In preparing for a much publicised debate in London on the motion 'The future belongs to India, not China', I was reminded of a conversation with my mother. She had asked, what is the difference between China growing at a rate of 10% and India at 8%? I replied that the difference was, indeed, very significant. If we were to grow at 10% we could save twenty years. This is almost a generation. We could lift a whole generation into the middle class twenty years sooner. She thought for a while and then said gently, 'we have waited 3000 years for this moment. Why don't we wait another twenty and do it the Indian way?'

Not a single politician has explained to us during this election campaign why India has risen to become the world's second fastest growing economy. It did not happen because our leaders gave cheap rice, reservations, employment guarantee schemes, loan waivers, or anything else on the mind of our political class. Hence, a suspicion has grown that our country may be rising despite its politicians and the economy grows at night when the government is asleep. The best that our leaders have done since 1991 is to gradually get out of the people's way.More...

'Oh, so you are one of them!' is how someone greeted my nephew, who is embarrassed to tell people that he is an investment banker. 'I'd rather say that I run a brothel,' he says. 'At least, that's a business people understand.' Bankers, having brought the world economy to its knees, have become pariahs overnight and a target of people's rage. International Labour Organization warns that global unemployment could hit a staggering 50 million. A typical knee jerk reaction is call it 'greed' but that is not helpful. We have always known that if envy is a sin of socialism, greed is a failing of capitalism. Much has been written of this crisis but not enough about its moral quality. Do free markets inherently corrode character?

B. Ramalingam Raju has been much on the minds of the citizens of our Republic, whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. It is thus a good time to reflect on Satyam's moral significance for our post-liberalization era. Although the story is still unfolding, there are intimations of sadness and tragedy about a man who has committed the greatest fraud in Indian corporate history. The swindle was worth Rs. 7136 crores, and the deceit went on for seven years. As a result, the public—both Indian and foreign investors—have lost around Rs 23,000 crores in the value of their shares, and over 40,000 employees face an uncertain future.

India and China are both growing; that's where the similarities end

China and India are in a struggle for a top rung on the ladder of world power, but their approaches to the state and to power could not be more different.

I met with a Chinese friend who was visiting India on business two days after last month's terrorist attack on Mumbai. He was shocked as much by the transparent and competitive minute-by-minute reporting of the attack by India's dozens of news channels as by the ineffectual response of the government. He had seen a middle-class housewife on national television tell a reporter that the Indian commandos delayed in engaging the terrorists because they were too busy guarding political big shots. He asked how the woman could get away with such a statement.

Speaking of the global financial crisis, Sonia Gandhi recently applauded Indira Gandhi's bank nationalization of 1969, saying that it had given India 'stability and resilience'. Like the Bourbons of France our political class neither learns nor forgets anything. I don't think Sonia Gandhi realizes quite what she was saying. India's bank nationalization delivered neither growth nor equity. Any public sector bank manager will tell you how loans were diverted to friends of politicians rather than to commercially deserving farmers. Bad debts of banks rose alarmingly in the 1980s and moral hazards persist.

One of my earliest memories is of a visit to a lending library. We lived in Shimla and I had discovered a circulating library near our home. Since my mother would not let me borrow a comic, I picked up my first copy of Enid Blyton. When we got home, my overbearing uncle thundered: “How can you let the boy read this trash!” Blyton may not be Shakespeare but with her I began my love affair with reading. When my kids were of that age they too found a lending library at Kemps Corner in Mumbai. When our family meets nowadays, we don't ask, 'how are you feeling?' We ask, 'and what are you reading these days?'

Nothing causes as much anxiety in a family as when someone falls sick. 65% of India's poor get into debt and 1% fall below the poverty line each year because of illness, according to NSSO 2004. The answer, of course, is health insurance, but only 6% of India's workers have it. Free public hospitals are not an option as two out of five doctors are absent, and there is a 50% chance of receiving the wrong treatment, according Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer's study. This tragic state of affairs is, however, set to change dramatically with Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), a visionary national health insurance scheme, which provides Rs 30,000 'in patient' health benefits at a premium of Rs 600, which the government pays if you are poor.

The persistent attacks of terror on Indian cities by Islamist fundamentalists and on Christians in Orissa by Hindu fundamentalists have spread fear, re-opened old wounds, and polarized us. India's economic rise is threatened as much by religious fanatics as by the global financial meltdown. This raises an insistent question: Will our 21st century be the story of an India turning middle class or will it get derailed by religious wars?

When you teach people for two generations not to respect the property of others you are bound to have a tragedy. Singur is 50 km northwest of Kolkata where Ratan Tata made the surprising decision to set up a factory for the world's cheapest car, the Nano. Bengal's image may have improved but it still has a poor work culture. But its chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is a charming man. He sees himself as the Deng of India, and he persuaded Tatas with an attractive plot of 1000 acres.