Indians Are Good at R&D, Hype Again!

Even many Indian and western media boasted that India has a knowledge-based economy and China has a manufacturing ecomony. These kind of hype is of pure propaganda based on no truth.

Here is a article by Sunil Jain. For the convienience, I select some data from it:

Indians' publications rose 2.5 times in the past 25 years, while Chinese increased more than 100 times during the same period!

In 1995, Indians published five articles in the prestigious Journal of American Chemical Society (JACS) versus just 2 for China, it was 34 versus 14 in the Physical Review of Letters (PRL) and 9 versus 2 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC).
So far this year, it's 4 versus 22 in JACS, 8 versus 28 in PRL and 2 versus 13 in JBC.

Technolog-intensive exports are just 5 per cent of India's total manufactured exports basket versus 23 per cent for China

By World Bank's Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM), China's score on the Knowledge Index has risen from 3.03 in 1995 to 4.21 today, India's has fallen from 2.76 to 2.61 -- that is, India has slipped even relative to itself!

In terms of innovation, which includes the articles published in scientific journals, apart from the number of R&D personnel and the number of patents, India's score has improved from 3.51 to 3.72 -- China, however, has improved from 3.94 to 4.74, another instance of that country's stupendous progress.

I had another articles on comparing the truth of India and China's R&D.

Based on the above facts and truths, China was and is doing much better than India in scientic R&D and innovation.

It is very wrong to say "India is good in R&D and China in manufacturing". The correct sentences to correctly describe the situation in these two countries should be "China does much better in R&D, innovation and manufacturing than India".

Of course, China, as a developing country, still lags behind the countries like US and Japan etc. China government and Chinese should pay more attention on the R&D which stands for the future.

IT outsourcing boom over in India

(Source)

The IT outsourcing boom seems to be over worldwide, including in India, as companies learn to be more strategic and selective but it's still too soon to call it the death knell, according to a new study.

In India, outsourcers are looking to China as a means of alleviating their growing labour shortage, says the study by Chicago-based consulting firm DiamondCluster International.

Major IT and BPO services hubs, including Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad, are reaching labour saturation and are desperately looking for educated resources elsewhere.

Within India, providers are building technology centres in lesser known locations like Kolkata, Mysore and Chandigarh.

The situation in India will drive both buyers and providers to expand their list of possible locations for operations with the labour shortage presenting an opportunity for other countries to fill the gap, the study said.

It's no surprise that a solid 75 per cent of buyers participating in DiamondCluster's fourth outsourcing survey are outsourcing to India.

But Canada is making headway as a haven for outsourcers. US-based buyers apparently believe that the higher cost of outsourcing to Canada is worth the gains in proximity, language and culture.

China has simultaneously emerged as the contender to challenge India in the years to come. The number of buyers that expect to offshore to China has soared 48 per cent since 2004. In addition, more than half of the offshore providers currently operating in India expect to grab market share in the burgeoning Chinese economy.

"Buyers are reaching the mid to final stages of current outsourcing contracts and find themselves distracted from focusing on new initiatives. And many buyers are telling us they have already captured the 'low hanging fruit' and are slow to seek out additional outsourcing opportunities," said Tom Weakland, who leads the outsourcing advisory services practice at DiamondCluster.

While buyers - 64 per cent offshore and 50 per cent onshore - remain committed to increasing their purchasing, these numbers represent a significant decline from prior years.

In 2004, none of the study participants said they would decrease the amount of outsourcing they were doing. This year, nine per cent of the buyers of onshore services and eight per cent of offshore buyers said they plan to decrease their levels of outsourcing in 2006.

"Companies are reining in outsourcing for three reasons. Either they mistakenly outsourced a process or function that is core to their business and are now bringing it back in-house; their provider over-promised and under-delivered; or the complexity of managing and measuring outsourcing projects and relationships overshadowed the benefits," says Weakland.

"This is by no means the death knell for IT outsourcing. However, boom years for growth have come and gone," he said.

"This should serve as a wake-up call for outsourcing providers that all is not well with their customer relationships and that they need to refocus on quality, clarity and measurement."

The latest DiamondCluster study reveals some troubling signs for onshore service providers. For example, less than one in three buyers of onshore services reported that all their expectations are being met, compared to 47 per cent of the buyers of offshore services.

