Image by rvw via Flickr
I am sick and tired of hearing about how China is “awesome” and India “sucks” when it comes to infrastructure. Sure, we have our bureaucracy and corruption, but its nothing compared to the scale at which it occurs in China. For us, a down day is when farmers refuse to pay back SKS. Compare that with Chinese bank loans that stood at $6,500 per capita in 2010 compared to gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of $4,400.
And their much envied high speed trains? It is a $330 billion scam where railway bridges were constructed by untrained unskilled migrant workers and rocks and gravel were tossed into pier foundations instead of concrete. Take this: when two bullet trains collided in July 2011, bulldozers buried the rubble even as bodies fell out of the windows of the carriages.
So what about the growth miracle? Sure, China is to manufacturing as India is to IT & BPO. But they seem to have lost their way when their “planned” economy allowed property construction to take up 13% of their GDP (from 3% in 1999) compared to 5% in India.
Yes, we flushed $7.82 billion down the NREGA. But we have nothing on the 18,000 officials who have fled the country taking a combined $126 billion dollars with them.
So the next time you wish for the Chinese miracle in India, keep in mind that our bottom-up economy, for all its messiness, is still better than one that is centrally planned and top-down.
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