u/Ok-Advance962

Frequently i come across left wing vs right wing debates in India and what I feel is that while there is a distinction between left and right wing in our country , we are missing the bigger picture.

Left wing focus on labor welfare, minimum wage etc

Whereas

The right wing focuses on the ease of business, easing up regulations

But what both left and right wing miss in India is integration with the world.

Both left and right wing want India to remain as a cocoon and domestic industries protected via high tariff walls and protectionism. We pursued policies like import substitution which is nonsense.

Contrast that with Chinese and Vietnam, technically communist parties ruled, but much more open in integrating with the world. They are far more open to FDI than India.

The Indian right wing is as inward looking as the Indian left wing. That is the problem.

We want to be autarkic, cut off from the world. We basically distrust the world. We are scared of FTA, though we are now actively concluding FTAs now, but it took an inordinately long time.

And the results are obvious, even countries like Phillipines and Vietnam which have had no IT services sector are able to beat us in per capita income.

Yes, we have a relatively higher ppp per capita, but that is the cost of keeping our economy agriculture and informal sector based for our vast labor pool, except for a tiny labor pool connected to the globe via IT services

What will happen if we open up more to the world is simple, we will have more labor working in export oriented large scale factories brought in via FDI, their wages will rise. This may push up the food prices, but that is not a bad thing as long as wages rise faster than the food prices.

The Byzantine empire was quite harsh on Levantine and Egyptian christian communities, because of their different brand of Christianity. They were treated harshly and extra tax was imposed on them to fund the Roman Persian wars(byzantine is just east roman and considered themselves Roman).

And the Romans and persians fought continuously. This basically bankrupted both of them with the sassanids becoming much weaker than the Byzantine.

Now due to the bankruptcy of both empires and byzantine harsh treatment of Levantine and Egyptian christians, the rashidun caliphate was able to easily conquer them due to very minimal local resistance as those residents practically viewed them as liberators from Byzantine tyranny.

Now instead of this constant war between Byzantine and Sassanids, what if they had a proper peace treaty, byzantine would likely have been still harsh on the Levantine and Egyptians, but because of the peace treaty , the taxation would be less severe. And on the other hand sassanid would have been better able to defend their territory without going bankrupt.

And very likely Rashidun caliphate would not have been able to conquer outside Arabia so easily. This would result in a vastly different world

There are two main angles to economic growth

One is labor productivity and the other is capital investment

Many Indians get the concept of capital investment, allow business to deploy capital easily, create jobs, make life for business easy. Make regulations easy. Has India done that ? not really, but many Indians instinctively get that, even if bureaucracy doesn't really match up to that, due to their desire for bribes.

However most if not all Indians do not get the concept of labor productivity.

Now when it comes to economic growth, labor productivity growth has a much bigger and longer term impact than simply capital investment

Just think about it.

Many Indians worry about ease of business for easy capital deployment, so this will probably be solved substantially even if not fully.

But the bigger piece of the puzzle is average labor productivity

Once you think along these lines, many problems become apparent with India

In India, we have a super strong IT service sector and offshoring sector and pharma, they use the latest and best technologies, from abroad. They enhance the labor productivity which leads to more output per labor input

But at the same time, we have tons of labor in agriculture, still basically doing the same thing that our ancestors did , maybe a few additional things like tractors and fertilizers, but it is basically still the same way it operated thousands of years ago, depending on cheap labor. Why nobody thinks of upskilling them and moving them out of agriculture into manufacturing, because as a society, we do not think of average labor productivity

Let's look at other examples, the slow pace of infrastructure like Bengaluru metro construction. We know there are multiple reasons for slow construction like land acquisition, slow bureaucracy etc. We all are unhappy at the slow pace, but how many think of lower labor productivity as one of the causes. We use cheap labor as a core pillar , instead of relying on more modern methods of construction like prefabrication.

One more example, house construction, an average upper class house construction involves tons of cheap labor staying at the site and doing house construction, but is that good or bad for society? It is not good because we do not want so much cheap labor available, that the only job they can get is unskilled jobs , this is not a strength but drawback for economic growth.

Labour costs should be high, this leads to more innovation and productivity enhancing techniques.

