Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

I spent few days in Delhi and Agra after new year, it was a reallly cool experience, the people were great, extremely friendly and educated, the food was awesome and the sights amazing (Agra is obviously a must with the impressive Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort but the Qudbut mosque and minarete in Delhi are also a great place to visit in Delhi that is less known but equally beatifull). I can wait to go again and to visit some other cities or to see more of Delhi since I missed most of the city.
What was surprising is the city infrastructure, I was expecting Delhi to be more like Bangkok, Manila or Beijing (Bangkok has actually improved a lot in the last 10 years, it now takes only 20 minutes to go downtown from the airport versus 2 hours 10 years ago when I first went) but they are definitely behind which is surprising given the economic growth that the country has had in the last years. I was told that all the investment in infrastructure has not been enough to keep up with the growth in population and this is the reason that they roads seems to be permanently collapsed or there is no reliable source of electricity and all the high tech companies have to have their own power generators to guarantee 24 hours. The other theory that perhaps explains this better is that while the growth in countries like China has been due to manufacturing which provides jobs to all sort of people in the society, low and middle class included, the growth in India has been driven by high tech and IT outsourcing which provides jobs to the educated part of the society but not to all of them. So the recent economic growth in Chinas has been spread more broadly than in India, the theory goes and this is reflected in the country infrastructure which is extremely unbalanced. If this is the case, I think that the goverment there might not be doing a good job in making sure that all the wealth coming to India is reinvested back into the country. Another interesting statistic that I heard was about health care spending, India is way behind countries like Europe or Japan (and the US but the US seems to actually be spending way more than anyone else in health care which should also raise a red flag) so this again points towards a bad goverment spending policy.
In any case, India is definitely the country to watch in the next years, for the last few years they have started getting into manufacturing so they might go through a change similar to China in the last 10 years, they are obviously ahead of the curve in the high tech arena compared to other countries in the region and even compared with China, they have a large population of very hard working people and dedicated people and a beatiful country with lots of natural resources. Countries and cities can change surprisingly fast (witness Shanghai in the last 10 years or Bangkok as I mentioned) and I am sure that India will change for the better. I will definitely keep watching and visiting them.

CD

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