Ask any common man in India about the problems India faces and you are likely to get the same answers. Those same answers are what you will get if you ask the question to people who do business in India be they Indians or Foreigners who are here to tap in to India’s immense potential. The broad governance issues that India faces can be categorized in these categories:
- Unhealthy Policies: For decades, after India got its freedom from the British in 1947, India adopted a protectionist stance towards its own businesses. It made it extremely difficult for foreign bussinesses to set up shop in India. India also hobnobbed with the Soviets which directly influenced many of India’s policies. Though India had adopted a western style democracy it’s early leaders were fascinated with Soviet style socialism. This fascination eventually caused India to be on the sore side of western leaders and the losing side of the cold war. It was only in 1991 that economic reforms were brought in and India opened up its markets. The change was immediate! Within a decade the landscape in India transformed completely forcing the world to sit up and take notice.
- Corruption: Asking anybody in India about its problems will fetch you the answer that India’s number one problem is corruption. It is a widely held belief that one can’t be born or even die in India without giving a bribe (for the birth or the death certificates) to some government official. One after another sleazy Scams are reported by the media (a very free and vocal Indian media) and causes a public outcry. The office of Prime Minister of India (the highest position in the land just like in Great Britain) itself has been accused of graft many a times since the 1980’s. The latest scam which caused a furor in the country involved a Union Telecom Minister of the country allocating contracts for Mobile Telephony Spectrum at nominal rates to several parties which these companies then sold of for as much as 10 times the price at which they had bought the spectrum. The CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) has estimated that this caused a loss of more than a 100 billion dollars to the Exchequer or in other words the taxpayer in India.
- A Lethargic Bureaucracy: Despite very severe criticism of the Indian Bureaucracy and the Judicial system both from within and outside India, they haven’t been reformed to keep pace with the changing spirit of the Indian nation. Many feel frustrated at the teeth gnashingly frustrating ways of the clerks and officers in Government offices in India, the average Indian bureaucrat will refuse to file a document if he/she spots a single alphabetical error in some unimportant part of a document, will refuse to go along with any improvisations in the procedure even when what you are suggesting is well within the bounds of both reason and the established law. Combine this with the extreme amounts of time they require often to do routine tasks (well many government offices in India are overburdened) and the entitlement to bonus cash they feel even for doing the most basic of their duties and you have an idea of how irritating it is to have to deal with Indian bureaucracy.
- The Indian Judicial System has problems of its 出讓生意 own, though recognized as fairly unbiased and fair, the time it takes for cases to be heard in Indian courts is bizarrely long. If you consider the judge to population ratio in India it is 6 judges for every million people down from 10 judges per million a decade ago. Despite repeated calls and suggestions, the government fails to do something about this. As for the delays, consider this, the verdict for the Bhopal gas tragedy case which took place 25 years ago (1984) in Bhopal, India in which there was a leak in one of the plants of American company Union Carbide. The Methyl Isocyanate and other chemicals which leaked out on that fateful day killed more than 10000 people and maimed many more. Several of the affected people who survived, till date have only received paltry compensations for the horrendous tragedies they have suffered. International lawyers point to the loopholes in Indian Judicial system and even its poor enforcement for India not being able to extract any meaningful fines. It takes an average of 10 years for India’s honorable courts to decide in every case. In what manners does Business suffer because of this? Well, because disputes in organizations or between them are not swiftly decided, the concept of copy wright protection being a joke in India because of non enforcement, businesses often have to suffer huge losses.