Improve productivity, efficiency to beat China
A little stocktaking is in order to understand the steps needed for India to consolidate the gains that accrue when its military wins the face-off initiated by China earlier this year. We have been told that China is merely flexing its muscles for primacy in Asia, and is annoyed that India refused to fall in line and undertook initiatives to create infrastructure. Moreover, in the Galwan valley clash in June this year, India openly challenged the Chinese might. Since then, the bent of the conversation in some military circles has veered around the theme that the defence forces are itching to teach the Chinese a lesson in good behaviour.
However, to ensure that the endeavour of India’s military succeeds, it is imperative that the rest of the population contributes to ensure it gets some heft rather than merely remaining a country known for oppressing this or that group when it is not pushing some other worldly spiritualism. At the moment, the efforts by India’s people seem too focused on symbolism with little content to it. Boycotting Chinese lights this Diwali will be good for our self-esteem, but it will achieve little beyond a symbolic show of our collective annoyance against the Chinese. And not much will be achieved by persuading Apple to produce iPhones in India unless Indians who do not work at Apple’s production facilities also learn how to work in more productive ways. This isn’t happening. The result is that the Army stands alone in its commitment to push back China.
India today matches China in population. If China’s population is estimated at 1.39 billion, that of India is 1.38 billion and growing, and intensely unproductive. What little it produces is not worth much. IMF estimations put China’s GDP at $15.2 trillion even after the pandemic. The GDP of India, in contrast, is at $2.6 trillion. Had the Indian economy not been hit by Covid-19, then too, it would have hovered at about $3 trillion, a small fraction of China’s.
The Chinese GDP is about six times that of India. What it means is that the value of goods and services produced in China is worth six times more than what India produces. It also means that China has far greater capacity to produce goods and services. Generating that capacity is about training everyone to perform tasks more efficiently, more productively. Generating that capacity is about new ideas to create better methods to perform the same tasks in less time, with more efficiency, and less cost. India lags behind in these areas.
A few random examples indicate what we mean. Agriculture contributes 7.9% of the GDP in China, and 15.4% in India. Yet, China manages to produce over 570 million tonnes of foodgrains, while India produces a little over 250 million tonnes. The Chinese farmers and farm workers produce more than double their Indian counterparts. China achieves this with just 27% of its labour force in agriculture in contrast to 44% in India’s case. Indian farmers and farm workers, to put it mildly, are extraordinarily inept, even though they use 1½ times more fertilisers than the Chinese. The only similarity is that in both countries, the farmers have little information about the market and little access to modern storage and processing facilities as a result of which almost two-fifth of the crop produced is wasted.
The iron and steel industry in India shows the prevalence of inefficient, extremely polluting small-scale units. They shove all hidden costs on to the people and yet produce only a miniscule quantity needed. Only 45% of the Indian steel production comes from the basic oxygen furnace as compared to 85% in China. Nearly 28% of Indian steel production comes from the electric induction furnace which can produce 16-20 tonnes per batch as compared to 170 tonnes per batch for the electric arc furnace and 250 tonnes per batch for the basic oxygen furnace. China produces half the world’s steel while India produces roughly 6%.
So, how do we scale up? Learn to do things better and create new tasks. ‘Learning’ is a tricky business. It involves generating new ideas, being more productive, investing in research and learning from failures and shortcomings. Learning means deploying knowledge for real-life tasks, watching the result and using the experience to improve. In other words, learning means going back and forth between knowledge and real life all the time. My teachers, Romila Thapar and Satish Saberwal, along with a number of public intellectuals of those times, used to call such a dialectical process ‘scientific temper’ in the 1980s and lamented its absence in India. But they chose to confine scientific temper to critiquing society and ideology and trying to make India into a clone of the individuated West. Often, this resulted in their advocating the creation of a deracinated individual, rootless and uncomfortable with anything Indian. So much so that fun was made even of the ISRO chief offering prayers for the successful completion of a rocket project. Maybe that version of scientific temper was needed in the 1980s when Indian society needed to exorcise the demons of religion and caste. What is needed today, however, is to use knowledge in instrumental ways to better our productivity in every field.
Beating China is not just about military tactics. It is about learning to improve productivity. To continue with the pastoral example — a study by Ashok Gulati and Prerna Terway found that every rupee invested in agricultural research adds 11.2 to the GDP. China has been investing in research for over three decades now. India, in contrast, cut down on agricultural extension work in the 1980s, and has not made effort to create either new knowledge or to disseminate adequately whatever agricultural scientists and engineers did create. Perhaps that is why today, the Chinese wheat yield is over 1½ times that of India and Chinese paddy yield is over three times that of India.
The simple point is this — there is no option but to improve efficiency by creating a synergy between learning, research and real life. Beating the enemy is not just about sending our young to battle or providing them with adequate firepower. The real battle is about generating the capacity to assert, and the will!
