Quota will dent booming Indian economy, says The Economist

New Delhi, Jun 1 (UNI) International news and business magazine The Economist has said reservation row can lead to further shortages of quality graduates in India and dent its booming economy, especially in the fastest growing and job-creating services sector.

The Economist which has done a survey of business in India, argues that the issue of reservation is based on the ''ignorance'' coming out of the fallacious data which claim that the OBCs (Other Backward Classes) contribute 52 per cent of the population.

'' The issue of reservations is indeed one of the most incendiary in Indian politics,'' the London-edited weekly publication says.

The Survey which lists many of the great feats achieved by the Indian economy, finds the availability of quality human resource as one of the key challenges for sustaining the global brand equity of the home-grown companies, especially in the IT and automobile sectors.

Quoting an IIT study which shows that one-half of the seats reserved for dalits and tribal people are lying vacant, the magazine says that the fundamental failure of the Indian education is not discrimination in tertiary institutions; it is the inability of primary and secondary schools to produce enough qualified students.

''Meanwhile, a shortage of well-qualified college graduates has become one of the biggest threats to the continued rapid growth of India's services and other industries and hence to the booming economy,'' it says.

Survey author and South Asia Bureau Chief of The Economist Simon Long told UNI that the Communists' take on the issue was fairly negative. ''When the quality of your graduate material is crucial, the last thing you try to do is to jeopardise it. It is hard to imagine quota will happen without impacting the quality of human resource which has been India's selling point,'' Mr Long said.

According to the survey, while on the one side there are not enough jobs, 70 million people will join the labour force in the country in the next five years. Currently, 260 million people live on less than a dollar a day. '' India needs to help those leaving the farm and replicate in basic industry what it has achieve in IT,'' Mr Long points out.

However, the magazine is all praise for the burgeoning growth that the Indian IT sector has achieved. '' Now Indian firms can match virtually every service offered by the global giants of IT outsourcing, such as IBM, EDS and Accenture,'' it says.

Infrastructure bottleneck and no movement in reforming the labour laws are the other areas highlighted by well respected publication.

Emphasising that India's creaking infrastructure still needs a lot more investment, it lists basic facilities like airports and roads which influence investors' decision. ''For many investors in India, infrastructure determines where to build, and is the biggest operational challenge''.

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