For those of us who have endured Tom Friedman’s endless babble about the wonders of the economy of India, it was a welcome read on the paper’s op-ed section today to see an account that gives a different view. Entitled “The Myth of India,” author Pankaj Mishra makes the critical point that it is basically the elites in India and the U.S. (read: Friedman) who see India as a rising success story.

While Mishra betrays a hint of a belief in the power of the free-market (“there are much better reasons to expect that India will in fact
vindicate the twin American ideals of free markets and democracy that
neither Latin America nor post-communist countries — nor, indeed, Iraq
— have fulfilled.”), he is far more sobering about where the reality lies:

But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country’s $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.

Nor is India rising very fast on the report’s Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.

Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country’s market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country’s growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country (the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names). In the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s population lives, the government has reported that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003.

Here’s hoping Friedman reads his own paper and not just his own hype. The fact is India, like many other “wonders” of globalization is powered by a sea of low-wage workers, not a broadly-shared prosperity for the vast majority of people. Come to think of it, that sounds like what’s happening in the U.S., too.