Will India grow to threaten biggies like US/UK or will we leave China to grow past us? We all say that China has a lower population of young aged people and hence by 2020, India’s growth will be unprecedented to China’s. How many of you agree? At least I don’t and I’m quite skeptical. China’s literacy rate is 99% as opposed to India which is less than 75%. Now to the distribution of the literacy rate, it's very uneven here. Kerala with a whopping 100% and some states like Bihar with a literacy rate lesser to 40%. When are we going to rise to the level of china in literacy? Next comes their Infrastructure... In order for industries to flourish, the country should have a good Infrastructure, be it roads or rail network or flyovers or office buildings. Shanghai, which is famously compared with Bangalore as a competitor for Software Services, has an excellent Infrastructure. They have the MagLev trains..., They are too good in building roads, bridges etc., See this panoramic photograph from Wikipedia...

Chinese Government, we all frown that it's a totally useless Communist Government... But look at the way they control their inflation. Were we successful in controlling the inflation in Bangalore? Bangalore's inflation fever has even spread to other cities in India like Chennai, Hyderabad and even Tier-II cities like Coimbatore. Unless the Indian Government brings in strict reforms over the issue of Inflation, no one can help India from losing to China. Now, on to the diversity of exports.., Shanghai exports not only software services, but also a variety of other consumer electronics unlike Bangalore whose sole economy is dependent on Software service export. A diverse export strategy is always required as depending solely on one single source of income is always a risk. Also, do note that, Bangalore exports a lot of software not because of the rich talent over there, but because US feels that, Bangalore has more English speaking cheap labours than any other country in the world. If we let our inflation soar high, we'll one day end up in losing our projects to our competitors like Shanghai and Brazil in line. I'll blog more on this Inflation issue some days later...