Man the most disappointing thing about our economic growth is lagging merchandise exports. Vietnam, a country with fraction of population and fraction of area, had much faster export growth than us. It nearly now exports as much as we do.
I call it
4 mistakes of India:
- Not controlling population explosion in 1970-1990s.
- Not focusing on skilling our labour force in 1990s just after liberalisation.
- Not focusing on labour intensive low skilled manufacturing in 1990s and 2000s, which we are trying to attract right now. If we had focused on it then, we would have been climbing value chain ladder. Services growth is good, but without labour intensive manufacturing, it is impossible to bring out surplus labour from agriculture. Medium and high end services require at least graduation, whereas low skilled manufacturing mostly requires on-site training.
- Not focusing on infrastructure and logistics in 2000s when our economy was booming. Without removing such bottlenecks, it was impossible to maintain the boom we had in late 2000s, though our growth sputtered for different reasons. That growth was in any case going to plateau in sometime. The infamous policy paralysis in early 2010s along with lack of focus on infrastructure took out all steam from our growth.
Though we still have chance, it is sad to see Vietnam and Indonesia taking away lot of manufacturing out of China. The most important problem right now I think is incompetencies of most of state govt, which are unable to create conducive policies to attract investment and resolve local infrastructure issues. We have so much to offer: large market size, large and cheap labour force, skilled engineering workforce, etc but we are still unable to fully capitalise on it.