OPINION: India: Institutions and Economic Success
Sir, Your pages have carried many articles describing the rise of India, often comparing it with China, especially since the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Chandran Nair

Martin Wolf ("What India must do to catch up with and possibly outpace China", February 15) offered India tips on how it might match China's economic success. Many who know these two countries might well argue that there is more to their development than economists' conventional theories.

India and China are moving inexorably towards socio-economic change, without any real applicable models to follow. The sheer number of people involved, emerging from poverty to positions of spending power, and their draw for investors and as consumers will drive the changes to whatever positive or negative outcome. Either way, the results will place China and India as equals among the world's nations.

Be that as it may, Mr Wolf says India's advantage over China is its institutions. Maybe it is time to rethink this oft-stated conclusion. Go to any major Indian city to see how scandalously and dangerously decrepit the public health systems are.

Disenfranchised and average citizens lack the most basic needs, even in the capital, New Delhi. China has its fair share of urban poverty and deprivation, true, but one would be hard pressed to find in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou a similar spectacle to that which greets early railway arrivals to Delhi each morning: hundreds voiding themselves in an insanitary, undignified dawn ritual, even at one of the city's most beautiful monuments, the Red Fort.

This is just one visible, squalid symptom of the kind of indignity that the poorer urban slum Indians must endure, either because the institutions responsible for the most basic human needs have completely collapsed or because those responsible choose to do nothing. Even the middle class think nothing of relieving their bladders in broad daylight. Granted, one institution, the Supreme Court, famously stepped in to force a turnround with belching buses and the results are clear to see - and breathe. But that has proved the exception. Where is the outrage of those Indians who have benefited most from the economic boom?

Its rise well overdue, "Incredible India" should seek to match its growth in mobile phones, car ownership and call centres with, for one, a growth in centres for the call of nature. Providing such a basic need -- and to enforce their use appropriately -- is a true sign of development, real prosperity and strong institutions. More so perhaps than those that economists hold so dear.

Chandran Nair,
Founder and Chief Executive,
Global Institute For Tomorrow,
Hong Kong

www.globalinstitutefortomorrow.com/