主题：【印度经济】印度缺的就是上海 -- 西风陶陶

India Can Shine If It Has a Shanghai or Two: Andy Mukherjee

Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) -- India is shining. Or so its government proclaims in full-page newspaper advertisements nowadays.

``You've never had a better time to shine brighter,'' says the tagline of the government campaign.

One advertisement shows a farmer who has stopped his motorcycle by the side of a gleaming highway to have a conversation on his new cellular phone.

``Go ahead, gain from these excellent times, build your dreams, spread the enthusiasm,'' the copy says.

Another ad shows a young mother enjoying a game of cricket with her son. ``Expenses are settling. Mothers are smiling,'' it reads.

There's more than a grain of truth in the publicity blitz. India's economy hasn't been this scintillating in a long time.

Economic growth in fiscal second quarter was 8.4 percent, within shouting distance of China's 9.1 percent expansion. The central bank predicts inflation will slow to a maximum 4.5 percent by March, from the current 5.6 percent.

Sensex, the benchmark stock index, soared to a record high yesterday.

In villages, farmers have been lucky to get the best monsoon rains in five years.

Thousands of new jobs are being created every month by companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., which are moving software programming, research, back-office and customer-contact tasks to India from the U.S. and the U.K.

World-Class Cities

Cellular phones sales in India are climbing faster than anywhere else in Asia. By the end of 2004, India will have 56 million cellular subscribers, up from 26.5 million in November, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

What has also captured the nation's imagination is the realization of its youth bulge: Every second Indian is younger than 25. There's no denying that a young population, backed by education and jobs, is a lethal competitive advantage.

Yet, it isn't an advantage that India can afford to be blase, about.

Top Indian professionals will keep heading for the U.S., Europe, Singapore or Hong Kong, unless India creates living conditions comparable with the best in the world

In other words, what India needs most now are world-class cities: its own Shanghai and Beijing.

How close is it to the goal?

It hasn't even begun the effort.

Cities Bursting

``Our cities are in disarray,'' says Nasser Munjee, managing director at India's Infrastructure Development Finance Co., a lender that finances public works. ``We don't have a single world- class city. We do not even have a vision for a world-class city.''

Already Indian cities are home to a third of the country's population and generate 55 percent of its $505 billion annual gross domestic product. By 2025, every second Indian would be living in an urban center.

Even now, Indian cities are bursting at the seams.

In capital New Delhi, road expansion has increased by 4 percent in the last decade. Population, meanwhile, has doubled to 14 million. The result: chronic traffic jams.

Power shortage in Delhi is acute. There isn't an evening when some part of the capital doesn't plunge into complete darkness.

`Perpetuation of Slums'

In the commercial hub Mumbai, slum-dwellers make up a third of the city's 15 million population. Politicians keep filling 15 square meter hovels with immigrant workers for their votes. As P.V. Indiresan, a former director of Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai, puts it: ``Unfortunately, urban politics depends on the perpetuation of slums.''

McKinsey & Co. recently presented a $44 billion, 10-year plan for making Mumbai a world-class city. If Mumbai has to compete with Shanghai, which is estimated to have spent $6.5 billion last year alone on infrastructure projects, the government has to find the money and be willing to spend it.

Bigger Problem

Financing is not the only challenge, nor is it the most serious one. The bigger headache is that in a sprawling democracy like India, the federal government's ability to force change is limited. Municipal bureaucrats run cities at the behest of provincial politicians who plunder urban centers of prosperity to finance their vote-grabbing largesse, such as distributing free electricity to farmers, or providing rice to the poor at 4 U.S. cents a kilo.

That doesn't mean urban resurgence is impossible in India. Just that it can't be left to bureaucrats.

As N. Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of the southern province of Andhra Pradesh has shown, civic improvement is possible as well as politically profitable. Naidu, who has won investments from Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. for Hyderabad, his province's capital, has changed the face of the city.

``The only cities that have strategized India is where the chief ministers have taken individual responsibility and overridden urban governance,'' says IDFC's Munjee. ``Left to urban governance, those cities will be disasters as well.''

Naidu has held on to his position for more than eight years.

India needs more politicians like him who will make it their personal mission to develop cities.

``The writing is on the wall'' for Indian politicians, says Munjee. Only chief ministers who deliver on civic infrastructure ``are likely to be mandated to remain in power.''

Last Updated: January 5, 2004 16:44 EST