Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

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Correct. You just proved what the CTO said, We are experts at replicating X at scale, once some one originally produces X. We didn't invent the video camera, or modern studio tech, or internal combustion engine, even rocket tech, electricity, electronics, medicinal sciences, metallurgy or anything for that matter. Heck we didn't even invent the ball point pen.

We replicate and resell things, we kind of have to, because there are so many people in India and every wants X. Apply this to cement, movies, motorcycles, medicines, pens, pencils, call center employees, human robots, trench and ditch diggers, even baby diapers. We live in a country where the government rolls out schemes for daily labor occupation, to keep them busy by helping them dig with shovels. You can even boast of largest human shovel operators in the world. Heck we are experts are producing more human beings, than any country on earth. You might want to add that to our list of accolades, then take your right hand and pat yourself on your back.

Keep producing more humans like this, eventually we will be largest producers and consumers of everything, diabetes patients to pick pocketers and then we can claim what we always claim, we are the best of the best, put all criticism to rest, join hands and sing Mera Bharat Mahan.

None of this fixes anything because you end up creating more mouths and more hands to change. More deeper human chains to act as middle men. Numbers keep increasing of course, but situation doesn't change much on the ground.

This (more or less accurate) charge of being copycats who do little domestic innovation was true earlier of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, and before them of Japan. It was true for decades of China too. This is just what happens when you’re doing catch up growth. There are huge easy wins by doing in your country what other people in other countries already know how to do, but cheaper because labour is cheap in your country because you’re poor. Or in taking a poorly managed company and making it marginally better managed every year until you’re as productive as the leading firms in your industry were a decade or two decades ago. Innovation is great but not being poor does not require innovation, it requires doing things that are well within the technological frontier. Eventually some small industrial cluster approaches the global frontier and then is at it in some industry. It just takes time.

That's true, but then for that to happen you need a working government and society, you can't do that if inefficiencies abound. China, Japan and South Korea all had powerful governments who made hard choices, India's on the other hand is weak and ineffective.

You need to put human resources development as the number one priority. As of now these are not even political issues in India. Nobody thinks these are important things to do.

India started off well during its Independence, the first education minister(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul_Kalam_Azad) and the first prime minister(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru). The idea was to build a highly trained workforce and an industrial base, and then they bootstrap each other. But India has kind of lost its way.

This what is said of first education minister:

Jawaharlal Nehru referred to him as Mir-i- Karawan (the caravan leader), "a very brave and gallant gentleman, a finished product of the culture that, in these days, pertains to few".[16] Mahatma Gandhi remarked about Azad by counting him as "a person of the calibre of Plato, Aristotle and Pythagorus".[27]

India hasn't had good quality leadership in human resources for a while now.

The current priorities of HR development ministers in India go on the line of rewriting history to propel their political propaganda, pushing things like homeopathy, astrology. Hating universities and academia, calling them elites who need to be eliminated for their political ideas to be taken forward.

You don't do much in Human resources building with these kind of systems in place.

Education has remarkably little to do with economic growth. Richer countries are more educated but changes in education do not predict changes in productivity. Education appears to be a superior good that people just purchase more of when they’re richer.

Ghana is more educated now than France was in 1960 going by average years of education and it’s poorer. China’s years of explosive economic growth after Deng opened it up in the 1980s happened with a population that had on average finished primary school.

India’s plan to build a highly educated workforce and industrial base in tandem was a thorough and costly failure. Lots and lots of people tried to get a good education so they could go for civil service jobs. It did nothing industrially because running a successful industrial policy is a lot harder than either leaving businessmen to their own devices, taxes and regulation aside, to make their own business decisions, or running a captured, cronyistic industrial that wastes money and is swept aside as soon as the policy is abolished. Ireland, India, Pakistan, Argentina; there are many countries that wasted enormous sums on infant industry tariffs to no benefit.

Do you have a resource to recommend that suggests reasons and provides data for this seemingly paradoxical observation?

Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education

From the Section “The Education Premium: Personal versus National”

> “When we move to the national level, these clean results vanish.65 Some prominent economists find that boosting national education slightly impoverishes countries rather than enriching them.66 Others report small positive effects; one typical estimate is that an extra year of national education boosts national income by 1.3%–1.7%.67 Remaining papers find moderate positive effects; the effect of national education on national income roughly equals the effect of personal education on personal income.68 No matter what they find, researchers usually confess their answers are highly uncertain.69”

> “65. For overviews, see Pritchett 2006, Bosworth and Collins 2003, and A. Krueger and Lindahl 2001. 66. See, e.g., Pritchett 2001, pp. 367–91, Islam 1995, and Benhabib and Spiegel 1994. 67. A. Krueger and Lindahl 2001, p. 1125, columns (2), (3), and (5). 68. For a survey, see Lange and Topel 2006, pp. 462–70. 69. One major exception: D. Cohen and Soto 2007 emphasizes the high quality of their data and the low uncertainty of their results. But even their findings dramatically hinge on their sample. When they look at 59 countries over 1960–90, a year of education raises national income by 4.9%. When they look at 81 countries over 1970–90, a year of education raises national income by 9.0% (D. Cohen and Soto 2007, p. 68, columns 5 and 10).”

It’s actually worse than weak and ineffective. If it was weak and ineffective then effective organisations would be able to make an end run around it, whether by corruption or by using politics to institute policy changes. India has a powerful government that’s captured by domestic constituencies that love the current sclerotic system. The Licence Raj lasted 50 years because powerful people wanted it. Moving from the current system to something better will require taking on some of these groups.

> We replicate and resell things, we kind of have to,

You clearly missed what I said here.

> Most countries don't produce that much valuable IP in this stage of their growth.

Seriously read that again. Every developed country has started out copying, manufacturing, and then moved up the value chain to inventing. That's how countries develop - Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore are some examples of this. And even then ISRO and BARC have had to re-create a ton of aerospace and nuclear research on their own, on account of being frozen out of the international research community for decades.

> Heck we are experts are producing more human beings, than any country on earth

Actually India's fertility rate is only a shade above the global average. So it's middle-of-the-pack on that measure, not a world-leader :-)

> Then we can claim what we always claim, we are the best of the best, put all criticism to rest, join hands and sing Mera Bharat Mahan.

Try to ease up on the negativity, anger, and extreme opinions a bit. Everything is not awesome but it's not all bad either.

All the best!

> We live in a country where the government rolls out schemes for daily labor occupation, to keep them busy by helping them dig with shovels

You mean like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

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