We must make that opportunity available to all Indian children.

Poor, little, rich protestors: The real grouse of anti-globalisers at WTO? Free trade isn’t helping leftist PhDs make moneyJAITHIRTH RAO The Indian Express Saturday, December 17, 2005

My story is one that is getting familiar. By a series of circumstances, both planned and fortuitous, India is well-placed to take advantage of globalisation. British rule was not planned, at least by Indians! The English language is the unintended positive consequence for us. IITs and IIMs were planned. But no planner wanted India to be a sluggard in economic growth. And it was India’s sluggishness that resulted in so many engineers and managers migrating. Without this intellectual diaspora, India’s forays into knowledge-based industries would not be possible.

Apropos of Globalisation 3.0, we are going well beyond labour cost arbitrage. We are doing to the digitised paper-intensive service industry what Henry Ford or Fredrick Taylor did to manufacturing. Our assembly line or better still our real-time work bench allows for collaborative work across complex supply chains — opportunities undreamt of ten years ago. But living in India I am denied the selective euphoria of the diaspora.

There is a fragility to India’s success as the unskilled and the “excluded” are not benefiting from these trends. We need to be inclusive, not only of manufacturing which is beginning to happen, but of agriculture. Large numbers of malnourished, illiterate and un-empowered fellow-citizens are not only a blight on our moral conscience but constitute a reservoir of human capital that is woefully under-leveraged. It is not sufficient if our children learn English, Java and C++. We must make that opportunity available to all Indian children.

Professor Venkatraman of Boston University makes a brilliant presentation on the disruptive nature of technology in industries as diverse as photography and music. Not changing, not adapting to change is an option on par with committing suicide. He makes a powerful plea that the entire paradigm of management studies has been built on insights from the automobile industry. These thoughts may be inappropriate, even misleading for the digital world. Professor Anil Gupta makes a subtle presentation underlining the fact that the global economy and its constituent national ones provide an eco-system, no more, no less. It is up to individual firms to chart their courses for survival and success.

Why is there so much opposition to it in rich as well as poor countries?” This remains a puzzle. The protestors in Hong Kong, the disrupters in Seattle, their fellow marchers elsewhere, claim to talk on behalf of the poor. Yet without free trade, the foundation of globalisation, China’s poor would have remained poor and India would have easily acquired sub-Saharan status. The overwhelming beneficiaries of free trade are poor people. This is not in dispute. And yet there seems to be some persistent fear, some inchoate anxiety that will not go away. Not all the shrill anti-globalisation types are loonies. What exactly is their concern?

Rajiv Dubey may have got it right. There is a lobby in rich countries that pretends to be pro-poor, but in fact is elitist. They are cosy and comfortable. Wal-Mart, seen as an egregious symbol of globalisation, upsets their refined upper class sensitivities. That Wal-Mart may be enriching poor Chinese and making erstwhile luxuries affordable to poor Americans is dismissed with all the disdain that privileged intellectuals can summon! What is puzzling is why the intellectual “poshocracy” of poor countries going along with this anti-globalisation posture knowing full well that opting out of world trade flows would remove the slim hope that we will dig ourselves out of poverty in our lifetimes.

Clearly, this has something to do not with absolute improvements in economies, but with relative shares of the pie. It is the basic law of capitalism that a pot-bellied pan-chewing businessman who wears safari suits and who is in the “import-export” business will on average take more risk and on average will make a lot more money than a PhD in multi-cultural anthropology from JNU. And this is from the perspective of the left-wing intellectual both unpalatable and unjust. The intellectuals of communist China don’t seem to have a problem with this. It is only the leftist elites of the West and their counterparts in India who seem to feel this way! The writer is chairman & CEO, Mphasis. Write to him at jerryrao@expressindia.com