Imagining India
Ideas For The New Century
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Indian software entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani has written the definitive book about modern India.
Nilekani gives us a fascinating new perspective for the twenty-first century, defying received and imported wisdom, and showing us what is really at stake in the world's largest democracy. He reveals why India's huge population has now become her greatest strength; how information technology is bringing the benefits of globalization; why rapid urbanization is transforming social and political life; and how we can learn from India's difficult journey towards a single internal market.
He also gets to the heart of debates about labour reform, the social security system, higher education and the role of the state. And he asks the key questions of the future: how will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? Will further access to the open market continue to stimulate such extraordinary growth? And how will all this affect - and be shaped by - her young people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The premise of this suave and unabashedly free market overview of the New India the rising economic powerhouse is that ideas lead economic and social policy rather than the other way around. It's not a consistently held position, however, as Nilekani, cochairman of the board of directors of Infosys Technologies (a leader in India's burgeoning IT sector), refers in the same breath to a longstanding (postindependence) antipathy to teaching English reversed by its economic advantage in a global market. Theoretical consistency aside, the author makes a bid for a centrist position in the globalization debate. His focus rests on India's particular domestic and international advantages in such areas as population, English proficiency and information technology. But there's little separating his take on India's recent past (hobbled by Nehru-era socialism) or best present course (embracing "globalization," seen as a harmonious and harmonizing amalgam of democracy, equal opportunity and resource access) from such neoliberal champions as Thomas Friedman (who supplies the foreword). Readers inclined to a free market perspective will find Nilekani eminently reasonable, if less than startling; those seeing it as antithetical to an equitable and sustainable future will meet a familiar frustration on nearly every page.