Proud to be Indian

The Indian economy is the eleventh largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth largest by purchasing power parity (PPP).

1. India is poised to achieve 9 per cent economic growth in the current financial year itself, driven by robust performance by the agriculture and industry sectors.

The economy grew by 8.9 per cent in the second quarter of the current fiscal.

2. India has emerged as one of the world's top ten countries in industrial production. The nation's industrial production grew at the fastest pace in three months at 10.8 per cent.

Manufacturing grew 11.3 percent in October after a 4.6 percent gain in September.

3. India is one of the fastest growing automobile markets in the world, expanding at 35 per cent on average in the first four months of the current financial year.

4. The Bombay Stock Exchange has been rated as the world's best performing stock market recently. With a 13 per cent gain, Sensex is among the world's 10 biggest markets, according to data collected by Bloomberg.

5. Indian companies have become bigger and stronger in the last ten years with the average revenue of a company on the Fortune India 500 list standing at Rs 7,632.5 crore (Rs 76.32 billion).

The total revenue of the Fortune India 500 companies stands at Rs 38,16,239.40 crore.

6. India is the world's largest recipient of overseas remittances. The remittances grew from $49.6 billion in 2009 to $55 billion in 2010.

It is also the country with the second largest number of emigrants after Mexico, according to the World Bank.

7. India owns over 18,000 tonnes of above ground gold stocks worth approximately $800 billion and representing at least 11 per cent of global stock, according to estimates of World Gold Council.

India ranks 11th in the world with 557.7 tonnes of gold reserves.

8. India is among the top 10 nations in terms of foreign exchange reserves.

The country's foreign exchange reserves breached the $300-billion mark for the first time since 2008 with an addition of $2.2 billion on the back of a healthy rise in foreign currency. The nation's forex reserves currently stand at $296.40 billion.

9. India's services sector, backed by the IT revolution, remains the biggest contributor to the country's GDP, with a contribution of 58.4 per cent.

The industry sector contributed 24.1 per cent and the agriculture sector contributed 17.5 per cent to the GDP.

9. India's civil aviation sector will be among the top five in the world in the next five years.

Indian domestic air traffic is expected to reach 160-180 million passengers per year, while international traffic will exceed 80 million.

10. India's exports during November jumped by 26.8 per cent to $18.9 billion year-on-year. India's exports during April-September aggregated to $103.65 billion registering a year-on-year growth of 28 per cent.

11. India, China and Brazil are the top three target countries for foreign direct investment until the end of 2012 with the United States, for years number one, now in fourth place, according to the UN trade and development agency UNCTAD.

12. The Indian telecommunications industry is the world's fastest growing telecommunications industry, 723.28 million telephone (landlines and mobile) subscribers and 687.71 million mobile phone connections as of September 30, 2010.

13. The number of Internet users in India is estimated at 81 million. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India pegs the number of broadband subscribers at 10.08 million in August 2010.

14. The Indian IT-BPO industry is expected to exceed $70 billion in fiscal 2011.

The Indian IT-BPO exports are projected to grow by 13 per cent to 15 per cent while domestic IT-BPO will grow slightly more by 15 per cent to 17 per cent during fiscal 2010-11.

15. India has the largest number of post offices in the world. The world's highest post office, Hikkim is located at 15,500 feet in the Lahaul Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh.

16. The largest employer in India is the Indian Railways, employing over 1.6 million people. Indian Railways started operations on April 16, 1853.

17. India ranks second in farm output globally. India is one of the largest producer in the world of milk, cashew nuts, coconuts, tea, ginger, turmeric and black pepper.

18. Tourism is the largest service industry in India, with a contribution of 6.23 per cent to the national GDP. The number of foreign tourists visiting the country during September this year is higher than that of the same month last year.

Around 3.69 lakh (369,000) foreign tourists came to India in September this year as compared to 3.28 lakh (328,000) during the same month in 2009.

http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-facts-you-must-know-about-indias-growth/20101215.htm

Who says India is a poor country?