Forty-seven per cent of buyers reported that they had abnormally terminated at least one outsourcing relationship in the prior 12 months. But here again the numbers were worse for onshore providers.

While only 28 per cent of buyers had terminated at least one offshore relationship, 42 per cent of onshore service buyers reported they had done so. Among those, 53 per cent cited poor performance by their onshore provider as the reason for abnormally terminating a relationship.

"We should also expect to see fewer successful new entrants. Second tier and smaller firms may have to face a hard choice between being acquired or building deep industry or functional skills to differentiate themselves from the outsourcing behemoths," said Weakland.

"Onshore firms in the US, many of whom have already established substantial operations in lower cost countries, may further consolidate their resources outside the US to achieve the obvious cost advantages that offshore operations provide," he added.

Buyers are also increasingly concerned about uncertain financial payback of their relationships with their onshore outsourcers. It was their second most frequently cited concern after the risk of increased management complexity.

Buyers seem to be signalling growing concern about the effectiveness of their onshore outsourcing relationships. It appears that many onshore relationships have become so complex it is difficult to gauge their financial success or failure.

The Mumbai Bombing Reveals India's Biggest Problem

The bombing in Mumbai is a sorrow and sad event but it is not isolated. It is one of the long-time struggles of Indian internal conflicts, and it reveals one of India's biggest problems: Disintegration of India.

Look back at Indian history, India was not a united country until British invasion. India today has hundreds languages, it is full of conflicts among different religions, different castes, different tribes and different cultures and even among the rich and poor. Generally India is divided even Hindus takes about 80% of India's population.

The conflicts between Hindus and Muslims has been there for a long history, which led to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh. But today, Muslims is still about 15%of India's population. There are still struggling for their equal rights and independence, especially Muslims in Kashmir. The terror attacks between Muslims and Hindus came from both sides. Here is the part of the long conflict list. In northern India, the World Hindu Council planned to build a temple in Ayodhyaon the ruins of a 16th-century Muslim mosque. The 1992 destruction of the mosque by Hindus sparked nationwide riots that killed 2,000 people. In 2002, hundreds Muslims died in Gujarat state because of Hindus/ looting, burning and killing (Source).

The conflicts among different castes exist in India too. The Indian government’s decision on university quotas for lower castes caused the protest from higher castes.

The deadly conflicts between government and people are rampant in India too.

It is hard to say who is main cause of the conflicts. But one thing is sure: Indians have a non-functioning government even it is called democracy one. Indian government does not only fail economically, but also politically. This government cannot lead Indian into a united country.

Western Dual Standards: Both India and Korea Tested Their Missiles

What happened recently? Most of western people would know Korea's missile tests. Yes, Korea tested its missiles on July 5 and 6, and western media are continuously broadcasting and discussing the news worldwide even today. US and Japan governments even brought the issue into UN and asked for sanction on Korea.

The interesting happened. India tested its long-range missile couple of days later (July 9) and resulted in a big failure. According to the Indian news, US even approved Indian missile test. What a world joke? Ironically, the so-called speech-freedom western media is keeping silence on India's missile test. CNN is still bombing its viewers with Korea's test and totally forget India. Media’s responsibility is to tell their readers or viewers the truth with balanced coverage, so that their readers and viewers can have a fair big picture of what is happening in the world. Apparently, US media failed in this. These events fully prove US media's bias against some particular countries and mislead their readers and viewers intentionally by dirty tricks.

Both India and Korea have their nuclear weapon projects. But the western countries and governments are keeping eyes on Korea and turn their eyes away from India. US and India are even talking about cooperation on nuclear technology. Don’t forget: India does not sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a responsible country.

Who could be the bigger threat to the world? Korea or India?

The thread to the world can only be substantialized by power.

Korea with only around 20 million population and has been sanctioned by world powers for more than 50 years. Its economy is weak. India is a country of more than 1.1 billion people and has enjoying the assistance from both socialism and capitalism blocks for more than 50 years. India is stronger than Korea, its threat to the world is bigger.

The claim of threat can only be justified by the history.

Korea is generally a peaceful country since it was founded. The Korean War was only a civil war for Koreans. But outsiders got involved for that. That's a pity for all Koreans including both north and south sides. Even today, Koreans of both sides are all still thinking they are one nation but they were divided against their will by so-called world powers. Korea hasn’t been in war with any other countries.

