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02-01-2007, 14:22 PM
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#1 (permalink)
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Postmaster General
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Join Date: 08-20-03
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India gives Britain a wake-up call
Quote:
India gives Britain a wake-up call
By Peter Foster
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 01/02/2007
Peter Foster's India blog
New Delhi
It is almost a decade since Prince Philip fixed his imperious gaze on a clapped-out fuse box in an Edinburgh electronics factory and observed that it looked as though "it had been put in by an Indian".
For decades, during the days of the sclerotic, Soviet-inspired Licence Raj in the 1970s and 1980s, Indians had to put up with those kinds of derogatory remarks, knowing as their own President A. P. J. Kalam acknowledged in his visionary book India 2020, that there was more than an element of truth behind the Prince's prejudice.
Not any more. Yesterday, as Corus, formerly British Steel, accepted a £6.2 billion bid from India's Tata Steel, should be remembered as the seismic day when corporate India slammed its fist on the global table of trade and demanded to be taken seriously.
As a resident of India who has watched the country's breakneck growth these past three years, I am not surprised by Tata's victory. But the reaction to the deal in Britain is quaintly revealing of attitudes towards India that Britain can no longer afford.
It was not just the fact of the sale, but its audacity — Tata is almost five times smaller than Corus — that speaks such volumes about the current ambition in corporate India.
For followers of the international mergers and acquisitions boom of the past two years, the Corus buy-out might be just another deal, but it is also the moment when India's economic miracle reached a wider public — not least the 24,000 Corus employees in Britain whose fate now rests in Indian hands.
The truth is that Britain — as Gordon Brown acknowledged recently on his first visit to India — has been slow to catch on to the Indian growth story, a fact that cannot be solely attributed to India's continued use of investment caps that keep foreign businesses out of key sectors such as retail and banking.
Other countries have done much better. India last month enjoyed the historical irony of Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea, an Asian peer who made his fortune in Cobra Beer, leading a delegation of 150 English merchants begging for new business opportunities in the old Empire.
It is equally revealing to remember that Prince Philip made that fuse box remark in 1999, a full eight years after the current prime minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, began to implement the economic reforms that are now delivering India's much-vaunted nine per cent annual economic growth.
The time has now come — as the troop of British ministerial visits to India this year implicitly acknowledges — for Britain to catch up with the new Indian reality. For many in India, it is a question of attitude. The recent Celebrity Big Brother race row was treated with a mature disdain in India, a country too enthused and engrossed in forging its future to be overly prickly about the imperial past.
"How is it," wondered most Indian newspaper editorials, "that Britain still holds such backward, Luddite — frankly embarrassing — views about India." India reserved its pity for backward Britain, not the accomplished, smart and soon-to-be-very-rich Shilpa Shetty.
Perhaps Britain's failure to "get" just how fundamental the changes in India are is forgivable. At the end of last year, for the first time, more money flowed out of India than in — as corporate India, backed by a vast global fund of hot private equity money, went on a shopping spree. Big Indian names in heavy industry, pharmaceuticals and IT, the likes of Wipro, Tata, Mahindra & Mahindra, Bharat Forge, Asian Paints, Ranbaxy, Dr Reddy's, have all been on the prowl for European and American companies.
Many of the deals, worth a few hundred million pounds, were small enough to go unnoticed, but the Tata-Corus buy-out caps a trend that analysts predict will only grow as India looks abroad for new markets and the technical know-how to expand its own businesses.
Last year, a report published by India Brand Equity Foundation found that India had emerged as the third largest investor in Britain, raising its rank by five in a single year. And the single biggest investor? The Tata Group which already invests in 16 British companies, employing more than 3,000 people.
In India, the pace of change is obvious, because it is there for all to see. Last week, I drove to a golf club outside New Delhi for the first time in four months — a course I have played for most of my three years here — and got lost, so rapidly has the skyline and the road layout in Delhi's new satellite boom town of Gurgaon changed. During the same period New Delhi's traffic jams have become visibly worse — an impression explained by the fact that 65,000 new cars enter Delhi's roads every year.
The statistics are capable of scrambling the mind. Last year, India doubled the number of mobile phone connections from 75 million to 150 million: little wonder that global players such as Vodafone are queueing up for a piece of the action. According to my newspaper this morning, corporate India will buy a new private jet every three days for the next three years.
Such growth, we are told, is to be welcomed — Mr Brown, while in India, was quick to reassure his audience back home that the benefits will be seen in "thousands of jobs created in the years to come" — but to see at first hand the sheer hunger in India for success is to know that life in the global economy is going to get tougher, even for the skilled.
Indian students, as any British university chancellor will testify, have a work ethic of which most British students can only dream. By 2010, China and India combined will graduate 12 times the number of engineers, mathematicians, scientists and technicians as America. A skilled factory worker might cost the company £1-£2.50 per hour, compared with upwards of £10 in Europe.
All of which is not to say that India doesn't have its share of problems. Perhaps, as the nay-sayers would have it, India's economic "miracle" is just a hot-money mirage shimmering above the timeless old Indian sands of woeful infrastructure, poor social provision, mass poverty, political corruption and a yawning fiscal deficit. But on current performance, you'd be mad to bet on it.
India gives Britain a wake-up call | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph
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Ah well!
I adopt the stiff British upper lip! 
Note the sentence construction! 
__________________
"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."
I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.
HAKUNA MATATA
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02-01-2007, 14:26 PM
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#2 (permalink)
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Seeker of Rivendell
Senior Contributor
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The stiff upper lip's utterances today are of no more significance to this world than the scurrying of ants is to the universe.
Well done Tata! A very special moment for all Indians 
__________________
"There is no excellence in all this world that can be separated from right living." - David Star Jordan My Blog
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02-01-2007, 14:28 PM
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#3 (permalink)
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Contributor
Join Date: 06-05-06
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It should be noted that Prince Philip was widely derided at the time for his remarks. He is many things (among them an extremely competent naval officer who but for who he married may well have gone on to become the head of the RN) but careful of what he says is not one of them.
__________________
Rule 1: Never trust a Frenchman
Rule 2: Treat all members of the press as French
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02-01-2007, 14:29 PM
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#4 (permalink)
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Seeker of Rivendell
Senior Contributor
Join Date: 12-15-04
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Ratan Tata is certainly a man of steel. He remained so dignified during the ruckus over Singur and now he has bagged Corus.
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