Thursday, October 30, 2008

Stock of a nation

As a senior Indian official in France would put it that the perception about India in Western Europe can be distinctly Gurgaon(India)divided between the phase before 1998 and the one after that. Before 1998, for the first 50 years India was more of an economically poor but culturally rich nation of philosophers who distinctly had a paradigm impact on modern Europe. India in those days was synonymous with mysticism, being a country known more for black magic, snake charmers and tigers than for its soft power and software. Yet 1998 and the assertion India made with its testing of five thermonuclear devices changed it all. Here was a country which through those tests was asking for its legitimate rights and venting out its frustration against a world which never paid heed to its concerns of terrorism and threats from China. It wasn’t just the nuclear test but the economic embargo in its aftermath imposed by the Americans and its stooges that made all the difference and that exposed the fundamental strength of an otherwise shy and a reclusive India. One has to remember the sheer impact of economic sanctions when imposed by Uncle Sam, something that crippled Iraq for a decade due to the oil embargo. It caused the death of thousands of children owing to lack of basic medicines and Iraq was doomed for ever. Yet when those same sanctions were imposed on India, the loss to American companies in terms of cancellation of governmental contracts was more than what a resilient India suffered. By then, seven years of liberalised economy had already solved the problem of forex reserve and to mitigate any eventual problem of the future, the government of India issued Resurgent Indian Bonds to be subscribed by the Non-Resident Indians....Continue

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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