House construction, infra construction should move towards automated and prefabricated construction techniques

I see many Indians happy that we have so much cheap labor in the form of house maids as opposed to in the western country, but is that good for the country ? Cheap house maids, earn very little and drag down the gdp per capita, they should be upskilled and moved towards export.oriented labor intensive manufacturing and slowly upskilled. And we should move towards things like the dishwasher , robotic vacuum cleaners etc. here in India, many houses are moving to dishwashers, but they still employ cheap labor to operate it, because labor is so cheap here.

Once we have a much bigger slice of well earning labor, then we have a much bigger consumer economy which in turn inspires more FDI to cater to the domestic demand by setting up factories

Basically for economic growth average labor productivity is of greater consequences than capital investment. Capital investment is important and we absolutely need to fix our shortcomings, but improving average labor productivity is much more important.

This is why most countries give more importance to things like universal education to drive up the average skill.

Frequently i come across debates between North Indians and South Indians on issues on the practise of cousin marriages.

At the outset, let me tell you, I am a South Indian myself and have not liked this concept of cousin marriages . Then I did a bit of digging around and saw that in the Dravidian kinship system, a man can marry the mother's brother's daughter or the father's sister's daughter. Now this does carry risk of recessive genes. And if done continuously over generations, the risk increases. We have this system in South India possibly for kinship reasons, for keeping property within the family etc . But from a scientific point of view , it is wrong and unfortunately North Indians have a point. Also we know in Islam, all forms of cousin marriage are allowed, not just MBD and FSD. But I kept digging further around and what I discovered was that the probability of recessive genes also increased due to the caste system based endogamy that has been prevalent in India and South Asia in general since at least 2000 years. This reduces gene pool and increases the chances of recessive genes through a mechanism called genetic isolation, founder events and increased carrier frequencies.

The gothra system doesn't really help in preventing recessive genes, because it disregards the woman's gothra which is assumed to be the same as her husband's after marriage.

The larger point i am driving to make is that we should look at issues from the basis of science and not as a way to blame South Indians, North Indians ,Islam etc.

Cousin marriages should be discouraged.

And inter caste marriages should be encouraged.

This is my takeaway.

Policies should be framed around that.

I am fine with traditional and modern marriages and way of life.

Traditional means where man is the provider and woman the nurturer.

Modern means both earn or maybe the woman earns and man looks after the house.

Either of them is okay, as long as it is based on consensus

What I don't like is the concept of staying at the husband's parents home after marriage.

Staying at the husband's parents home after marriage, puts the woman at a disadvantage, makes the parents excessively dependent on their son. The husband finds it difficult to support the wife or the parents and conflicts are common. The husband will need to pick a side and this is not easy. For a traditional wife, the job of looking after the husband's parents falls on her, whereas the working wife is expected to work as well as look after the husband's parents. This dramatically increased workload.

Ideally parents of the husband should learn to live independently and not be dependent. At very old age, one is dependent, that is biological reality. But not when one is around 60 or 70.

But this also means changes in how wedding ceremonies are conducted. The wedding ceremony is between a bride and groom. So they need to spend the maximum, at best parents can support, but what kind of wedding ceremony that needs to be done, should be decided by the bride and groom. Now if the bride is not working, the groom needs to manage all the expenses with a little help from his brides parents and groom parents, but the attitude should not be that since the bride is not working, the bride's parents should make up for the shortfall. When a groom wants a traditional setup, all sides need to be aware of the pros and the cons.

And the other major change is looking after the grandchildren. When children are very young, the boys parents look after the grandchildren, while the wife works, this is a little underappreciated. Ideally grandparents should not look after the children, unless they want to and based on their own choice, it should not be their duty.

These are my thoughts, opinions ?

I see a lot of discussions based on regional disparity in India. I see plenty of South Indians making disparaging remarks on North Indians and North Indians themselves making fun of poorer people in their regions. This is an attempt to find solutions within the existing framework and development economics. Please note I am not an economics student or professional, but I am an economics enthusiast.

