By David Pilling
Published: September 24 2008 20:15 | Last updated: September 24 2008 20:15
If ever there were a symbol of India's ambitions to become a modern nation, it would surely be the Nano, the tiny car with the even tinier price-tag. A triumph of homegrown engineering, the $2,200 (€1,490, £1,186) Nano encapsulates the dream of millions of Indians groping for a shot at urban prosperity. That process has stalled.
The Nano has run into trouble because of a messy tussle over land with dispossessed farmers. But the struggle to determine whether West Bengal's paddy fields yield up crops or cars is symbolic of something much bigger: the difficulty India has in emulating the manufacturing-led models of countries that have hauled themselves from poverty.
No big economy has prospered without undergoing a huge, often brutal, shift of labour from the countryside to cities and from farms to factories. In Britain, this process was underpinned by the enclosure acts of the 18th and 19th centuries, which drove people from the land by expropriating the commons, creating a landless working class that became fodder for the dark satanic mills of its industrialisation.
The pattern, with some variations, was repeated elsewhere, including in Japan and South Korea, where people were pushed by poverty and pulled by ambition to work in vast urban conglomerations. China, today, is in the throes of the biggest mass migration in history as people flock from subsistence farming to clock in at the world's workshop. As many as 600m people, or about 47 per cent of China's population, live in cities, at least 100 of which have swelled to more than 1m inhabitants. According to McKinsey, the consultancy, the country is adding a new Chicago a year to its urban throng.
Now look at India. According to Rana Hasan, labour expert at the Asian Development Bank, of the 406m labour force in 2000, 78 per cent lived in rural areas against just 22 per cent in towns and cities. The structural transformation from low-productivity farm labour to higher-productivity industry has been painfully slow. Today, agriculture employs about 60 per cent of the workforce but accounts for a measly one-fifth of national output. The predominantly urban, "organised" sector produces 40 per cent of output with just 7 per cent of the workforce.
According to unpublished research*, in 2004 there were 6.75m "standard workers" (working 300 days a year, eight hours a day) engaged in Indian manufacturing versus 61m in the Chinese sector. The Indian figure may underestimate the true picture by up to two-thirds because of "unregistered enterprises" that slip through the statistical net. Even so, there is a yawning gap with China.
India's information technology and service sector, no matter how dynamic, simply cannot absorb enough labour. To truly shine, India will need millions, perhaps tens of millions, more manufacturing jobs. Why has it not created them?
One answer is that it got off to a false start. Mahatma Gandhi's idealisation of rural simplicity set the tone for post-independence policies that concentrated on heavy-industry import substitution but was biased against creating labour-intensive manufacturing jobs. Policies of "reserving" entire production lines for small-scale enterprises throttled automation.
Even now that some of these policies are being dismantled, as states vie for investment, you often need up to 100 permits, chits and slips to set up a factory. Rigid labour laws, which make it hard to fire workers, as well as pot-holed roads and intermittent electricity supplies, remain formidable barriers to industrialisation.
More fundamentally still, as the dispute over land in West Bengal shows, it is hard to engineer mass migration in a democracy. In contrast to 18th century Britain and 21st century China, the vote of a dispossessed Indian peasant is worth the same as that of a would-be industrialist. Collectively, it is worth more. "You have to hand it to Indian democracy," says Mr Hasan. "It does give you a voice. But that makes it very difficult to negotiate change."
The fact that a process is slow and messy does not mean it is doomed, argues Kishore Mahbubani, dean of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. India was slow off the mark, dismantling the Licence Raj in 1991, more than a decade after Deng Xiaoping unleashed China's potential. "My sense is that it will catch up," Mr Mahbubani says. Indeed, where investment has come, such as in automotive components, advocates argue that quality matches world standards.
Amartya Sen, Nobel economist, agrees that democracy need be no obstacle to industrialisation. But even if short-term obstacles – such as bureaucracy and access to land – are overcome, he sees a severe bottleneck ahead. That is the neglect of basic education and healthcare which, as well as being scandalous in its own right, deprives India of the fit and literate workforce any competitive industry requires.
Mao Zedong, for all the reckless horror he unleashed, did bring schools and rudimentary healthcare to the peasants. "The train of China's industrialisation runs on the secure foundation of Maoist rails," says Prof Sen. If India is to become a car-owning democracy, it will have to solve some basic problems first.
The Nano has run into trouble because of a messy tussle over land with dispossessed farmers. But the struggle to determine whether West Bengal's paddy fields yield up crops or cars is symbolic of something much bigger: the difficulty India has in emulating the manufacturing-led models of countries that have hauled themselves from poverty.
No big economy has prospered without undergoing a huge, often brutal, shift of labour from the countryside to cities and from farms to factories. In Britain, this process was underpinned by the enclosure acts of the 18th and 19th centuries, which drove people from the land by expropriating the commons, creating a landless working class that became fodder for the dark satanic mills of its industrialisation.
The pattern, with some variations, was repeated elsewhere, including in Japan and South Korea, where people were pushed by poverty and pulled by ambition to work in vast urban conglomerations. China, today, is in the throes of the biggest mass migration in history as people flock from subsistence farming to clock in at the world's workshop. As many as 600m people, or about 47 per cent of China's population, live in cities, at least 100 of which have swelled to more than 1m inhabitants. According to McKinsey, the consultancy, the country is adding a new Chicago a year to its urban throng.
Now look at India. According to Rana Hasan, labour expert at the Asian Development Bank, of the 406m labour force in 2000, 78 per cent lived in rural areas against just 22 per cent in towns and cities. The structural transformation from low-productivity farm labour to higher-productivity industry has been painfully slow. Today, agriculture employs about 60 per cent of the workforce but accounts for a measly one-fifth of national output. The predominantly urban, "organised" sector produces 40 per cent of output with just 7 per cent of the workforce.
According to unpublished research*, in 2004 there were 6.75m "standard workers" (working 300 days a year, eight hours a day) engaged in Indian manufacturing versus 61m in the Chinese sector. The Indian figure may underestimate the true picture by up to two-thirds because of "unregistered enterprises" that slip through the statistical net. Even so, there is a yawning gap with China.
India's information technology and service sector, no matter how dynamic, simply cannot absorb enough labour. To truly shine, India will need millions, perhaps tens of millions, more manufacturing jobs. Why has it not created them?
One answer is that it got off to a false start. Mahatma Gandhi's idealisation of rural simplicity set the tone for post-independence policies that concentrated on heavy-industry import substitution but was biased against creating labour-intensive manufacturing jobs. Policies of "reserving" entire production lines for small-scale enterprises throttled automation.
Even now that some of these policies are being dismantled, as states vie for investment, you often need up to 100 permits, chits and slips to set up a factory. Rigid labour laws, which make it hard to fire workers, as well as pot-holed roads and intermittent electricity supplies, remain formidable barriers to industrialisation.
More fundamentally still, as the dispute over land in West Bengal shows, it is hard to engineer mass migration in a democracy. In contrast to 18th century Britain and 21st century China, the vote of a dispossessed Indian peasant is worth the same as that of a would-be industrialist. Collectively, it is worth more. "You have to hand it to Indian democracy," says Mr Hasan. "It does give you a voice. But that makes it very difficult to negotiate change."
The fact that a process is slow and messy does not mean it is doomed, argues Kishore Mahbubani, dean of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. India was slow off the mark, dismantling the Licence Raj in 1991, more than a decade after Deng Xiaoping unleashed China's potential. "My sense is that it will catch up," Mr Mahbubani says. Indeed, where investment has come, such as in automotive components, advocates argue that quality matches world standards.
