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India's Road To The Future
Paul 03244 writes "Historians, economists and technologists agree that movement of ideas, goods and services are fundamental to trade & advancement of the human condition. Today's online version of the NYT has a rather lengthy but fascinating article on the construction of a modern highway system in India that details some of the social & cultural changes being brought about by this highway project." Interesting to look at the parallels between the spread of tech and services in India and the same process in the U.S.
Highways were first thought up by Hitler to aid the Blitzkrieg technique and move armies and supplies quickly around Germany. He correctly imagined that the bottleneck in modern industrial warfare was not in the factory at all but in the delivery in the goods to the battlefield.
Truman developed the US highway system to prepare for war with the USSR. The long east-west highways would be the long supply chains bringing supplies from northeastern factories (i.e. Detroit) to the Western front/staging area in California. Highways out west were designed to be wide enough and have a long enough straight line to allow for a B52 bomber to land and be refueled. They still practice this to this day.
Slashdotters are fond of posting that porn and warfare drive technology. Highway systems are driven by warfare.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I realize the parent poster was trying to be funny but it doesn't change the fact that (IMO) most Americans think our economy is completely built around serving them and that all Indians are tech support people for Dell.
No. Most Americans think all Dell tech support people are Indians. Not the other way around. Dell does not have a billion tech support people.
We all know what highways do to the landscape: they route around old centers, create new growth and new powers on their edges and speed up commerce.
To your point of corruption & bureaucracy, it doesn't seem to have stopped the US, so why should this stop India?
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
the article mentions aryan invasion as one of the significant events in India's history.... wasnt that theory debunked as fantasies of colonial occupiers? really, one would think that NYT would do a much better job of researching before publishing....
All Indians don't work for US outsourcing tech companies. In fact, a very small minority of us do.
That may be so, but don't forget that the huge population difference between India and the US means that even if a "small minority" of you are involved in outsourcing, it is still enough to displace a significant portion of the US workforce. Not that this is a bad thing; it might even encourage them to get of their lazy, fat arses (yeah, you heard me!) and vote for someone who actually gives a shit about something other than taking over the world one oil-rich Middle-Eastern nation at a time.
..modern electronics is more crap throw away quality than not, necessitating a lot of customer service calls. When Americans call the handy 800#, they honestly can't understand what is going on in the conversation most of the time, leading to double frustration, a broken gadget and then no way to effectively communicate. And it doesn't help that the tech support guy calls himself "Mike" either, it's just an insult to the customer because he or she knows his name is most likely not "Mike". They are frustrated because A-nothing gets fixed, B-they get insulted right off the bat, and C-they know that this used to be a US job. All of the above and more. This has created contention unfortunately.
The US right now almost every day in the biz headlines is "more layoffs". I mean big layoffs, significant, large, important. it's *spooky* what is going on to those paying attention. The average person here is starting to get more than a bit concerned over the future. They see blue collar jobs going to china, white collar to india, and service jobs here going to illegal immigrants. Uhh-what's left exactly?
It's not personal, so don't take it personal, just there is no way to get those US bosses and politicians (who aren't sweating the mortgage payment and healthcare and whatnot) to understand that this "globalism" bill of goods they foisted on us isn't working out like they thought. Since they really started pushing it,the past 20 years or so, we've gone from the planets largest creditor nation to largest debtor nation. The middle class is shrinking fast and is exisiting on credit cards and refinancing the mortgage. This is not a good idea. Not-at-all.
No one has anything against other folks in other lands having jobs,NONE, that isn't the issue at all, the main issue is transferring existing jobs, when they should just be creating new jobs in places like where you are at. It really doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both if the globalist boss class wasn't such greed-jerk total lamers..and I bet it's the same in India as well.
It might just be the opposite. Because intellectuals/planners in India fully understand that corruption can undermine the economic progress India has made since 1991, many large projects which were earlier undertaken by government bodies are now awarded based on International tenders. Same is the case with this project.
It is a pity that most Americans think that outsourcing has initiated Indian economic progress, while the fact is that we started progressing after the country was left with 15 days of foriegn reserve in 1991 and the Prime Minister invited one of the best economists in the country Dr. Manmohan Singh to join the cabinet as the finance minister. The economic growth of 6.9% that we saw this year was a result of reforms introduced in 1991.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3725357.stm
Yes, outsourcing does boost the economy, it probaby does not drive it.
Ofcourse we are far from what we should be after 50 years of independence, but lately we have made enormous strides and things are begining to change. 15 years back Indians could not even dream of such a project and today they are talking about linking all rivers in India; a feat if achieved would be a significant engineering achievement. Whenever, there is a discussion on how India is making progress, there are be numerous who refuse to see the glass as half full and point to corruption and poverty that rots our society. While the statements are true they fail to see the winds of change sweeping India.
The change is symbolised by the following facts. By coincidence or by design, the Prime minister of India today, Dr. Manmohan Singh, an economist, is the artitect of the biggest economic reforms in the country. The President of India Dr. Abdul Kalam, a rocket scientist, is considered to be the father of Indian missile and space programs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/countr y_profiles/1154019.stm#leaders
In contrast, the President of United States is a cowboy. (No offense, but I could not resist the comparison).
