India, China warned against complacency

China and India, who are poised to spearhead global economic growth, should not be complacent but strive to enhance productivity and develop critical thinking skills, president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci), Onkar Kanwar has said.

Speaking on the Vision for Asia in the 21st century at the Boao Forum Annual Conference 2005 held in southern Chinese island province of Hainan, Kanwar said the age of Western dominance will be over in the coming decades and Asia will become the dominant power by 2020.

Kanwar, chairman and managing director of Apollo Tyres, said recent projections have shown that China and India would be the second and the third largest economies in the world by 2050.

"Based on these conclusions, my vision of Asia is that of an optimist," he said, adding he would like to sound some warning bells so that "we in Asia do not get complacent and get overtaken by emotion rather than hard logic."

Kanwar said that it was little known that the massive development in the economies of south-east asia was primarily fuelled by capital accumulation and not by growth in productivity.

"My fear is that the same may be the case with Indian and Chinese growth stories," Kanwar said at the two-day meeting, attended by leading politicians and business leaders.

"India and China must re-examine their development models and concentrate deeply on productivity. We must engineer major breakthroughs in discoveries and focus on research and development activity," Kanwar said.

"By merely mimicking or even by adapting western discoveries, we can only go so far and no further." We are bound to hit a plateau in another five years," he warned. Kanwar also stressed on the urgent need for critical thinking skills.

"While we Asians, tend to be highly disciplined and immensely hardworking, we also tend to be rote learners and reproducers of existing thoughts and processes," he commented.

"While there is merit in this disciplined Asian behaviour, the demerit lies in our incapacity to think out of the box, to reject existing paradigms and think anew - visualise the future from totally different angles and approaches. We need to innovate massively to maintain leadership in the 21st century," he said.

Another challenge for Asia, Kanwar said, lay in the domain of widening technologically nurtured human capital.

He noted that 547 million people in India are below the age of 25, which he described as a great demographic advantage.

"But our challenge is to create a technological culture for these youth from childhood, which embeds these young men and women into the brave new world of continuous and relentless technological change," he said.

"I am proud to say that if the 21st century is destined to be a knowledge century, my country India, has already embarked on the path of knowledge as a driver," he added.