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South India is generally ahead in economic indicators compared to states like UP, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha etc and due to this, south Indians generally do not want to undertake the same kind of back breaking work that people from those states are willing to do, so this means that for various opportunities in construction, agriculture, services you generally find a lot of migrant labor. While it is undeniable that this is contributing to the growth of South India, this also raised the prospects that South India falls back on mechanization in agriculture and construction and is dependent on cheap labor from the poorer states. In the long run, this is not good for either South India or migrant labor.

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What we need is more mechanization in South India which will improve productivity and faster development and more opportunities for poorer regions of India. Distress migration of cheap labor is not a solution, but a perpetual disaster.

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What I propose is simple, we need more large scale labor intensive manufacturing in the poorer regions of India to cater to the world demand and not just South India or Mumbai. The policies, infrastructure, mindset, governance need to match this. We need exports of more labor intensive goods like textiles, footwear, clothes, light manufacturing in big factories from the poorer regions. We need to compete with Bangladesh, Vietnam and more such export powerhouses. We need to get out of the small and medium scale enterprises which dominate our thinking. These don't provide scale. Because these large scale factory derived exports cater to the world, the workers can get higher wages than by migrating.to the south or mumbai, while still staying in their respective regions. If our Indian entrepreneurs can't scale or lack the mindset, invite FDI on a massive scale in such labor intensive export oriented manufacturing. India has plenty of friendly countries who want India to succeed, what we lack is the mindset and the will.

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This will also have the impact of lesser migration to the South. Much of migration to the south today is distress oriented. People today migrate mostly because there are no jobs in the poorer regions for people without formal degrees. What the rising of wages in poor regions will ensure is that labor costs will rise in South India. Initially this will increase inflation in South India, but the solution will be labor saving innovation, construction techniques will rely more on modern technologies than back breaking labor, agriculture will be more modernized. This will ensure high growth in South India too.

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And the other major advantage of large scale labor intensive exports is our trade deficits can be changed to a surplus or at least substantially reduced.

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This is a high growth solution across all regions, will improve wages in poorer regions, will reduce distress migration, and will improve our exports

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I feel this is much more relevant to India than discussions about Sovereign AI or other high end stuff.

With the E-85 and other stuff being in the news, I was wondering why electric vehicle adoption remains quite low except in maybe 2 wheelers and 3 wheelers.

Here are the top reasons

1. Many Indians in urban areas who like electric vehicles live in apartment complexes, so need additional wiring work to support charging. Hassle.

2. Battery costs are high and this increases the price of the vehicle, India is a highly price sensitive market.

3. No local EV champions like BYD or Tesla

4. The supply chain for EV vehicles is not yet robust and dependent on China, which makes it vulnerable.

5. India has a great small ICE car manufacturing and localization ecosystem, so easy to maintain and repairs are cost effective for such reasons

6. Lack of public chargers. Quite small in number compared to the US, China, EU. Range anxiety. Indians want their cars to be good at everything, city driving , visits to nearby towns and cities etc.

7. If EV adoption increases substantially, load on grid at night will increase as more charging will happen overnight. So grids will need to be modernized to handle additional load

Despite all this, 2 wheeler and 3 wheelers EV adoption which has much lesser range anxiety issue is increasing fast and in passenger vehicles, i think it is around 5 percent

Desire is there, but our manufacturing, policy, domestic companies are unable to convert this strong desire into a great outcome.

People often point to India's huge PPP GDP despite the very low nominal gdp per capita as a sign of strength. I'm not convinced.

A high PPP adjustment means many goods and services are cheap. But why are they cheap?

Because India still has:

- Too many people in low-productivity agriculture.

- Too many workers in informal small-scale businesses.

- Extremely low wages for a large share of the population.

Cheap labor is not a development goal. It is usually a symptom of underdevelopment.

The objective should be to move agricultural and informal workers into labor-intensive export manufacturing and modern industry, where productivity and wages are much higher.

Ironically, rising labor costs are often a good thing. When workers become expensive, firms invest in better machinery, technology, training, and processes. Productivity rises.

Many Indians worry about higher service costs or higher food prices. But the real question is whether incomes are rising faster than costs. A society where workers earn more and produce more is healthier than one that relies on permanently cheap labor.

My concern with the "India's domestic market is enough" argument is that hundreds of millions of workers are effectively competing for the spending power of a relatively small affluent class. That's a race to the bottom.

