Time of India: "India 12th wealthiest nation in 2005"???

Times of India: “India 12th wealthiest nation in 2005: World Bank”?  Also in the Hindu

Oh my god! India? Wealthiest nation?  Pankaj Mishra's op-ed "The myth of new India" published in the Hindustan Times makes some very good and sober comments on this type of media euphoria: "Mittal is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russian's imminent economic superstardom."

A foreigner, if he never walks out of his Indian hotel and reads only Indian newspaper headlines, will certainly get an impression that Indian is the heaven.

Everyday, you are bombarded by headlines like “Asian Development Bank president: India to become a developed nation soon”,   “Indian banks beat Asian peers” “India to beat China in 10 years: BBC survey” (by the way it was actually a survey of Indians),  “No one has actually made any money in China” , so on and so forth.

Any rankings released by any small organizations, so long as India ranks better than Pakistan or China in one of the numerous components of the ranking system, will be highlighted on the same day on Indian newspapers.

The same is true for China, but never to such an extent. Many Chinese are proud of their country as the 4th largest economies in the world, not realizing that the “wealth” has to be divided by 1.3 billion fellow countrymen, and in an terribly unequal way. But I never see any Chinese newspaper headline that portraits China as one of the “richest” or “wealthiest” nations.

When you read Chinese newspapers, except the state media People’s Daily (which by the way cannot be found in most newspaper stands on the streets. i.e., no one buy it), I will say when it comes to economic news, there is not much difference between Chinese newspapers and Indian newspapers. This is not to say that Chinese media is in any sense free, but that Indian newspapers, at least when it comes to economic news, are as propagandist as Chinese ones. The difference is that: Chinese newspapers are forced to, while Indian newspapers choose to, to please readers.

There is a joke that goes like the following. China and India are the same although one has the strictest media censorship in the world while the other has free media. In Chinese newspapers, you always find a lot of articles about the need for reform and how many hidden dangers are ahead of the economy. In Indian newspapers, you will find the same thing: banking sector problems, pollutions, labor unrest......... in China though!

There are actually quite a few academic studies that try to find out the reason why media industry, even with perfect degree of freedom, will still purportedly propagate biased information. One of the reasons, as many researchers point out, is that readers believe only what they want to believe, and when the benefit of finding out the truth is much smaller than the cost, no one bother to find out.

I think it is quite true. If you cannot do anything about the poverty, why bother emphasizing it on a daily basis. The other day, I saw a BBC article, which highlights the number of Indians living under $1/day. A local Indian commented below the article that: “why do you throw out a number every several days about the poverty of India. We don’t need you to tell me that we are poor. We can see it everyday when we goes to work. We don’t need you to repeat it”

It's qutie true. After you spend you real life in a sweatshop, why don't you want to review your real tough life again when you go home to relax.

Comments

[jvz]

Quote: A local Indian commented below the article that: “why do you throw out a number every several days about the poverty of India. We don’t need you to tell me that we are poor. We can see it everyday when we goes to work. We don’t need you to repeat it”

True but ignoring the plight of poor will not do India any good and the problem will not go away by itself.

What India need to do is to face the reality and tackle it .