India: the next science superpower?
THE first sign that something was up came about eight years back. Stories began to appear in the international media suggesting that India was "stealing" jobs from wealthy nations - not industrial jobs, like those that had migrated to south-east Asia, but the white-collar jobs of well-educated people.
Today we know that the trickle of jobs turned into a flood. India is now the back office of many banks, a magnet for labour-intensive, often tedious programming, and the customer services voice of everything from British Airways to Microsoft.
In reality, the changes in India have been more profound than this suggests. Over the past five years alone, more than 100 IT and science-based firms have located R&D labs in India. These are not drudge jobs: high-tech companies are coming to India to find innovators whose ideas will take the world by storm.
Their recruits are young graduates, straight from India's universities and elite technology institutes, or expats who are streaming back because they see India as the place to be - better than Europe and the US. The knowledge revolution has begun.
The impact of the IT industry on the economy has been enormous. In 1999 it contributed 1.3 per cent of India's GDP. Last year that figure had grown to 3 per cent. And what's good for one science-based industry should be good for others.
India has a thriving pharmaceutical industry which is restructuring itself to take on the world. And biotech is taking off. The attitude is growing that science cannot be an exclusively intellectual pursuit, but must be relevant economically and socially. The hope among some senior scientists and officials is that India can short-cut the established path of industrial development and move straight to a knowledge economy.
http://www.newscientist.com/special/india/mg18524876.800
It's too bad that most Indians live in dire poverty. Hopefully, the changes there at the top will filter down.
I've heard that a big obstacle to India's progress is the caste system that's been around for hundreds of years. If you're born into the lower class, you don't get into schools and can't take certain jobs.
The reason China is doing better and has more potential than India is because China is a classless society, or so they claim to be. Talent comes from all levels of society, not just one.
It seems that the older a society is, the harder it has changing when the world changes. Younger countries like the US, Australia etc. can adapt so much faster than anyone else can. Even in Europe, 70 percent of the land in England is owned by the same 1 percent of families that's always owned it. Talk about barriers to any progress. It's a wonder they can support that universal health care system at all.
What really plagues 3rd world countries appears to be a way of thinking that's anti-progressive and hidebound (prejudiced, narrow-minded, and inflexible).
THE first sign that something was up came about eight years back. Stories began to appear in the international media suggesting that India was "stealing" jobs from wealthy nations - not industrial jobs, like those that had migrated to south-east Asia, but the white-collar jobs of well-educated people.
Today we know that the trickle of jobs turned into a flood. India is now the back office of many banks, a magnet for labour-intensive, often tedious programming, and the customer services voice of everything from British Airways to Microsoft.
In reality, the changes in India have been more profound than this suggests. Over the past five years alone, more than 100 IT and science-based firms have located R&D labs in India. These are not drudge jobs: high-tech companies are coming to India to find innovators whose ideas will take the world by storm.
Their recruits are young graduates, straight from India's universities and elite technology institutes, or expats who are streaming back because they see India as the place to be - better than Europe and the US. The knowledge revolution has begun.
The impact of the IT industry on the economy has been enormous. In 1999 it contributed 1.3 per cent of India's GDP. Last year that figure had grown to 3 per cent. And what's good for one science-based industry should be good for others.
India has a thriving pharmaceutical industry which is restructuring itself to take on the world. And biotech is taking off. The attitude is growing that science cannot be an exclusively intellectual pursuit, but must be relevant economically and socially. The hope among some senior scientists and officials is that India can short-cut the established path of industrial development and move straight to a knowledge economy.
http://www.newscientist.com/special/india/mg18524876.800
It's too bad that most Indians live in dire poverty. Hopefully, the changes there at the top will filter down.
I've heard that a big obstacle to India's progress is the caste system that's been around for hundreds of years. If you're born into the lower class, you don't get into schools and can't take certain jobs.
The reason China is doing better and has more potential than India is because China is a classless society, or so they claim to be. Talent comes from all levels of society, not just one.
It seems that the older a society is, the harder it has changing when the world changes. Younger countries like the US, Australia etc. can adapt so much faster than anyone else can. Even in Europe, 70 percent of the land in England is owned by the same 1 percent of families that's always owned it. Talk about barriers to any progress. It's a wonder they can support that universal health care system at all.
What really plagues 3rd world countries appears to be a way of thinking that's anti-progressive and hidebound (prejudiced, narrow-minded, and inflexible).