East Asian economies grew by connecting their workers to global demand through exports. Their workers weren't competing for local customers alone; they were competing for the world.

For a country at India's income level, the primary focus should be increasing productivity and wages through export-oriented manufacturing. A large domestic market is the reward that comes later, not the engine that gets you there.

How important is the culture for economic growth

After analysing east asian countries with India, i have come to realize culture is much more important than the labels of communism, capitalism, autocracy, authoritarianism, dictatorship etc

What is common among the east asian miracle ?

They are all very different, communism, liberalism, autocracy, authoritarianism.

But they all followed the same template, how to increase the wages and productivity of all people starting from the people who earn low and all the way to the highest. And the best way to do that is universal education plus large scale labour intensive exports. This comes from a genuine desire to uplift. That desire can only come from culture.

The communists of China and Vietnam get it as much as authoritarian Taiwan and South Korea as well as non liberal Japan. It is a different matter that Taiwan and South Korea later became democratic and Japan became more liberal.

But Indians don't get it. But I notice that South Indians do get it to an extent. We see TN focussing on labor intensive exports, we see Kerala govt doing well with the money it has received from gulf remittance and improving govt schools and governance , we see Karnataka and Telengana doing well in literacy, health indicators etc. This only goes to show that culture is as important as capitalism , communism, socialism, autocracy etc.

On the other hand we see North India, no focus on education and literacy for the masses, no focus on exports, no intentions to set-up labor intensive exports in UP or Bihar, so that it can absorb the labor and also earn precious dollars while raising wages. In UP and Bihar, we had centrists , caste oriented parties and now hindutva, but things haven't changed much. The problem is not the political or economic labels, it is the culture. North Indian culture simply doesn't care about their poor people at all.

Economics and politics is a subset of culture and policies flow from that.

After analysing east asian countries with India, i have come to realize culture is much more important than the labels of communism, capitalism, autocracy, authoritarianism, dictatorship etc

What is common among the east asian miracle ?

They are all very different, communism, liberalism, autocracy, authoritarianism.

But they all followed the same template, how to increase the wages and productivity of all people starting from the people who earn low and all the way to the highest. And the best way to do that is universal education plus large scale labour intensive exports. This comes from a genuine desire to uplift. That desire can only come from culture.

The communists of China and Vietnam get it as much as authoritarian Taiwan and South Korea as well as non liberal Japan. It is a different matter that Taiwan and South Korea later became democratic and Japan became more liberal.

But Indians don't get it. But I notice that South Indians do get it to an extent. We see TN focussing on labor intensive exports, we see Kerala govt doing well with the money it has received from gulf remittance and improving schools and governance , we see Karnataka and Telengana doing well in literacy, health indicators etc. This only goes to show that culture is as important as capitalism , communism, socialism, autocracy etc.

On the other hand we see North India, no focus on education and literacy for the masses, no focus on exports, no intentions to set-up labor intensive exports in UP or Bihar, so that it can absorb the labor and also earn precious dollars while raising wages. In UP and Bihar, we had centrists , caste oriented parties and now hindutva, but things haven't changed much. The problem is not the political or economic labels, it is the culture.

Agriculture

Demographics is not destiny, policy is destiny. And we want to be remain an agricultural country with poor water usage.

Water used by India, China , US across agriculture, industry and residence.

Few things stand out. India uses more water in agriculture than China and US and yet has a lower yield per acre and more people in agriculture. Very little modern irrigation methods like drip irrigation are used in India.

India heavily underperforms in Agriculture too. Not just in industry or manufacturing. Inefficient use of water, with lesser output per acre and per worker to go along with it.

Source: FAO AQUASTAT (via World Bank, latest available data)

India:

Agriculture ████████████████████████████████████████████ 90%

Industry ███ 5%

Domestic ███ 5%

China:

Agriculture ████████████████████████████ 61%

Industry █████████████ 26%

Domestic ██████ 12%

US:

Agriculture ███████████████████████████ 42%

Industry\* ████████████████████████████ 46%

Domestic ████████ 12%

Counterfactual question. What if the deccan campaign by Aurangzeb was never attempted and the last strong Mughal emperor had listened to his advisors and stayed put and not gone on a campaign which ultimately made the Mughal empire bankrupt.

