by Mira Kamdar Scribner. NewYork 336 Pages
Reviewed by Mahadev Desai
 

Following her acclaimed and award winning memoir, Motiba’s Tattoos, Mira Kamdar has written a thoughtful, well-researched, comprehensive and highly informative Planet India: How the fastest-growing democracy is transforming America and the world. No stranger to

India, Kamdar has traveled extensively, interviewed and met with corporate leaders, celebrities, social activists and people in different walks of life to paint a rich and endlessly fascinating portrait of political, cultural and social forces shaping India.
In the very first Chapter, she emphasizes that no democracy in history has undergone a transformation of India’s magnitude and velocity. India is world’s youngest but vibrant multicultural, multireligious and multilingual democracy and also fourth largest economy. India has the youngest population (50% of India’s people are under 25) on the planet and a middle class as big as the population of the entire United States. Not only is India the ideal market for the next thing, but with a highly skilled English-speaking workforce, elite educational institutions like the famed Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and growing foreign investment, India is emerging as an innovator of the technology that is driving the next phase of the global economy. Over 70% of global entertainment revenue is expected to come from Asia by 2015, and India alone will account for half of this. India deserves a place in reconfigured United Nations Security Council Organization.
But she also highlights the age old problems that India needs to grapple with immediately because it does not have the luxury of time. It has a tiny affluent minority, a rising materialistic and acquisitive middle class, and 800 million people who live on less than $2 per day.” Our biggest challenge is the challenge nobody has solved in the world: how to grow equity”Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industry, told Kamdar.India faces all the critical problems of our time-extreme social inequality, employment insecurity, caste divisions,a growing energy crisis, severe water shortages, a degraded environment, global warming, a galloping HIV/AIDS epidemic, terrorist attacks,-on a scale that defies imagination.
India has become a major source of skilled, low cost labor, with a corps of English-speaking, highly skilled workers who can compete with the best, especially in technology and science, for a fraction of what a comparable worker is paid in the U.S. or Europe. No wonder jobs in finance, technology, life sciences, human resources and business management are being outsourced to India. “Any business that doesn’t require physical presence can be outsourced”Azim Premji, CEO of WIPRO, one of India’s largest Companies said. Alan Blinder, a Prof. of Economics at Princeton University calls this the third industrial revolution. The first was the shift of labor from farms to factories; the second was the shift from manufacturing to services and the third is a shift made possible by the information age. Big multinational corporations are accessing India for research and development, and also for markets. India’s 1.2 billion and 20 million strong Diaspora are beginning to flex their cultural and economic muscles. Evidence of India’s renaissance is everywhere-in Indian fashion, music, movies, art and letters.
70% of India’s population lives in rural areas, where they are dependent on agriculture.-mostly small scale farming. Over the next ten years, hundreds of thousands of these people will flood into the cities, putting even greater stress on the already burdened infrastructure and creating a massive need for new jobs. To help with jobs, India Government has passed Rural Employment Guarantee Act. But agriculture needs to be revitalized. Rural India has become home to perhaps the most experimental and revolutionary methods of idea sharing and trade. Agribusiness giant ITC has installed several communal information kiosks called e-Choupals to bring local farmers access to innovative farming techniques as well as new trading partners from around the world. In Andhra Pradesh, e-service centers help villagers to get electronic records of birth certificates, marriage certificates, tax returns, land titles etc.and also to pay bills.
India must be energy independent, by developing alternative sources of energy like wind farming, biofuels etc. Recently India and the U.S.have signed the Nuclear Energy Bill but it has received a mixed reaction in both the countries. American Corporations though expect to earn $20 to $40 billion from this civil nuclear agreement. India also faces severe water crisis. It has 17% of the world’s population but only 4% of world’s fresh water.
India also needs to address Health and Education (Especially Primary) crisis. Critics argue that while India tops the developing world in buying conventional weapons, it spends only 1.3% of its budget on health care. 70 million Indians cannot afford to see a doctor or buy medicine. India must use digital technology for telemedicine, and remote diagnostics, and provide inexpensive generic drugs to the population. The Gates Foundation spends 300% more on AIDs awareness, prevention and treatment than the Indian Government does. The Heroes Project, co chaired by actor Richard Gere and Parmeshwar Godrej in partnership with Kaiser Family Foundation and with a grant from the Gates Foundation is leveraging celebrity power and the media to increase awareness about HIV/AIDs crisis. India is facing an education emergency. Last year, Pratham, an NGO in Primary education, in it’s Annual Survey of Education Report stated that of an estimated 140 million children in primary school in India, 30 million cannot read, 40 million cannot even recognize an alphabet, and 55 million will not complete even four years of school. One of the most innovative ways to extend educational opportunity is via distance learning over wireless internet connections. Some of the reasons for the abysmal state of primary education are lack of schools with basic facilities, child labor, and internal migration of parents, teacher shortages, and teacher absenteeism. There are encouraging signs of some inspired individuals, NGOs, and the private sector taking on the challenge of improving the quality and reach of basic education in India, however. And same goes for efforts (chiefly by women activists to save the country’s environment from the wanton destruction of unchecked exploitation.
Kamdar celebrates the ‘Can- do spirit among Indians.” Everywhere I was stunned by the pride, the bullishness, the sense that this moment belongs to India. I caught a glimpse of India’s future, its possibilities and its perils, and in that future I saw our own, for as goes India, so goes the world,’ reflects Kamdar.
Planet India, with Mira Kamdar’s in-depth research, abundant up-to-date data and scholarly analysis is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of America and the world.
Mira Kamdar is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute since 1992, and an Associate Fellow of the Asia Society. She has provided expert commentary on India for CNN International News, the BBC, and NPR. She lives in New York with her husband and two children. 

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