Page 2 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW A comparative
failure Infrastructure Growth in
India and China: A Comparative Study
edited by Dhandapani Alagiri
Reviewed by David
Simmons
railways, in fact just about
everything in the country more complex than a
street vendor's cooking grill is as dysfunctional
as claimed (and there is substantial evidence that
it is so), how can the Indian economy function at
all? And yet it not only functions, its gross
domestic product has been growing at rather startling
rates for years. Something
like China's.
Ah yes, China, that other
vast Asian country mentioned in book title. What
about China?
Well, as noted above, there
is not much helpful information in this volume on
what India could actually learn from the
experience of its giant neighbor. But really, can
it practically be otherwise?
It is indeed
always tempting to make comparisons between India
and China. They have both tapped into the
globalization phenomenon at a pace that has surely
caused sleepless nights for not a few of the
Western corporate fat cats who started that whole
game with visions of slave-wage-generated profits
dancing in their heads. Both countries have vast
populations and, although hundreds of millions of
their people have not benefited from the "economic
miracle" but remain in squalor, significant
proportions have indeed experienced greatly
improved wealth, to an extent that pressure on the
Earth's resources – especially energy, in which
neither country is anywhere near self-sufficient –
is expected to multiply at rather frightening
rates.
However, for the purposes that
allegedly motivated this book, China and India are
not particularly comparable. Their systems of
governance are utterly different, and governance,
after all, is at the root of relative progress in
infrastructure development in any country, not
just these two. The blame for India's decrepit
infrastructure can be laid squarely at the
doorstop of its democratically elected
governments, hobbled by lethargy and incompetence
at the federal level and by inefficiency and
corruption at all other levels, with very few
exceptions.
Similar charges can be made in
China, especially at the provincial levels and
below, but where it matters, the fact that China
is not a democracy tends to make it more
efficient. Theoretically, in a dictatorship, if
some bureaucrat or job foreman or ditch digger
doesn't do as the leaders say, they can just shoot
him. Of course that doesn't happen much anymore in
modern China (as far as we know from that mine of
information that is Xinhua), but the point remains
valid. In a democracy, if the bureaucrats and job
foremen and ditch diggers simply don't do as they
are told, there is not that much you can do about
it even if the leadership has the will – which,
alas, has evidently been lacking at the highest
levels through much of the six-decade history of
independent India.
A more interesting and
helpful – because less apples-and-oranges –
comparative study might be to compare India's
progress with those of other Asian democracies,
some of which have faced similar obstacles to
India's and yet, in varying degrees, handled them
more efficiently.
There is the occasional
useful, even entertaining (if you're the sort
whose idea of a fun evening is microwaving some
popcorn and watching the Bloomberg channel) fact
to be found it this book, and it appears to have
been compiled with good intentions. It has also
been formatted in a manner that can be helpful to
the reader, such as the summaries that appear atop
each article, which are so well condensed and
comprehensive that they can function as much more
readable substitutes for the articles themselves,
thereby cutting down reading time by at least 90%.
Now that's efficiency.
By and large,
though, it is little more than a statement of the
obvious.
Notes 1. A
recent example of an editor apparently taking this
precept literally is Consumption boosts China
stocks, Asia Times Online, September
19. 2. It is estimated
that at least one-third of India's 1 billion-plus
population can carry on a conversation in English
with sufficient competence to be classified as
"English speakers", albeit always as a second
language. That works out to 300,000-350,000
people.
Infrastructure
Growth in India and China: A Comparative Study
edited by Dhandapani Alagiri. The ICFAI University
Press, 2006. ISBN: 81-314-0306-8. Price US$17; 228
pages.
David Simmons is a
regional correspondent for Asia Times Online based
in Thailand.
(Copyright 2007 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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