India and China are two giant Asian neighbors which are increasingly dominating global trade and economies. These two countries have each engineered extraordinary social and economic advancements over the past two decades. However, owing to cultural and other factors, India and China are following dramatically different trajectories in their paths to prosperity. For one thing, China is rapidly urbanizing (more than half the population now live in large cities); while the overwhelming majority of Indians still live in rural villages. This disparity may have drastic implications for both nations.
In a word, no. But there are problems ahead for India. And, unless India can solve these problems - quickly - India will seal her own fate. Unfortunately, given the promise and the ultimate disastrous precedent of the 2010 Commonwealth Games on a far smaller scale in Delhi, the nation has much work to do, and no time to waste.
In the next decade, 70 percent of the China's population will live in cities. India, however, will undergo an astonishingly rapid shift in movement from rural to urban centers: although 28 percent of India's population may live in cities today, in the next thirteen years that will almost double. By 2025, 46 percent of Indians will live in cities. By 2030, China will have 221 cities with populations exceeding one million residents each and its total urban population will add 400 million new residents - more than the entire population of the United States then. Similarly, India will have 68 cities with populations exceeding one million each and will add another 221 urban dwellers to its rapidly swelling urban agglomerations.
Whereas China has been thinking strategically about how to handle this astounding increase in population and its accompanying need for capacity resilience and infrastructure support, India has not. China has specific plans for building metro systems, highways, and high-speed trains for its top 170 cities. In Beijing, for example, from 2004 to 2006 alone (and, yes, the Olympic Games had much to do with this), spending on urban transportation increased over 50 percent. So, for these 170 "top" Chinese cities that are a strategic priority, China will need 28,000 kilometers of metro rail lines and 5 billion square meters of paved road - and it is likely that China will achieve these goals.
India, on the other, hand is heading for a fall. To even meet the basic capacity and infrastructure needs of its top 35 cities in the coming two decades, India will need to build 400 million square meters of metro rail lines every year from now on until that goal is achieved. But that is twenty times more than what India has been building in the last decade alone. India, to meet the urban transportation requirements of its top 35 cities in the future will require 7,400 kilometers of metro rail lines and 2.5 billion square meters of paved road. Let's be honest; it doesn't look good.
emographically, China made a serious mistake with implementation of this policy at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. At that time, China's annual fertility rate was almost 8.0 percent; by 2000, it had dropped below "replacement fertility rate" of 2.1 percent. The "replacement fertility rate" simply means simply what level of population "replacement" you must have to keep your population sustained. But here is where the problem lies for China. It has to do with something called the "dependency ratio" which is the relationship between people not of working age (either those who are pensioners or those youth who are being educated and not yet part of the workforce). Clearly, the larger the number of people who are in the workforce - because they pay taxes and contribute to social welfare systems such as government programs for healthcare, education, and so forth - makes for a more prosperous, developing, and sustainably long-term society. However, if the dependency ratio shrinks, then there is trouble. For example, almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has been mired in a 1:1 dependency ration for decades and thus cannot prosper and cannot develop and cannot sustain itself.
China, right now, is in the midst of its demographic "sweet spot." In the next two years it will peak with a 1:2.6 dependency ratio - that is, 2.6 people working who support every person who is not. But in the next fifteen years, one-third of China's population will be retired, assuming things stay as they are with retirement ages. No more than two decades after that, and likely much sooner, China will have a dependency ratio of 1:1.5. This will be disastrous and likely kill China's prosperity.
China, the most strategically forward looking state on the face of this earth, knows this. This is why China seems, and is, so ruthless, on the global financial stage. These demographic pressures, to be blunt, could lead to future war. The bottom line: China is in a race to get rich before it gets old.
India, on the other hand, has yet to hit its demographic and dependency ratio "sweet spots." Despite the insanely foolish and short-lived forced male sterilization policy under Indira Gandhi in 1976, India remains the world's largest democracy. People have the freedom and the will to make a choice about when to have children and how many to have. As a result, even as India is on track to soon become the world's most populous state, her birth rates have been steadily declining as India's economy grows and her prosperity becomes ever more evident to the world.
The most eloquent answer comes from an Indian columnist name Anand Giridharadas, who wrote about Mumbai: "If the elite live in virtual exile, seeing Mumbai as a port of departure, the city teems with millions of migrants who see it in exactly the opposite way: as a mesmeric port of arrival, offering what is missing on the mainland, a chance to invent oneself, to break with one's supposed fate. . . . They arrive from the 660,000 villages of India. Perhaps the monsoon failed and crops perished. Perhaps their mother is ill and needs money for surgery. Perhaps they took a loan whose mushrooming interest [that] even cow-milking and wheat-sheafing cannot repay. Perhaps they are tired of waiting for the future to come to them. . . . The longer you remain, the less you notice what Mumbai looks, smells, sounds like. You think instead of what it could be. You become addicted to the companionship of 19 million other beings. Surrounded by hells, you glimpse paradise.
Absolutely not -- I can say this unequivocally. But it also depends on who you are - by this I mean how strong you are in terms of population, economic, political, and economic power (and clearly India and China are mega-powers) - and where you are located. India, for example, was "written" off for much of the twentieth century by economic geographers as being unable to progress because of its geography: too much of it was located in a tropical temperate equatorial band. These geographers were wrong. They were simply oblivious to the advantages that technology would bring about and the sheer genius that Indian and Chinese innovation would bring in working comparative economic advantage to their best use.
Let me illustrate the significant differences between India and China visually as well.
At the turn of this century, the United States National Imagery and Mapping Center completed a project that represents a composite of the earth's landscape at night, showing energy use, population distribution, and states where obvious power centers lie.
Using these images, here's the good news: India - with the exception of Bihar and the vast desert region in western Rajasthan - has an almost completely uniform distribution in terms of energy use, population, and distribution. China, visibly, does not.
China has a superb education system. But India is uneven is its education distribution. In India, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh are leaders in twenty-first century development, largely because of superb education systems. Gujarat and Bihar might as well be considered as locked in the fifteenth century in terms of education and their complete lack of development.
As far as health care goes, China has crushed India. When India gave up its Socialist ways under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s and privatized and opened its economy to the world and began almost immediately to prosper, it assured its economic and political future. But it also lost its way in terms of health care. With so few Indians actually paying taxes, so many Indians are impoverished and left to die. There is no overall health care system. It is a crime.
