Author: Times News Network
Publication: The Times of India
Date: November 28, 2006
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/627615.cms
The second-most important man in Britain's
Conservative Party has challenged the UK and West's "lazy assumptions"
that India, a country "with low wages and high ambitions", would
be content to do "cheap things" and leave the West to "do the
clever stuff" in the age of globalisation.
George Osborne, Britain's shadow chancellor
and right-hand man of David Cameron, leader of the main opposition Tories,
launched on Monday a combative attack on the patronising attitude towards
India by an intensely self-satisfied UK and the West.
Osborne, who visited India with Cameron just
weeks ago, harangued the annual conference of Britain's premier business organisation
with a rat-a-tat round of points. He told the Confederation of British Industry
(CBI): "How are we going to compete against countries with low wages
and high ambitions?
There are quite a lot of lazy assumptions
out there that we need to confront. There's the assumption that we'll do the
clever stuff, we'll move up the value chain, and leave the Chinese and Indians
to do cheap things. Let me tell you no one has told them that."
Osborne added, in his high profile speech
to an organisation that counts most of the UK's top-flight CEOs, biggest companies
and employers among its members that he "was in India with David Cameron
in September. We saw Internet start-up companies in Delhi to rival the start-ups
I saw in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago.
"We met with Ratan Tata in Mumbai, whose
companies are setting up engineering research facilities in Coventry and a
call centre in Northern Ireland. We had lunch with Anand Mahindra and talked
to him about his plans to launch a Mahindra hybrid car into the UK market.
And we pressed the Indian PM to further open up his economy to, among others,
British retailers."
In an extraordinary paean to the new "emerging"India,
Osborne declared: "There is an ambition, an appetite for hard-work, a
drive to succeed in countries like India which I have to say I think is lacking
in too much of this country."
Analysts said it was significant that the
Conservative Party had seen fit to launch an attack on the West's "lazy
assumptions" about India remaining content with the menial, so-called
21st-century coolie jobs in a fast-globalising world. They said Osborne's
warning that India wanted to move swiftly up the value chain was clearly a
disconcerting message to the "fat cats" of the CBI, which boasts
it is "the premier lobbying organisation for UK business on national
and international issues".
Till now, almost every major Western politician,
not least British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has talked up the "challenge"
presented to the West by India's vast pool of highly-educated, English-speaking
professionals. But till Osborne's rapier-sharp challenge to British business
orthodoxy, no politician had explained India's ambition to move from body-shopping,
low-grade "coolie" labour at the coalface of the new global information
empire.
Within hours of the speech, Osborne's paean
to Indian ambitions was being hailed as reflecting an important mood of political
realism about the rise of the East on the global stage.