Could britishers and other colonial powers have been so easily been able to penetrate into India, with a smaller but stronger and stabler center ?

The rest of the country in deccan and south may have been dominated by a strong Maratha rival, but they would not have been able to make inroads further and form a maratha confederacy as rest of the country still had a strong central empire

While Hindu Muslim issues would have remained, but less intense perhaps.

South Asia would eventually evolve into something like Europe, smaller countries , but without the baggage of colonial rule and massive hindu Muslim issues. While colonial rule did not create the Hindu Muslim issues, they amplified it, made it worse and attempted to benefit from it, which created its own set of issues, which South Asia is still suffering from.

Essentially the deccan campaign which weakened Mughal empire due to financial drain, allowed foreign powers like Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali to carry out massacres and allowed colonial powers like British to easily win over a weak central empire and polity riven by Hindu Muslim issues.

While the concept of hindavi swarajya or hindu rule existed prior to deccan invasion of Aurangzeb, the thing is, it also needs specific set of circumstances politically for it to gain credence and that opening was provided by the unnecessary deccan campaign waged by the last powerful Mughal emperor.

1. No US intervention in Afghanistan, supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia

2. No Global Jihad

3. No Pakistan trying to use the template in Kashmir Valley to engineer a low cost victory over India, using the same tactics that ensures a superpower loss in Afghanistan for the Soviet Union.

4. Terrorism in South Asia reduced by 50 percent. Other parts would be there, but the Kashmir problem will be reduced.

5. Pakistan would be a bit better off with a less radicalized society

6. Potentially no Taliban, though a less violent and more localized civil war in Afghanistan still highly probable. But very possibly Afghanistan would have recovered faster.

7. Communist regime in Afghanistan would have died naturally and quickly as it was unpopular.

8. No 9/11

9. No Osama Bin Laden

10. No collapse of the Soviet Union, or Soviet Union surviving a bit longer or maybe the China style reforms of Soviet Union may have succeeded

Global superpower proxy plays catalyse existing issues and have tragic consequences.

Global proxy superpower play turned a local conflict into a global conflict and spawned global jihad as a secondary order effect.

I blame both the Soviet Union and the US

I do not blame either side for the pre-existing issues in India and Pakistan and Kashmir, but intervention by both these players had a profoundly destabilizing effect.

I am not from TN and I don't particularly think any political party in TN is honest. However that being said, one thing that deserves recognition is Tamil Nadu's long-term focus on manufacturing.

Despite frequent allegations of corruption, intense political rivalries, and the unusual fact that many of its dominant political parties were founded or led by film personalities, the state maintained a remarkably consistent industrial policy across decades.

Today, Tamil Nadu is one of India's largest manufacturing hubs, leading or ranking near the top in sectors such as automobiles, auto components, electronics, textiles, leather, and renewable-energy equipment. Cities like Chennai, Coimbatore, and Hosur have developed strong industrial ecosystems that attract both domestic and foreign investment.

While many Indian states have relied primarily on agriculture, government jobs, real estate, or services-led growth, Tamil Nadu invested heavily in industrial estates, power infrastructure, technical education, ports, and manufacturing supply chains.

The result is that, whatever one's political views, successive governments managed to create a broad-based industrial economy that generates large numbers of jobs across skill levels. It is a reminder that sustained industrialization often depends more on policy continuity than on political branding.

This is the closest that an Indian state has come to try the East Asia approach. Diversified export oriented manufacturing.

What bothers me isn't that India is poor. Plenty of countries have been poor.

What bothers me is how little attention we pay to the hundreds of millions of people stuck in agriculture and informal work. They are the people who grow our food, build our homes, deliver our goods, and keep our cities running.

Yet our national debates are dominated by caste, religion, language, and symbolism. We spend far less time discussing how to move workers into productive jobs that raise incomes and living standards.

Sometimes it feels as though we've accepted that a large part of the population will remain cheap labor forever, and we've stopped asking whether that is acceptable.

We need to move them to export oriented manufacturing jobs. Raise their living standards. On a massive scale. On an urgent basis.

And we cannot give the population size as an excuse, China has done far better with a similar population.

The flaw is within us, not just with political parties or the bureaucrats.