Indians are poor but India is not a poor country, says Swiss Bank Director. He says that Rs. 280 Lakh crore of Indian money is deposited in Swiss Bank.

This same money can be used for

• Tax less budget for 30 years
• Can Give 6o crore jobs to all Indian
• From any village to Delhi 4 lane roads
• Forever free power supply to more than 500 social projects
• Every citizen can get monthly Rs. 2000/- for 60 years.
• No need of World Bank & IMF loan.

Think how our money is blocked by rich corrupt people.

ZEROING IN ON BLACK MONEY

$462000000000

India Drained Of 20 Lakh cr During 1948-2001: Study

Binoy Prabhakar NEW DELHI

IN A season of swindles, kickbacks and scams, here is some more on the mother of them all. Black money — the popular moniker given to the billions seeded by dirty deals and whisked away abroad from the taxman’s prying eyes — has received much attention in recent years.

The opposition never tires of screaming foul at the government. The government, for its part, is at pains to say it is doing all it can to track down the illegal stash.

Despite the cacophony, an estimate of the scads of black money in secret bank vaults overseas has long been one big unknown, resulting in a great deal of speculation and glib talk around the subject. Finally, some help is at hand.

A new study by an international watchdog on the illicit flight of money from the country, perhaps the first ever attempt at shedding light on a subject steeped in secrecy, concludes that India has been drained of $462 billion ( 20,556,848,000,000 or over 20 lakh crore) between 1948 and 2008. The amount is nearly 40% of India’s gross domestic product, and nearly 12 times the size of the estimated loss to the government because of the 2G spectrum scam. The study has been authored by Dev Kar, a lead economist with the US-based Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit research body that has long crusaded against illegal capital flight.

Mr Kar, a former senior economist with the International Monetary Fund, says illicit financial flows out of India have grown at 11.5% a year, debunking a popular notion that economic reforms that began nearly two decades ago had tempered the creation and stashing away of black money overseas.

Outflows accelerated after reforms
IF CAPITAL outflows were a child of the independence era, the problem came of age in the years after the reforms kicked in. Nearly 50% of the total illegal outflows occurred since 1991. Around a third of the money exited the country between 2000 and 2008.

“It shows that reforms seem to have accelerated the transfer of black money abroad,” says Mr Kar, whose study titled ‘The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India: 1948-2008’ sifts through piles of data on the issue over a period of 61 years. The study, which Mr Kar says is the most comprehensive one yet on illicit financial flows from India, will be made public on Thursday.

His report comes amid a renewed government push in recent months to pursue black money stashed abroad. In late August, the government signed an agreement with Switzerland — its banks top a list of usual suspects — that will enable exchange of information on tax evaders. New Delhi is also in talks with at least 20 tax havens, particularly Mauritius, to extract similar information.

The government is also attempting to gain a measure of the total unaccounted money circulating in the economy. The finance ministry last week approached the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy to get a fix on such money.

But M Govinda Rao, director of the institute, says his think-tank is yet to decide on going ahead with the exercise because it is not an easy task. “A study on this subject is a huge challenge because one is dealing with a very big problem that covers hordes of money from many sectors,” he says.

Black money turned into an election issue during the 2009 general elections, with the BJP harping on the issue throughout its campaign. Its leader LK Advani has been the most vocal critic of the government on this issue, time and again questioning the government’s resolve to chase illegal funds. Mr Advani recently urged the government to publish a white paper on the issue.

While Mr Advani was unavailable for comment, the government’s detractors on this issue say there is more talk than action to address this issue.

“Everybody knows about the gravity of the problem, but the government has not shown the political will to bring the money back to India,” says Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

The government has, however, received praise from Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has been at the forefront of the fight against tax evasion. OECD, whose relentless offensive is largely credited with lifting the veil of secrecy over umpteen tax havens, hailed India’s efforts to crack down on tax evasion and sign information exchange agreements earlier this year.

These are but short-lived answers, say experts, adding that an overhaul in the global financial system is central to a lasting solution. New tax havens will spring forth when pressure mounts on existing ones.

