The Hindu Business Line : `India can grow without overseas market, but ... '

ACHIEVING growth with productive employment generation is the challenge India faces, according to Prof John Harriss, Director-Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics. India, he said, "has been experiencing jobless growth over the last 15 years or so," which means a large number of people have been marginalised even as the economy has grown.

Pitching for globalisation that is "inclusive", Prof Harriss told the gathering at the Brand Summit here that, "India has such a huge domestic market that it needn't rely on the overseas market for growth," but to realise that potential, people need to have incomes.

China, in contrast, seems to have achieved the synergy between employment generation and sustainable growth.

Another negative fallout of increasing inequalities is the emergence of "narrow identity politics ... that bring about violent conflict". This is true, he said, "of those cities north of England where many immigrants from India and Pakistan have settled. The job prospects for large number of English men in these cities are poor, and it is often amongst such men that the politics of the British National Party are found attractive".

He, however, said the blurring of geographies or the interconnectedness enabled by globalisation, paradoxically, brings greater significance to what is local, rather than wearing down cultures as has been feared.

"Research that is being done in Chennai by two of my colleagues from the LSE is showing, too, that many of those who are employed in the best jobs in the software industry, far from chasing after Western lifestyles — as one popular stereotype of them would have us believe — actually cherish many aspects of their own cultural tradition."

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