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WILL POPULATION BE A BOON OR A BANE FOR INDIA? According to the 2001 Census, India’s population was 102.9 crores. Viewed in a global context, India constitutes 16.9 per cent of world population and 2.4 per cent of the global land area. Currently, India’s population is estimated to be around 111.2 crores. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. The population of India grew by 21.6 per cent in the first decade following Independence; the rate rose to 24.8 per cent during the next decade. The growth began declining from the third decade onwards and in between 1991 and 2001; it declined to 21.5 per cent. Despite population growth in India declining steadily over the last two decades, the population size is increasing because of the high proportion of young people in the reproductive age group. The population size will continue to grow for some more time because of the “population momentum“ factor. The high population growth rate in some parts of the country is due to the large size of the population in the reproductive age group, higher fertility due to lack of contraception, and high wanted fertility due to the high infant mortality rate (IMR). According to the report of the Registrar General of India, Technical Group on Population Projections: (A)The population of India is expected to increase from 1,029 million to 1,400 million during the period 2001-2026-an increase of 36 per cent in 25 years at the rate of 1.2 per cent annually. (B)The Crude Birth Rate will decline from 24.1 in 2004 to 16.0 during 2021-25 because of the decreasing level of total fertility. (C)The IMR, reported to be 58 in 2004, is expected to decline to 40 by the end of the period 2021-25. (D) With declining fertility and increase in life expectancy, the number of older people is expected to more than double, from 71 million in 2001 to 173 million in 2026. (E)The urban population, which was 28 per cent in 2001, is expected to increase to 38 per cent by 2026. (F)The total fertility rate (TFR) is expected to decline from three in 2003 to two during 2021-25. The assumption is that the TFR would decline steadily and touch the floor value of 1.8 in some states. With this, the weighted TFR is projected to reach the replacement level of 2.1 by 2021-25. Population stabilisation is not [...]

WILL CORPORATE INDIA GO GLOBAL? The intense competition unfolding in India today has ensured the rise of several world-class and soon-to-be-world-class companies. Entrepreneurial ferment is in the air. Yet, there is an under utilised asset that corporate India should recognize-the Indian diaspora. China has shown the way forward. Its worldwide diaspora numbers about 50 million, compared to India’s approximately 20 million. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. Over the last two and half decades, the Chinese government has successfully tapped into the financial, managerial, knowledge and social networks of the overseas Chinese. This has resulted in mutual gain. In the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping’s China first opened up, only Chinese entrepreneurs overseas could compensate for the murkiness of the Chinese corporate environment and chose to invest. During the late 1980s, 70 per cent of foreign direct investment into China came, from this community, especially from the ethnically Chinese locales of Taiwan and the then British colony of Hong Kong. Their catalytic function thus served; today China is a central part of most major corporate boardrooms’ investment maps. In recent years, the US Census Bureau has reported about one million India-born residents in the US, as compared to 1.5 million China born residents. The Chinese community in the US is larger mostly because migration from China to the US began as early as the 1840s; migration from India followed about a century later. But, importantly, migration from India hit its stride in the 1960s and thereafter-precisely when Mao’s China had curtailed migration-so that more Indians than Chinese have found their professional ways into American corner offices and boardrooms today. Indians have thus steadily and very visibly reached upper executive echelons. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Indian origin, responsible for putting the Indian diaspora on the radar, were once senior executives technology firms. Success has not been limited to information technology, but has spanned sectors like consumer products and aviation. And the Indian community as a whole is wealthy- surveys by the likes of Merrill Lynch point to two hundred thousands millionaire families and median income for people of Indian origin of $60,093 compared to the US median income of $38,885. Encouragingly, the government has made strides in acknowledging the value of the Indian diaspora. The high-profile Pravasi Bharatiya Divas is now in its fourth year and the India Resurgent Bonds scheme of [...]

