 10 cents more. A sobering reminder of these statistics, even if we go by the Indian poverty line, is that while a quarter of the population lives in extreme poverty, another 30% is just above the poverty benchmark.

Some experts have claimed that the new benchmarks exaggerate India’s poverty numbers. Do they? I think the answer to this question depends on what you want to do with these numbers. If you want to use the poverty numbers to forecast India’s purchasing power for, say, toothpaste or soap, the new poverty rates may be an exaggeration. For it is possible for someone who earns $1.25 or $1.35 a day to occasionally buy toothpaste and/or soap. I may add another statistic for this purpose alone: in 1981, by World Bank’s new poverty line, there were 280 million non-poor in India, and in 2005, the number increased to 630 million. So did India’s purchasing power for soap, toothpaste, cell phones and thousands of other consumer items.

But if you want to understand India’s political economy and study whether the fruits of economic growth of the past decade have been shared with the poor, the new poverty statistics provide an essential reading.

Experts often like to argue that global poverty has declined because of India and China. This is wrong and misleading. As the World Bank report clearly points out the story of reduction in global poverty in the past quarter century is basically the story of China or East Asia. By both poverty benchmarks, $1 a day and $1.25 a day, the number of persons in poverty in the world outside of China has remained almost constant between 1980 and 2005.

I find that the statistics on poverty are most useful in comparing trends over time. There the story appears to be the same whether we use the World Bank data or the National Sample Surveys. In the past quarter century, poverty rate in India has slowly declined — by somewhat less than one percentage point a year. But the number of poor, irrespective of the poverty line we use, have remained stubbornly large, and roughly the same within a margin of 8% to 10%. The World Bank data, like the NSS estimates show that the decline in poverty was modestly fast during the 1980s than during 1990-2005.

However, I will not hasten to blame economic policies since 1990 for the slow progress in poverty reduction. There are so many factors that have affected the plight of the poor that it would be wrong to blame all on economic policy changes since 1990. In fact, I am not sure how to measure the effect of policy since the initial set of economic reforms in the 1990s was in direct response to the policies of the 1980s that brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Clearly, India has not experienced the same spectacular declines in poverty that were the hallmark of economic progress in most of east Asia during the 1980s and much of the 1990s. And it is important that Indian policymakers acknowledge the lack of progress made by India on this front. The numbers are startlingly clear: in 1981, there were roughly 1 billion poor people in East Asia and 421 million in India living on less than $1.25 dollars a day (at 2005 prices). Twenty-five years later, there are only 337 million poor in East Asia, in comparison to 457 million in India.

The World Bank numbers are for 2005. Since then the Indian economy experienced an explosive 9% growth in its output. In several East-Asian economies, including China, such explosive economic growth has been found to lower poverty substantially. We will have to wait for the next round of surveys to find out whether similar growth has brought any rewards for India’s poor.

(The author teaches at Columbia University)

Reforms and poverty numbers- Opinion-The Economic Times

 

[Vinod2070]

Well this thread has gone for a toss.

The original topic has been totally derailed.