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India Rising!

A friends of mine who is in the US, sent me this YouTube link:



While this India rising story is fast becoming a cliche, the video nevertheless makes things look quite amazing. And so many Indians abroad seem to be getting more and more sold on the India story.

I however believe there's more to it than meets the eye!! :-) The troubles of working (or operating business) in India are quite irking - for example I was stuck for 2 hours today in Ghatkopar - fortunately the habit of having a book in my bag helped me - but imagine the amount of morning productive time I wasted!

The stock market which went up and was hailed to stay put even as the US melted under sub-prime, has finally crashed today [last reported it fell 1300 odd points]. The real estate prices which have been rising in speculation are already falling in smaller cities and while they have stayed put in metros - the whole urban dream seems to be crumbling because of the inability of the governments to be able to supplement the real estate development with adequate infrastructure.

Another problem which is I think is more macro is the lack of a common methodology towards development. Everyone's trying their hand at everything - the governments are trying to develop small towns as well as metros as well as their suburbs. Some are touting highways as means mass goods transit, others stress on having distributed manufacturing units, others want railways to do the job. We are neither becoming like Europe (many connected smaller cities) nor like the US (few big cities with their suburbs).

Same with telecommunications - unlike any other country in the world we have two competing technologies GSM as well as CDMA - nothing wrong with that because India is a large country and can accommodate both. But what is wrong is there are no efforts being made towards interoperability of the two services.
The result - customer lock-ins for CDMA operators and lack of competition for GSM players - effectively illustrated by the fact that none of the GSM players compete with each other, neither do CDMA ones - they have formed 2 lobbies and both lobbies compete for getting - not customers - but regulations on their side. In effect leaving customers wanting on the side of soft-areas like customer service.

There is a lot that I can write but guess you get the picture that there is hope for India - but as they say - there is many a slip between the cup and the lip!

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