MyTake

Few years back while I was reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a thought kept penetrating my mind as to whether the transformations that were illustrated and explained really resulted in making the world flatter. There was a feel which was somehow hindering the entry of such belief that really the world is getting flatter, whether opening up of the economy has really helped India in appropriate distribution of wealth. Isn’t it a reality that big corporate houses and huge multinational corporations are killing small businesses and the opening up of the economy is in fact resulting in consolidation? This thought kept me busy for few months till I happen to read the views, comments and research papers by Harvard scholar, Pankaj Ghemawat and the world is flat began to sound more like an illusion, a fiction well defended and attributed to the success stories. I began to read comparative literature and kept an eye on the growth of Indian industries, especially small and medium ...

India lives in its villages. And India’s most important characteristic on which its strength rests is ‘unity in diversity’.  We have grown with this fact.  The belief that people residing in urban areas are better off than their counterparts toiling in the villages is highly relative.  It really depends as to what really one wants to look at, in tangible form or intangible form. Whatever the case be, it is evident from the practices that the back end support to industrial power houses is provided by this strong rural working population, working hard through their lives. The thinking that standard of living in the villages in tangible terms is poor or relatively bad, is obscure.  It has given birth to an idea of focusing on developing better infrastructure in the rural areas.  It is also necessitated out of issues related to migration (from rural areas to urban areas), which is posing a great challenge to the urban development departments of the respective go...