India is a country of contradictions. As this article at Spectator Business argues, it might be expecting GDP growth of 8% in 2008, but it's equally got some incredibly deep problems to resolve which have been summed up by this author after he runs through a few issues blocking sustainable Indian growth:"And that's before we tackle India's two greatest Achilles heels: a bloated bureaucracy with an insidiously corrupt political core; and some of the worst infrastructure the modern world has ever seen."
As an Englishman who has spent more than 3 months in India and travelled through both the North and the South, transport and bureaucracy are both tricky, with even buying a train ticket becoming an activity taking over an hour, and requiring the strength to muscle your way to the front of the "queue" (which involves full body contact or otherwise it is considered that there is a gap that someone could slip into!). If you have the money, you don't even buy the ticket yourself - you pay someone else to go through the ordeal on your behalf.
But more concerning from what I experienced as a consumer, and heard about in a business context, was the corruption. A CEO that I met in India, running a company who had relocated from the UK given that India was where their core audience was, made reference to the various issues he had in getting his head office up and running. The process of ensuring electricity involved various bribes and use of middle-men to negotiate on behalf of the company, also taking a cut. Corruption on that scale makes it impossible for anyone to work out their business case, and that was only to sort out the leccy, one of hundreds of issues to resolve.
So since experiencing India in 2007 and again this year I've always wondered exactly how this country was going to become a global superpower - as I'm told it is by every article I read - until this one.