The intensity of the issues mentioned here is less in South India. If you encounter 10 cows driving 150 kilometers in North India, you would only encounter 1 cow driving that far in South India.
the fact that (IMO) most Americans think our economy is completely built around serving them and that all Indians are tech support people for Dell. Not only is this incorrect but it is insulting and I just took advantage of this topic to let off steam.
Remarks about what most Americans think, usually based on shallow, stereotyped views of Americans as egocentric dullards (a view which even some Americans hold, egocentric dullards that they are), can also be taken as incorrect and insulting.
Much like citizens demanding more services and fewer taxes from the government, workers demanded ever higher wages and benefits and vacation time from their companies, while at the same time demanding cheaper prices for goods and services. In both cases, however, there's a limit, and if money doesn't come in, it isn't there to give out.
There was a recent TV report on Indian outsourcing on TV, and the study in contrasts was amazing. These people realize that they're being given an opportunity, and they're willing to WORK for it. Millions of kids are studying as hard as they can to prepare for it. What happens here? No one gives a damn, and millions watch the clock, waiting until they can go home and watch TV.
Yeah, "W" is an easy target, but it's not his fault. Nor is it the fault of those greedy corporations. Americans did it to themselves. Maybe after its citizens spend a decade or so in abject poverty, America will regain her work ethic.
But I doubt it. Much more likely we'll stand on our "rights", find someone to blame, and demand we bomb the shit out of them....
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
No, China's one-party system magnifies corruption by concentrating it in the hands of the Party elite, who foster the appearance of due process by periodically executing corrupt low-ranking officials. As for the matter of mundane graft and bribery in China among ordinary people, do a little research and you'll find that it is as common as tea over there. That place is dog-eat-dog competitive, having gone from Marxian dialectical materialism to capitalist dialectical materialism in the span of less than a generation.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
When will the software dished to them be something clean enough the people who hired them can understand it well enough to be able to make mods & enhancements for subsequent versions?
It's been documented they aren't able to deal with their own code and have to rewrite it for v2.0.
This is not a good sign of companies having saved money.
There isn't a shortage of IT people. there's a shortage of good IT people. And bad coders can write bad code faster than good coders can write good code or fix the bad code, yet productivity numbers favor the goober who writes it in a fraction of time but it's substandard. (if engineers or people it the medical industry conducted themselves with the same quality, society would have disappeared a couple of centuries ago.
They sure brought a lot of misery too. The Romans were responsible for a whole shitload of wars, and generally wars of aggression. They're also responsible for a number of genocides, the most notable being that against Carthage.
You have no idea what corruption is if you think the U.S. is corrupt. In general, the U.S. is the least corrupt large country ever seen.
I have a friend who came from India, and when he got here I asked him the question I ask all new arrivals to the U.S. -- "What surprised you most about the U.S. when you got here?" His answer was, "The honesty and integrity of your government."
He offered this story:
I went to the Social Security office on my second day here. I
got in line, and right behind me walked in a businessman in
a fine suit. I automatically got out of his way to let him
go to the front of the line, but he said "No, of course not.
You were here first."
Then I started looking at the line in front of me. There were
about five people, and first in line there was an obvious wino.
When he got to the window, he had trouble stating his need and
the clerk patiently helped him fill out his form.
I got my documents in 15 minutes with no difficulty at
all, and I was treated kindly and respectfully.
I was thunderstruck. In India, to get official documents like
this without a month or more of wait, you must pay off the
local officials. The size of the baksheesh determines how much
priority you will get -- if you don't pay enough right away,
you will be sent away with another form to fill out.
Eventually, you will get your documents. A rich businessman
goes to the front of the line, pays his greater amount of
baksheesh, and gets the papers immediately with no question.
Later I found out that it would be foolish to even offer
baksheesh here. You might get worse service because you
had attempted to bribe the official, or even potentially
arrested for attempted bribery.
This attitude pervades your people and gives them a
confidence and power most of our people cannot have.
I will not make the blanket statement that there is no wrongdoing in
our government, but our government is certainly not corrupt in the
sense that almost all but a few Western European and Nort American
governments are corrupt. Corruption pervades, wrongdoing is isolated.
The U.S. is not corrupt.
The new rail link will not only speed up China's environmentally disastrous exploitation of Tibet's national resources but also hasten the systematically executed demographic disaster which is intended to turn Tibetans into a disenfrancised and sinociziced minority in their own country, not unlike Mongolians after the chinese communists took over "Inner Mongolia" and extended China's railway network there.
China is already using occupied Tibet, historically a neutral buffer state between India and China, as a military and nuclear missile base overlooking South Asia. Part of the Indian planners' realization of the need for an improved road network to complement the existing railways has undoubtably been China's communist-era expansionism towards India (including China's still unresolved invasion of north Indian territories soon after Tibet had been occupied), and Chinese military's ability to easily disable India's railway network with a sneak missile attack from their bases in Tibet.
In ideal world the democratic nations would have a common policy of supporting the economic development of democratic developing countries like India while refusing to prop up expansionist dictatorships like China through trade and investment.
Unfortunately for democratic principles, the special interest groups behind the leaders of the currently rich democratic nations are finding it more lucrative to do just the opposite.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?