Trying to follow the story on Tata Motors new "cheap car" [they prefer "peoples' car"] has led me into some interesting places, and a look at a free-for-all if-not-exactly-free market like we normally think of it.
You will recall that in perusing Indian news sources I pointed out both the land acquisition problems that Tata was having in regard to its proposed Nano production plant in Singur, and also my discovery that the Indian constitution does not consider property a "fundamental right" any more.
So I got hooked on this story and tried to dig a little deeper.
It turns out that Tata Motors--described by the India Times as "a somewhat hidebound company"--is using the occasion of the Nano to completely re-organize its facotry system into "independent production hubs," and has dropped its plans for a Nano plant at Singur, shifting instead to Pantnagar in Uttarakhand.
I don't know where any of these places are, which is a major problem. Why?
Because the Indian government sees the Nano as only one component in making India itself the major international player in small car (say, sub-sub-sub-compact) production and export. According to the India Times economic section:
The Auto Policy 2002 and the Automotive Mission Plan 2006-2016 state the government’s intention and outline the action required to make India an automotive hub. A key element of this vision is the small car. While various policy measures are under discussion within the government, the automobile industry has proactively contributed to the realisation of this vision....
There are four essential prerequisites for being called a small car hub. First the total production of small cars in India should rank amongst the top two in the world. Second, small cars should have a high share of the domestic market....
There can be no question about meeting the first requirement. Although, the numbers of cars produced in India are small compared to the US, Japan, China and other European countries, India is the third largest producer of small cars after Japan and Brazil. Small cars also account for over 71% of the domestic market.
The driving force behind this move--aside from significant government investment assisting the Indian automobile industry in becoming internationally competitive--will have to come from designers like Designer Girish Wagh: The whizkid who shaped Tata Nano, a 37-year-old design engineer who has achieved overnight superstar status in the Indian automotive world. You can tell just listening to the Tata Motors CEO talk about Wagh that he's half expecting the Whiz Kid to be spirited away:
Tata himself is more than generous in his praise for Wagh. “Girish is a terrific guy and has displayed enormous leadership qualities,” he said, just after the Nano launch.
“He takes over a responsibility and sees it through.” Of course, “no one is indispensible and Telco did go through many years of innovation without a Girish Wagh. There’s a terrific spirit in the company and we try to identify, motivate and empower that spirit. Girish is part of that process,” he said.
There's a point to all this; but first one slight detour.
Always pay attention to the scenery on your trips. In this case the scenery is the advertising on the financial pages of the India Times, which includes the University of Phoenix on-line program, Vonage internet telephone service, Vacations to Go.com, and Dish TV.
The front page of the India Times website includes stories on Al Qaeda, Brittany Spears, and the Babe of the Day, which in this case is actress Divya Khosla.
Now, the point: between global warming, outsourcing of American jobs, nuclear saber-rattling in Kashmir, India--the world's biggest and most fractious democracy--is a place the average American knows nothing about.
We're still back with Mother Theresa picking up orphan babies in Calcutta, and that's not where this country is.
As the Christian Science Monitor notes, we've not only outsourced to India answering the phone at some county government offices and the drive-through windows at some Burger Kings, we are now outsourcing the tutoring necessary for American school children to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind:
Somit Basak's tutoring style is hardly unusual. The engineering graduate spices up lessons with games, offers rewards for excellent performance, and tries to keep his students' interest by linking the math formulas they struggle with to real-life examples they can relate to.
Unlike most tutors, however, Mr. Basak lives thousands of miles away from his students - he is a New Delhi resident who goes to work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with American students doing their homework around dinnertime.
Americans have slowly grown accustomed to the idea that the people who answer their customer-service and computer-help calls may be on the other side of the globe. Now, some students may find their tutor works there, too.
While the industry is still relatively tiny, India's abundance of math and engineering graduates - willing to teach from a distance for far less money than their American counterparts - has made the country an attractive resource for some US tutoring firms.
My favorite part of the article is when the American education bureaucrats and teachers' unions chime in:
But critics worry about a lack of tutoring standards and question how well anyone can teach over a physical and cultural gulf. The fact that some of the outsourced tutors may be used to fulfill the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) supplemental education requirements - and get federal funds to do so - has been even more controversial.
"We don't know who's tutoring the students, we don't know what their qualifications are, and we're concerned about their familiarity with the curriculum in the districts of the students they're tutoring," says Nancy Van Meter, director of the Center on Accountability and Privatization at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Ms. Van Meter says she's concerned about the lack of quality control for all tutors hired under NCLB, but "the offshore tutoring raises that issue even more dramatically than we've seen here in the States."
My guess would be that the last time Nancy Van Meter thought about India it was when she was staying up late to watch the colorized version of Gunga Din on the Superstation.
Time to wake up and realize that there's one hell of a lot out there, folks, in the rest of the world than just us, Europe, Japan, and China.
Comments