WHICH STATE WILL BE THE MOST PROSPEROUS? The question pre-supposes that states will continue in their present geographical form and will not be broken up. Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal are too large to be governed efficiently. There are three additional points: First, regional development is also a function of economic integration with immediate neighbours. This has begun to happen in the South. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. Second, India’s future will depend on the Hindi heartland-Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. Third, road networks are mainstreaming states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. The problem lies in central India and the East. Per capita income is the most obvious indicator of prosperity, but it is not the only one. Judging on the basis of current trends, Chandigarh will be the richest state of lndia. Delhi, or the National Capital Territory         (NCT), will be next. This is not fair, one might argue. Chandigarh and Delhi are not quite states. And a state like Goa, which will also do well, is small. Among major states, we are talking about Maharashtra, followed by Gujarat. Haryana will follow, pulled up by the NCR factor. Punjab will come next, but will increasingly fall behind. In the next category will be the southern clutch of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. However, two states-Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh-will break away from historical trends. These are the states to watch out for. The percentage of the population below the poverty line is another indicator of prosperity. In the states mentioned, there will be poverty reduction. But one state, not listed above, will also have a very low ratio of poverty-Jammu & Kashmir. Prosperity can also mean access to physical or social infrastructure. If one forgets about Chandigarh and Delhi, the best physical infrastructure will be found in Goa, Maharashtra and Punjab, with Gujarat, Haryana, Kerala and Tamil Nadu following. If one talks about roads, Haryana, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh will be the best. In power and sewerage, Gujarat will lead the pack. In terms of social infrastructure, Kerala will still lead, followed by Tamil Nadu. To restate the obvious, prosperity will be in the North, the West and the South. Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Bihar, in that order, are states I wouldn’t want to live in, even a decade or more from [...]

INDIA‘S NEXT BIG GROWTH SECTOR India’s economy has been dramatically changing in the last 15 years, It is now the latest of a long string of Asian countries that have been transformed by a sharp acceleration in growth and development since the mid-20th century, However, India’s growth trajectory has been very different from that of other Asian countries. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. The standard Asian “miracle” was all about deploying ever larger amounts of labour and capital in manufacturing and construction, In contrast, India has so far grown by deploying a highly skilled but cheap middle class in the services sector, This has led to a boom in banking, media, software, business process outsourcing, tourism and so on. As a result, the services sector now dominates the Indian economy at 55 per cent of cop, (In comparison, services only account for 35 per cent of China’s GDP). India’s unique growth path was the result of two historical accidents: First, it already had an educated middle-class in place before economic reforms were introduced; second, the information technology and communications revolutions of the 1990s coincided with India’s economic liberalisation. Unfortunately, the unique services-led growth model has a major constraint-the size of India’s skilled middle class. A figure of 300 million is often quoted in the media, but, in my view, the middle class is still a fraction of this size. This is why the country is currently experiencing one of the sharpest escalations in wages/salaries of skilled workers ever witnessed. Ask any major corporate and you will be told that the biggest constraint to expansion is the availability of skilled workers. In other words, a growth path relying exclusively on the urban middle class is no longer tenable. Montek. S. Ahluwalia (Vice-chairman Planning commission) So, is this the end of the Indian growth story? No, Two completely new factors will drive growth over the next 15 years. First, a primary education revolution is rapidly pushing up literacy rates across the country, Since the mid -1990s, the efforts of the government, NGOs and, more importantly, private schools, have pushed up primary and secondary enrolment rates sharply-an achievement that is rarely recognised. We have witnessed how schools have sprouted in remote places like Arunachal Pradesh. This will boost the basic literacy rate to over 90 per cent by 2020. In turn, this will make it possible, [...]

WILL INDIA SUFFER FROM AN ENERGY CRUNCH? Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. An assessment of how India is doing in terms of energy depends very much on how the question is framed. If we are to measure the current state against our past, we seem to be doing well indeed: the Planning Commission estimates that the total primary energy supply increased from 83 million tonne of oil equivalent (mtoe) in 1950-51 to 440 mtoe in 2001-02. Over this period, commercial energy supply increased even more significantly, from 22 mtoe to about 300 mtoe, while power generation went up from 5 billion Kw-hours to 515 billion Kw-hours. But we remain woefully constrained in terms of overall energy availability. Per capita energy consumption is a third and per capita electricity consumption a fifth, of the world average. While higher energy and electricity consumption is not an end in itself, availability of adequate and modern forms of energy is generally correlated with human and economic development. Worse still, the distribution of energy use in the country is highly skewed, with a wide disparity between the energy haves and have-nots. About a third of our total primary energy supply still comes from non-commercial sources (biomass, dung) that are used mostly in a traditional fashion-direct combustion-by an estimated two-thirds of the country’s population (mostly the rural poor) for their energy needs. The only worse performers are the poorer African nations and a few countries in Asia. And over 40 per cent of the households in India still do not have electricity. In terms of energy supply, we are fortunate to have fairly extensive coal resources. While detailed assessment of reserves is needed, there is a general consensus that coal will be a mainstay of the country’s energy future. But the difficulties in rapid increase in power generation capacity have become apparent in recent years. Oil and gas resources are much more limited, resulting in high dependency on imports (for oil, about 70 per cent of total use). The tightening global oil markets, driven by the United States’ enormous appetite and China’s growing demand, are likely to pose continuing problems for India-our oil consumption and imports saw an annual growth of over 5 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively, between 1990 and 2002. Looking forward, the major challenges for the Indian energy sector are three fold: (A)We need [...]