In today’s (Sunday December 4th), Amy Waldman describes the impressive new superhighways that are being built to link India’s major cities.She says that India which has already surpassed China in its growth rate in the past two years plans to leapfrog many technologies and become a first world nation in the next two decades.
If those of us who were worried about our job losses in the IT industry want to see where this thing is going, we will see fast erosion of all our manufacturing jobs, our educational infrastructure, our medical jobs and you name it.After reading Waldman’s article, and there are three more installments coming, I am certain India will prove to be a more formidable threat to our jobs than China.It has excellent universities where students are taught in English,their grasp of abstract concepts is excellent and their eagerness to do work over and above that required is legendary.
As most of the service work is already being moved to India, the bigger threats that we will see in the near future are the fine modern medical centers in India performing procedures at a fraction of the cost over here.We are also likely to see many teaching jobs at University level being moved to India posing a threat to jobs in academia.Manufacturing, which has been the mainstay of China’s economy will also be seeing movement to India, as GM, Delphi and others are already doing.
The lessons from all this is that while we have been throwing away our wealth in expensive military toys and wars, China and India have invested their wealth in productive enterprises and are poised to give us a run for our money.I can anticipate a day when GM will simply start importing its cars from India, China, Korea and other countries and sell the cars at Wal Mart.
