Fareed Zakaria on India, disaster and hope

To understand how much and how fast India is changing, look at its response to the tsunami. I don't mean the government's reaction but that of individual Indians. In the two weeks after the tidal wave hit, the Prime Minister's Relief Fund, the main agency to which people make donations, has collected about $80 million. After the Gujarat earthquake of April 2001, it took almost one year to collect the same amount of money.

But the real story might be that 20 years of modest but persistent reforms in India have had huge effects. Over the past 15 years, India has been the second fastest-growing large economy in the world (after China), with an average growth rate of 6 percent. Per capita income in the country has almost doubled (from an admittedly tiny base), and more than 100 million Indians have moved out of poverty...

China is following the East Asian model, with a strong government promoting and regulating capitalist growth. But India might well be forging a new path, of necessity, with society making up for the deficiencies of the state. Actually, this is not entirely new. In some ways India's messy development resembles that of another large, energetic, chaotic country where society has tended to loom larger than the state—

While Zakaria's very optimistic take on things may be a bit idiosyncratic, for reasons mentioned in the article I root for India rather than China as the first 1 billion person wealthy superpower.
- posted by Anonymous @ Thursday, January 20, 2005