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Returned to College Street in Calcutta today after many years, and nothing beats the algorithmic genius of a seasoned bookseller.

I asked for a specific book (Mark Tully’s No Full Stops in India). Off he went and not only pulled it out of somewhere but also ten other books I have wanted to read. At one point, he unintentionally pulled an Osho and immediately cast it to the side - eishob toh apni porben na (you don't read this stuff).

He then went on to pull out a Lenin - weevil eaten and bookwormed but otherwise in pristine condition.

Love City Lights and many other indie book stores but nothing beats College Street

India's spend on education is terribly low, at about 3.5% of GDP. Some reports say it goes as low as 2.7% in reality. Unfortunate since in 1968, we had promised we would spend 6%.

While I have included some smaller economies (Bhutan and Nepal), and some big ones (US, Canada and the UK), I believe the real comparison is with China who we were equals with not that long ago.

In Northern Europe (all countries in top ten by development), almost as many women work as men. Norway has the smallest gender gap in labour workforce participation at 6.9%, and Denmark at the highest with only 8.4%. Our neighbour China sees something similar - the gap is only 10.8%.
For India though, this number is a staggering 44%.

This means that 70% of Indian women don’t work, and that includes our mothers, aunts, sisters and friends who stay at home to provide care, or  because we can’t give them safe public transportation or working conditions or simply because we don’t let them work outside of home.

In fact, if we were to compare ourselves against our neighbours (second slide), we are third from the bottom. And we know what is happening in Afghanistan.

And here’s the wildest paradox: the richer an Indian family gets, the less likely the women are to work. Economists call this the income effect - where keeping women at home is treated as a luxury status symbol.

Indian news is celebrating again because India’s GDP smashed expectations by growing at a stellar 7.7%. 

Except, we have been saying that about India for about two decades now. We have been trading for the top spot of “fastest growing major economy” with China since the 2010s. Some years it was us, some years them. Yet, I take a walk outside and realize that we are nowhere close to being developed. What gives?

So I dug in a bit. For some time in the 1980s, the average Indian person was richer than the average person in any of our neighbouring countries. 

Yet, as you can see in the first graph, that has changed so much that the average Chinese person is now 5 times richer than the average Indian person. The last time China and India were equals was in 1984, after which China surpassed India due to major economic reforms. Bangladesh ALSO surpassed India in 2020.

Anyway, if we stay with India, we will see some interesting patterns emerge. India’s southern states, while still behind China, are ahead of all our neighbouring countries plus other countries such as Egypt or The Philippines (see second graph).

Now if we were to flip this and look at our poorest states - Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, we will find that we are poorer than Pakistan (see third graph). In fact, only the war ravaged Afghanistan is poorer than us.

That 7.7% GDP growth doesn’t mean much after all :(

edit: gdp per capita on the y axis.

My buddy and I were hanging last night over drinks, and discussing infiltrators aka ghuspetiyas in India. In other words Bangladeshis. An issue our current government has hinged itself on in not only our little poor infiltrated state of West Bengal but also other parts of India. Not to worry, not too long from now, Indians may soon have to infiltrate Bangladesh. Here is some data to back our point. In 1990, Bangladesh started with the lowest human development baseline of three major nations of the subcontinent - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. However, Bangladesh’s growth trajectory has been steeper, eventually allowing it to catch up completely and tie with India in the latest statistical release. Unlike India, which saw a major 2020–2021 contraction in its trajectory due to shifts in domestic health data, Bangladesh managed a softer, brief stagnation, allowing it to temporarily edge ahead of India during the peak pandemic cycle. Pakistan seems to have experienced a flattening curve over the last decade. While it shows incremental upward growth, the gap between Pakistan and its neighbors has widened drastically since 2010. Source: World Bank/ UN Human Development