American foreign policies and India's fortunes

The United States of America is a very rich country, and it is a well known fact. It is a country that has framed extremely intelligent foreign policies to keep itself in the top of the list featuring the superpowers of the world. Cotton is being imported from the Asian countries, namely India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Electronics and every other domestic product (including a safety pin) are being imported from China. The call centre jobs are outsourced to India and most of the software applications used by the Fortune 500 companies are a product of software giants in India. If India, China and other Asian countries stop their supplies and services, the United States would be in despondency by now! I strongly agree that considerable amount of manufacturing and production is done in the USA, but from the angle of a common man, all we see in the tags and prints of products is not what is made in USA.

A lot of citizens of the US are not very pleased with the policies and decisions taken by Mr. Bush and his subordinates. But at the end of the day, I guess he has won the vote of the people in effectively handling the economic recession by using some of his selfish and clinical methods. His ideas seldom care for the welfare of other countries and their economy. But, India’s case with the effect of US policies has been different. Even though I would not completely agree on the export of cotton, most of the policies have been influential in effecting the Indian economy.

Let’s take an example of a call centre that operates in a metropolitan city in India. There has been a mushroom growth of these call centers all over India in the last 3 years. The average salary of a person working in a call centre is around Rs.10000 (app. 200-250 USD) and you have a million call centre jobs around India! Suppose the same position existed here in the USA and considering the stress factor involved in the call centre jobs (Being awake all night), no American citizen would settle for a pay toting up to less that $2000 a month.

People in America would argue on losing millions of jobs, but on the positive side, look what they have gained! On the other hand, the sudden openings of jobs (software and BPO’s) have exterminated the mass redundancy and the economic struggle which have existed in India for years. The standard of living seems to have gone up and there seems to have been a new element of fortune that has been inducted into the nation. The conservative attitude of people has also begun to change, but since that is of a totally different dimension to what we talk now, I’ll discuss it in detail during some of my blogs in the future.

Right now, both USA and India seem to be doing extremely well in terms of economy. India should give a big salute to the American government which has played a big part in changing its fortunes. While America tries to maintain its position being economically stable, India is trying to rise up like a phoenix to feature among the top ranks. With both the nations being interdependent on each other, this might be the beginning of the struggle for preeminence between the two nations.