That is not to say there are only a few tax havens out there. Indeed, at least 91 such hotspots flourish across the globe. Asian countries, particularly Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau, too are emerging as new destinations for parking illicit funds.

Besides Switzerland and Mauritius, Indian money is also said to end up in Seychelles and Macau. Due to the illicit nature of these deposits, pinpointing the journey’s end of the bulk of India’s black money is tenuous at best.

The GFI study gives a measure of the amount of money that the government is chasing, but it is only a fraction of the $1.4 trillion that the BJP claims is the illegal stash.

GFI acknowledges as much, saying its figure is conservative and hasn’t taken into account smuggling and certain types of trade mischief. It also admits to gaps in available statistics, lamenting the lack of data on the consolidated fiscal balance with the government, which has hampered research. If these indicators were counted, India’s total illicit outflows would well be half a trillion dollars.

But Mr Kar says the $1.4 trillion figure was an “estimate”, while the numbers in the latest report are based on real data.

Still, GFI says that by no stretch of imagination is its calculation insignificant, more so when viewed against the country’s existing external debt at nearly $230 billion.

“It means India could not only have contracted less debt or even paid it off, but another half would also have been left over for poverty alleviation and economic development,” says Mr Kar. “There is no question that this huge loss of capital has set India back in its struggle to eradicate poverty and illiteracy.”

The study has based its findings on the World Bank Residual Model that tracks illicit outflows by measuring the disparity in a country’s recorded source and use of funds. It also delves into IMF’s ‘trade-mispricing’ model that compares a country’s recorded imports to what the world says it exported to the country as well as the recorded exports against its global imports. The gaps tell the story.

The perpetrators of illicit outflows, says the study, are wealthy individuals and private companies. Black money is also abetted by the existence of an ’underground’ economy that emerged out of illegal activities and assets spawned by such activities.

The unabated growth of slush funds is borne out of a growing affinity of culprits for offshore financial centres, or tax havens, at the expense of banks in developed countries such as the US, France and the United Kingdom. The study finds that the share of deposits in offshore tax havens grew to 54.2% in 2009 from 36.4% in 1995.

The study is as much an indictment of feckless government action as it is about shedding a light on the nature of illicit financial flows. “The sharp rise in illicit flows means that tax evasion (which is part and parcel of such flows) is also increasing sharply,” says Mr Kar.

“In the absence of good governance and poor institutional oversight, the desire for the hidden accumulation of wealth drives more of such transfers,” he adds.

Though India cannot end its black money problem alone, there are challenges it must address by itself, says the study. Legal institutions and procedures need to be strengthened and streamlined. The guilty should be punished --the architects of the Commonwealth Games scam, for example -- swiftly. And tax policies must be rationalised.

“Sure, black money is there in most countries but if it worsens poverty, robs human rights and drives centrifugal forces such as naxals, it becomes a problem that can no longer be ignored,” says Mr Kar.

Source: The Economics Times, 18/11/2010

'Awake to freedom'

'Awake to freedom' "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.

At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, then an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again.

The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Freedom and power bring responsibility. That responsibility rests upon this assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now.

Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we might fulfill the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease
and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labor and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagines that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible, so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

To the people of India whose representatives we are, we make appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill-will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell."