On the contrary, India's foreign policy is badly aggressive. It had wars with Pakistan, China repeatly. India had violent wars against Pakistan in 1947–48, 1965, and 1971. It had a war against China in 1962. With India's aggressive foreign policy, it has very bad relationship with almost all of it neighbors. Even today India government is repeatly saying its nuclear weapons and missiles are targeting its neighbors.

The world should know: Comparing Korea with India, India is apparently a bigger threat to the world.

The Myth of the New India

This is a article on New York Times. It speaks out some truth in India.

By PANKAJ MISHRA
London

INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story." So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India's leading business newspaper, The Economic Times, summed up the general euphoria over the event in its regular feature, "The Global Indian Takeover": "For India, it is a harbinger of things to come — economic superstardom."

This sounds persuasive as long as you don't know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia's imminent economic superstardom.

In recent weeks, India seemed an unlikely capitalist success story as communist parties decisively won elections to state legislatures, and the stock market, which had enjoyed record growth in the last two years, fell nearly 20 percent in two weeks, wiping out some $2.4 billion in investor wealth in just four days. This week India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made it clear that only a small minority of Indians will enjoy "Western standards of living and high consumption."

There is, however, no denying many Indians their conviction that the 21st century will be the Indian Century just as the 20th was American. The exuberant self-confidence of a tiny Indian elite now increasingly infects the news media and foreign policy establishment in the United States.

Encouraged by a powerful lobby of rich Indian-Americans who seek to expand their political influence within both their home and adopted countries, President Bush recently agreed to assist India's nuclear program, even at the risk of undermining his efforts to check the nuclear ambitions of Iran. As if on cue, special reports and covers hailing the rise of India in Time, Foreign Affairs and The Economist have appeared in the last month.

It was not so long ago that India appeared in the American press as a poor, backward and often violent nation, saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy and, though officially nonaligned, friendly to the Soviet Union. Suddenly the country seems to be not only a "roaring capitalist success story" but also, according to Foreign Affairs, an "emerging strategic partner of the United States." To what extent is this wishful thinking rather than an accurate estimate of India's strengths?

Looking for new friends and partners in a rapidly changing world, the Bush administration clearly hopes that India, a fellow democracy, will be a reliable counterweight against China as well as Iran. But trade and cooperation between India and China is growing; and, though grateful for American generosity on the nuclear issue, India is too dependent on Iran for oil (it is also exploring developing a gas pipeline to Iran) to wholeheartedly support the United States in its efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The world, more interdependent now than during the cold war, may no longer be divided up into strategic blocs and alliances.

Nevertheless, 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.

Since the early 1990's, when the Indian economy was liberalized, India has emerged as the world leader in information technology and business outsourcing, with an average growth of about 6 percent a year. Growing foreign investment and easy credit have fueled a consumer revolution in urban areas. With their Starbucks-style coffee bars, Blackberry-wielding young professionals, and shopping malls selling luxury brand names, large parts of Indian cities strive to resemble Manhattan.

Indian business tycoons are increasingly trying to control marquee names like Taittinger Champagne and the Carlyle Hotel in New York. "India Everywhere" was the slogan of the Indian business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year.

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.

Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by the urban-oriented economic growth, communist insurgencies (unrelated to India's parliamentary communist parties) have erupted in some of the most populous and poorest parts of north and central India. The Indian government no longer effectively controls many of the districts where communists battle landlords and police, imposing a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless rural population.

The potential for conflict — among castes as well as classes — also grows in urban areas, where India's cruel social and economic disparities are as evident as its new prosperity. The main reason for this is that India's economic growth has been largely jobless. Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.

For decades now, India's underprivileged have used elections to register their protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the 2004 general elections, they voted out a central government that claimed that India was "shining," bewildering not only most foreign journalists but also those in India who had predicted an easy victory for the ruling coalition.

Among the politicians whom voters rejected was Chandrababu Naidu, the technocratic chief minister of one of India's poorest states, whose forward-sounding policies, like providing Internet access to villages, prompted Time magazine to declare him "South Asian of The Year" and a "beacon of hope."

But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism.

Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond."