According to me things become change after a Video clip of Mr SONAM WANGCHUK Laddakh
Revolutionary things happen in India which I never seen before. 5 million times by Indian Android users was taken down by Google Play Store citing policy violations. The take down of Remove China Apps which made headlines over the last week by promising to uninstall popular Chinese apps like TikTok, Helo and ShareIt, as well as some lesser known ones, came close on the heels of yet another popular app - TikTok clone Mitron being removed from Google Play Store for similar violations.
India has not been able to bridge the infrastructure gap with China even after 20 years of opening up its economy is one of the most staggering failures of a country that wishes to become the next manufacturing superpower. This question has intrigued me since the time I started studying economics and the answer is not as simple as 'land acquisition is difficult' that most people answer when asked this question. Pranab Bardhan has an entire chapter dedicated to this question in his book Awakening Giants Feet of Clay : Assessing The Economic Rise of India and China.
Bardhan writes that from the beginning of Chinese economic reforms till the early 1990's,
India was ahead of China in terms of the standard indexes of many of the infrastructural facilities. For example, at the beginning of the 1990s India’s highway and railway infrastructure was ahead of that in China in terms of route kilometers. [1]
That China can leap past ahead an India well intentioned to develop infrastructure shows both a glaring mismatch between national priorities and a difference in national cultures in India and China with China's national culture heavily skewed towards what it takes to build infrastructure projects despite its short term drawbacks.
A simple comparison of India's Geert Hofstede national culture with China and South Korea, two of this century's biggest infrastructure led growth stories makes the glaring distinction clear.
India scores the lowest among the three in long term cultural orientation which reflects in the way India is governed and what drives policymaking.[2] It is intuitive, India is the only major economy to de facto democratize before becoming rich on a per capita basis.
'Democracy with Indian characteristics'** comes with the need to think short term. In India where winning elections is prioritized, steps that appease the largest possible number of the electorate is prioritized, things like subsidies take precedence over large infrastructure projects that will take years to build and to break even and generate profit. Only when the need to build a highway is glaringly obvious and is covered by the media ad nauseum and that the general public start to complain about the lack of certain infrastructure is when an election prioritizing regime thinks it is safe enough to build or start building the project.
Projects such as the Delhi metro were not started because the government felt the need to do so, if that were the case, the government would have started them in 1990, they were started when the capital was overrun with cars and it was obvious (and hence safe) to build the metro. The present NDA government led by Narendra Modi is the only government that has a different outlook and it investing in infrastructure, possibly because the stories of India's disastrous infrastructure are covered widely by the international media and it is clear than China has taken a lead which is near impossible to bridge if we do not start soon.
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