When two nations started upgrading one of their cities, one nation aimed to make it an industrial & manufacturing hub, the other aimed to upgrade it to be their only and biggest IT hub. Coincidently, both these cities are located at the south of the respective nations. But then, one nation chose a port city (to exploit the sea trade), while the other ignored the very economy of sea and chose a landlocked city. One has a land size of 7,434.4 sq km with a population of 9.94 million while the other has an expanse of 741 sq km but has a population of 5.7 million. These two nations are none other than the favourite choices of economic critics – China and India. While China went ahead with Guangzhou on their industrial spree, India settled down for Bangalore to make it India’s biggest IT hub. Both Bangalore and Guangzhou laid their founding stones in the early 90s, and by the end of 20th century, had established themselves as an IT and industrial hub respectively. But then, the differences between and effective output by both these hubs now are more startling than their similarities.
China has always been of high interest to me since my childhood due to the books on Mao Tse Tung that I had read. However, the surge in interest came when I went to China for the first time. The way the nation hits you is stupendous! If you were not to know which country you had come to – and if you were not even shown how the people looked – then looking at the roads and buildings, you could easily mistake it for any Western developed nation, quite unlike India or its best cities like Bangalore. And Guangzhou has been at the very centre of this mind numbing development. To put the difference between the two cities into a better perspective, in the 2010 Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s Global GDP City Ranking Index, Bangalore ranks 84th with a GDP of $69 billion while Guangzhou ranks 44th with a GDP of $143 billion – almost twice that of Bangalore. Let’s take a look into the journey of these two cities on the basis of some key parameters to bring about the key differences.
China developed Guangzhou into its most efficient and dynamic industrial hub with a GDP of $143 billion and a per capita income of $13,111. Women’s employment rate in Guangzhou was 70.84% in 2010 (which increased by three fold since the last one decade) and around 2.5 million urban women are working in the city. Women constitute 40 percent of the total workforce. Better lifestyle and financial freedom also escalated the social fabric of the city. The most important factor, when it comes to women development, was that the life expectancy rate is now pegged to have reached 81.33 years (again, an increase by 4.5 years in the last one decade). Even the education rate has seen a major surge; more than 49 per cent of total graduates are women and can be seen actively working in the health, science, technology and education sectors.
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China has always been of high interest to me since my childhood due to the books on Mao Tse Tung that I had read. However, the surge in interest came when I went to China for the first time. The way the nation hits you is stupendous! If you were not to know which country you had come to – and if you were not even shown how the people looked – then looking at the roads and buildings, you could easily mistake it for any Western developed nation, quite unlike India or its best cities like Bangalore. And Guangzhou has been at the very centre of this mind numbing development. To put the difference between the two cities into a better perspective, in the 2010 Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s Global GDP City Ranking Index, Bangalore ranks 84th with a GDP of $69 billion while Guangzhou ranks 44th with a GDP of $143 billion – almost twice that of Bangalore. Let’s take a look into the journey of these two cities on the basis of some key parameters to bring about the key differences.
China developed Guangzhou into its most efficient and dynamic industrial hub with a GDP of $143 billion and a per capita income of $13,111. Women’s employment rate in Guangzhou was 70.84% in 2010 (which increased by three fold since the last one decade) and around 2.5 million urban women are working in the city. Women constitute 40 percent of the total workforce. Better lifestyle and financial freedom also escalated the social fabric of the city. The most important factor, when it comes to women development, was that the life expectancy rate is now pegged to have reached 81.33 years (again, an increase by 4.5 years in the last one decade). Even the education rate has seen a major surge; more than 49 per cent of total graduates are women and can be seen actively working in the health, science, technology and education sectors.
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Comments
Thanks,
Sudipto Mukherjee
I think the factors of production and the infrastructure of India is moving forward but the people are moving backward.
All the Indian news confirms this. Sir you talked a lot about developing India and its poor, but what about teh mental health of people in India,
can it be improved by using revital.
People of cities are as hostile as their counterparts in hinterlands. I have experienced serious rascism in many parts of India's so called cosmopolitans.
May be you are well known and respected for your ideas.
World.