By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
Davos : India will catch up with the West and take its place alongside “the best” in the world but it’s not going to happen overnight, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram told an audience of young people at the World Economic Forum.
“I see a shift but I don’t think it’s going to be a dramatic shift or over a short time. China and India have some way to go before we catch up, but we will catch up and we will take our place,” Chidambaram said at panel discussion televised live by BBC Television in this Swiss town.
For the moment, the Indian minister said, countries that control capital and intellectual property and knowledge-based societies will “continue to have the upper hand.”
“The greatest universities are in the West, the best minds migrate to the West, the best opportunities for innovation and research are in the West,” he said, and mentioned Germany when asked to name an example of such a country.
He said 60 percent of the world’s output came from China and India until 1820.
“Two hundred years later, in 2020 or so, 60 percent of the world’s output will come from China. I think the rise of China and India as economic superpowers will do a lot of good to the world.”
His comments came at a session on ‘shifting powers’, where Singaporean academic and free market advocate Kishore Mahboobani said the world was entering a new era of world history which would be marked by the “end of western domination”.
The West’s place, he said, would be taken by India and China, who deserved to be on the G-8 group of the world’s industrial powerhouses.
“With the shift of power to Asia, it’s clear that it’s in the world’s interests to realise that the G-8 is a sunset organisation” in its present shape.
Mahboobani said that research showed there was a 50 percent improvement in living standards in a person’s lifetime during the industrial revolution.
“In Asia today, the figure is 10,000 percent,” he said.
Calling for India to be made a permanent member of the UN Security Council, he said it was an anomaly that the “main qualification for a seat in the Security Council is that you should have won the World War in 1945.”
India’s economic emergence has been among the themes at the WEF this year, contrasted with the economic downturn faced by the US economy.