Last week, a projection of gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates by Goldman Sachs that showed India's pace of economic growth might soon surpass China's prompted a flurry of news stories. The real story is how far behind India is - China's GDP is about $9 trillion while India's is $1.8 trillion. Even slower growth for China off such a high base will keep China ahead of India for another century or two.
In a recent paper, the economists Larry Summers and Lant Pritchett project what the gains to the global economy would be if China and India continued to grow at their current pace. Before pointing out that even fast-growing developing countries see growth eventually slow to something closer to the global mean, they calculate faster growth would mean a net gain of $56 trillion by 2033 for global GDP with China's share of that additional growth amounting to a staggering $51 trillion and India's $5 trillion.
This is a theoretical exercise since it is highly unlikely China can grow at the torrid pace it has for the past couple of decades. Nevertheless, the numbers underline the advantage of having such a gigantic base to grow off.
There are many reasons why India will never catch up with China - but least commented upon among them is a similarly enormous lead in gender equality for China. As a recent Save the Children report observes, India ranked 132nd on a gender inequality index put out by the United Nations Development Programme behind even Pakistan and Bangladesh, not to mention Sri Lanka at 75. The Gender Inequality Index measures yardsticks like the number of births to women still in their teens, the number of women with secondary level education to the proportion of women who are part of the workforce to the numbers of women in Parliament. China is some 100 places ahead of India.
The report, The World of India's Girls, offers a depressing vision of what it means to grow up as a girl in India. For starters, female foeticide is "most prevalent" among the richest sections of society. A quarter of girls never make it past Class V and 41 per cent don't complete Class VIII. About half of India's girls are married by the time they are 18. "Concern for safety of girls is one of the chief reasons girls are married off early," the report says. The number of women teachers, who would ordinarily be role models, has fallen from 38 per cent in 2001 to 31 per cent in 2012.
There is lots more - the evidence that girls struggle to survive beyond the age of five, the 38 million "missing women" in India, the largest share in the world. The report interviews 11-15-year-old girls in slums in Delhi who aspire to being policewomen, in large part because they see violence towards women and harassment as part of the fabric of their lives. Older girls matter-of-factly observe that even if they do better at studies than their brothers they are more likely to be pulled out of school. But the most disturbing of all is reading teenaged boys echo the prejudices of their parents. "Girls should not be allowed to use a mobile phone," says a boy in his late teens in Odisha. "Girls use mobile phones to talk to boys and it is hard for their parents to know who they are talking to."
Taking a break from such irritating double standards, I turned to Factory Girls, Leslie Chang's account of migrant women working in China's busiest factories in the south. In the early 2000s, women accounted for 70 per cent of the factory workforce there. China's is a tale of female emancipation and upward mobility on a mass scale. The women workers were not afraid of the police, Ms Chang found - they were not afraid of much really. "Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line," writes Ms Chang. "The young women I knew did not appear destined to return to the farm because they had never farmed before."
Among my most vivid recollections of reporting in southern Chinese cities like Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2010 and 2013 is of city centres teeming with unaccompanied young women out often till 11 p m to midnight after a day's work - shopping at street markets and eating at hotpot restaurants and laughing raucously. (In New Delhi, even in the parts dotted with ministers' gigantic compounds, it is hard to find unaccompanied women on the street after 9 p m.) I recall human resources managers in China complaining that as women discovered more opportunities in retail and restaurants, their companies were struggling to recruit as many women as they wanted. (The ratio of men and women in factories had by then fallen to about 50-50.) The contrast between China's quasi-developed world status and India's is very large, but nowhere more so than in how women conduct their lives, the glaring imbalance in sex ratios in both countries notwithstanding.
The rape last Friday of a woman coming home from an early night of socialising is a reminder of how far we have to go. The banning of web-based taxi-hailing services is a substitute for thoughtful action by our patriarchal governing classes because they are likely unaware that middle- and upper middle-class women felt liberated to have services like Uber and Ola at their fingertips. And how seriously does the government take safety for women on public transport, anyway? One of the smallest sums doled out in the Budget earlier this year was the outlay for the safety of women on public transport. The much heralded programme of girls' emancipation (Beti Bachao) received Rs 100 crore, about the same as the money allocated to a sports university in Manipur. Of course, there are countries in the world that treat women worse than we do, but at least they don't pretend they will one day catch up with China.
Twitter: @RahulJJacob
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