A New Series

Being in Chennai, a city experiencing rapid economic growth, and conducting a project that required constant face time with academics, government officials, activists, and private sector employees gave me the chance undertake a fun, more qualititative diversion. In particular, I asked people the following three questions:

1) Do you believe that India will be a developed country by 2020?
2) Do you think everyone is benefiting from economic growth?
3) What are the top three factors/forces that could derail India's quest to become a world economic superpower?

Over the last two years, India has been everyone's favorite cover girl, with breathtaking commentaries on rising affluence and consumerism in India a sign of the West's fascination with this budding superpower. Also, one of the things that struck me most during this most recent trip was how much things had changed, mostly for the better, since my last visit in 2003. Given these two things, I felt a study on people's perspectives on growth might be interesting.

My "sample" consists of all the parties mentioned above, along with individuals from occupations such as flower seller, auto rickshaw driver, small store owner, large store owner, and school child, with the idea being to try the best I could to generate a representative cross-section of the Chennai population. (Besides getting answers to my questions, interacting with so many people allowed me to practice my Tamil, whose condition I have upgraded from "terrible" to "not good."). My aim is to combine these perspectives with my own thoughts and readings in a series of posts about Indian economic development.

Of course, any synthesis that begins with Chennai is probably biased in the direction of optimism (which happens to be my natural leaning, anyway). This is where you come in: please feel free to post any comments, experiences, or thoughts you might have.

I hope to kick off this series in the coming few days and work on it over the course of a month or so. Hope you find it interesting.