India gets its point across

WORLD ECONOMY FORUM

India's gains from the 36th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum that ended yesterday are not just that it is now firmly placed on the radar screen of international investors.

The more significant achievement is that the international business community is now bracketing India with China as one of the two emerging Asian economies that are poised to increase their dominance in world economy.

The other gain is the message that it has sent out loud and clear that the Indian industry and the government are now talking in one voice.

"It seems India Inc has truly arrived. Your ministers and industry leaders have shown tremendous understanding and are not working at cross purposes," said one US delegate to the annual meeting.

Indian business leaders and the government's team, comprising two Cabinet ministers (Finance Minister P Chidambaram and Commerce Minister Kamal Nath) and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, were seen as complementing each other while propagating the India story.

There were several sessions where an Indian business leader was sharing the dais with one of the ministers as a panelist. Neither shied away from accepting that there were inherent problems of running a coalition government which delayed the decision-making process.

But at the same time they convincingly argued in different sessions that India's reforms programme was on course and irreversible.

If Chidambaram argued at a session that the global capital flows from developing countries to the developed world needed to be reversed, Mukesh D Ambani of Reliance Industries echoed similar views at the closing session by describing the present global growth pattern as unbalanced.

The success of the Rs 17-crore "India Everywhere" campaign to draw international investors' attention to India has also meant that the responsibility of the government and the business community has increased.

"We now have to deliver on the promises that we have made," admitted Nandan Nilekani, president, CEO and managing director of Infosys, who steered the campaign at the WEF meeting this year.

What may prove to be an added advantage is that even as India acquires the status of an attractive investment destination, China's lack of a transparent legal system and the absence of civil society are being cited as areas of weakness.

In fact, an entire session at the annual meeting was devoted to the absence of civil society in China and its impact on the sustainability of its growth.

The general consensus was that while China's economic success lifted millions out of poverty, there were question marks on the sustainability of such growth without an equally rapid development of its civil society.

Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan said she was horrified that the annual meeting at Davos did not discuss the human rights issues in China.

China managed to get away easily even though non-government organisations there operated under a regime of strict control and redressal of human rights violation was not easy as the judiciary tended to favour the state in such cases, she said.

The recent case of Google accepting self-censorship on its search engine as a compromise step so that it could continue to operate in that country also figured during the discussion and presented China in poor light.

Another session drew attention to the rising unrest and economic inequality in China, which raised the question of sustaining its economic growth.

In 2005 alone, more than 74,000 demonstrations were reported in China, partly due to conflicts over land rights and corruption.

In another session, Yoriko Kawaguchi, member of the house of councillors of Japan, noted that his own country, Australia and India were keen on having China grow and follow the same rules of law as other countries in the region.

No Indian delegate openly talked about this basic differentiator between India and China and the fact that India scored on this front. Chidambaram came close to doing it when he told a meeting of international investors that "We (China and India) are different, our political systems are different and our models of growth are different."

But the fact is that in spite of the several uncomfortable questions raised about China, no developed country is taking a fresh look at its engagement with the Asian giant.

Indeed, like Google decided to accept self-censorship on its search engines in China for business reasons, the developed world does not want to lose the Chinese market even though India seems to enjoy a few advantages over China.

At the closing session yesterday, the World Economic Forum announced its decision to set up two new offices "" one in New York and the other in Beijing.