Amartya Sen, Nobel economist, agrees that democracy need be no obstacle to industrialisation. But even if short-term obstacles – such as bureaucracy and access to land – are overcome, he sees a severe bottleneck ahead. That is the neglect of basic education and healthcare which, as well as being scandalous in its own right, deprives India of the fit and literate workforce any competitive industry requires.
Mao Zedong, for all the reckless horror he unleashed, did bring schools and rudimentary healthcare to the peasants. "The train of China's industrialisation runs on the secure foundation of Maoist rails," says Prof Sen. If India is to become a car-owning democracy, it will have to solve some basic problems first.
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(This is to ignore the fact that if many applicants seek to play the numbers game then any perceived advantage will cease to exist and an applicant would have been better off applying to a college with a high number of applicants to places which, in the next year, will have fewer)
As with other guides for Oxbridge entrance, this one seems to have no basis in experience of what actually occurs. Having read all the books on the market, NONE of them give an accurate portrayal of the decision-making process.
As for the idea that schools have relationships with Colleges - this is at least twenty years out of date. The only schools which have an advantage are those which do not produce the bland pro forma references for applicants. Such references are entirely worthless.
This article isn't worth the server space it is hosted on.
Due to the pooling system, any attempts to 'play the game' when choosing colleges won't work.
The best advice? If you're good enough for Cambridge, apply to either a college that you really like, or a college with a good reputation in the pool.
Another New Hall friend of mine applied there because she actually likes the place. She is a very happy and active member of the college.
When I applied, I did all those stats for college, like the above article. My school teacher wanted to apply a certain college that I was not keen about, because he knows someone there. At the end, I didn't use these tricks. It's not just the 'getting-in Cambridge' part that is important; it's the 'three-years at Cambridge' part that is. So I went for the one I really liked and got in. It felt great to know that I got in because of my abilities, not what kind of tricks I used.
What happened? I got there on interview day to discover there was only one place on offer that year, and fourteen applicants for it... I wasn't the only one to have done the math and tried to game the system.
Yes, I got the place. But I hated the course and ended up switching to something else after just two weeks - arguably I would have been much better off at a bigger, less cliquey college.
I'd recommend you pick a subject you feel passionate about, that you've properly researched, at a college you feel most comfortable at.
To sum up, I believed those who do have the potential to be an oxbridge should just choose whichever they like. This article is quite futile and there is very little point to believe in what it says. TO THOSE WHO WANT TO APPLY OXBRIDGE: Just shows those interviewers that you are an interested person. BE YOURSELF.
The real star would always shine through the crowds.
My advice to anyone wanting to apply then, would be to do so, and to ignore all this nonsense. Picking a course and a college should be down to passion and gut feeling. Go to an open day, find a place you like, and apply. There is nothing to gain by trying to cheat the system, and ultimately, you'll only be cheating yourself out of what you want the most.
And it's Queens' with the apostrophe after the 's'. An apostrophe before the 's' is Oxford's Queen's College.
Moreover, as a Cambridge student myself, I should stress that choosing your college by what's least competitive is potentially foolish. Despite what you may have heard, not all colleges will suit everyone perfectly: there are many variances between colleges, including the Fellows' areas of expertise; you have to do your research to find out what (and who) suits you.
And anyway, who wants to spend three years of their lives at a college they chose because it seemed easier to get into? Where's the integrity in deliberately not going for what you feel is the best?
Another person selling his take on the supposedly secret knowledge behind getting to Oxbridge.
The reason why it more candidates get in to do history than social sciences may be that history is undersubscribed. Or it may be that the people applying to do history really want to do history and have got good scores at the right A levels. A bright student who is perfect for economics isnt magically going to improve her chances by applying to do history, if she has no interest in history and cant show a spark.
Improve your chances? go to the open days yourself (not your mum), talk to the tutors, do the A levels they tell you to do and learn to love your subject.
And dont waste any of your hard earned cash on any course that promises to sell you insider knowledge.