-- Speech by Jawaharlal Nehru

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wUcw8Ufx_Y

My Response to comments received for earlier post

Nice points of observation. So now lets see what do you want to say. First of all it all about “these people”, but who are “these people”. I think “these people” are you, I and some others like us hence we. So now since we know whom we want to address to for getting India on higher growth lines, let’s look at what do we do which we need to change. We spit on roads, we are narrow minded, we are illiterate, corrupt and we live on ‘jugaad’.
I guess you already know what I am going to write but still allow me to do that. First is to change ourselves then talk about others. See yourself in how many such activities you contribute, in positive and negative manner. Do you also spit on roads? Do you also get involved in corruption? Do you use any jugaad yourself? And what have you done to get people literate?
You don’t need to answer me but you know the answer. If the change has to come it has to start from within. How can we demand something from others when we don’t do it ourselves? We should set examples, which can lead the way. No body in the world can stop you from thinking big and bright, then why do you think we are narrow minded. Who is narrow minded brother? A farmer, who grows crops every year and still lives below poverty line, is he narrow minded. He has thought much-much bigger than what we do, its because of him that we get to eat our food, its because of him that India is the largest supplier of pulses and grains in the world. He has done much more than we ever can. But yes he cannot talk in English like you, or he does not have a great dressing sense, or he might be getting involved in child marriage or female daughter killing. So what do you think can change all this?
Education is the key to all those issues. Studying arts, science and commerce is not enough, we should also learn our moral duties. It’s our moral duty to keep our country clean. It’s our moral duty not to make our country corrupt. It’s our moral duty to help other.
Poverty is another big enemy of ours and we have to win over it. But this too has solution from education. If we are educated than we can get better jobs and some of us will create some jobs and businesses.
Tell me why you can’t teach someone. You are big enough to teach anyone. You not your servant and their children may be one hour a day. Now what possibly can happen if you do that? Firstly you will loose one hour of your play time. Secondly, that servant will spread the word of mouth that his employer teaches him and his children. Such can be the excitement that in sometime more servants will ask their employer’s to help them in studies. Hence it will gradually decrease the illiteracy rate. Even government has now implemented so many policies like mid-day meal, free primary education, etc. for such people. You can help them in getting in there. Remember to make any policy successful we should have three important factors; people who can take the best benefits from the policy, systems which can sustain the policy and its demands, and the policy makers for can manage all the implementations and monitor the response.

My Reponse when asked - what according to u is a feasible solution? {related to GROWING INDIA}

The current India is growing India itself, that's why we call it as developing nation. The question is - are we satisfied with the pace at which it is growing? If yes, then we have the solution and we are working on it. If not, then what changes are required to increase the pace?
Well my solution is simple, a nation grows when its people grow, because it’s the people who make a nation, not the other way round. Hence the growth has to come from each individual; each individual has to understand their responsibility and role towards nation’s growth. Every wrong act is wrong, no matter how large or small it may be and it’s the individual who has to stand against wrong and has to stand high for the right.
A nation progresses when each individual understands his own contribution in countries’ GDP. we have such a beautiful example of Japan in front of us, a country beaten down to dust but look at them now, they are among the developed nation. India on the other hand never faced any such tragedy. But to be fare, India has faced bigger ones. Atom bomb happened once in century, India has smaller atom bombs exploding every now and then with different names. A stupid country, smaller than the size of U.P. in all terms be it area, population, economy, etc. has caused more problems per year to us then the number of companies India has registered on sensex every year. How can any Indian forget that one of our beautiful state is under terror attack since 1948?
The actual problem does not stop there, because it starts from inside. The corruption, self centered thinking, and cowardliness (yes it’s a truth Indians are coward people) has pushed India more back than anything else. How can you imagine that when UP, Assam, Bengal get floods every year, we have desert in Rajisthan, drought in AP and Tamil Nadu. Why can’t we combine all the rivers and states together and use the power of free flowing energy. This is the kind of thoughts and work which is required from our nation's countrymen.
The solution lies within us, we as nation has to take decisions some will be hard, some will be shocking but for certain they have to be bold. And that's exactly what our generation has the responsibility for. Our fathers and grandfathers have done their job and it’s time for them to retire and be our guide. But its time for us the generation next to stand make things count.

10-point plan for India to be an economic superpower

1. Agriculture needs to grow at a sustained rate of 4%.

2. Manufacturing needs to register 11-12% long-term average growth.

3. Service sector needs to remain robust and a growth driver.

4. Physical Infrastructure needs to be of global standards.

5. Education would have to be the center of reforms.

6. Skill development would need a massive step up.

7. Labour environment and rules need to be conducive to employment creation.

8. Delivery mechanisms of government need to be streamlined.

9. Need new urban centers to come up as growth poles.

10. The financial sector reforms need to be fast tracked to enable financing of a high growth, large economy -- particularly focussing on long-term funding instruments and financial inclusion.