Indian Voters Turn a Cold Shoulder to High Technology

In the last few years, there has been a lot of hullabaloo over the wide-spread benefits of technology growth in India. The recent outcry in the US over the outsourcing of jobs to India only furthered the impression that Indians as a whole were winners in this phase of globalization. However, as this article in the New York times reports, the benefits of economic liberalization and globalization have been highly uneven and politicians associated with the IT-led globalization have been punished in the recent elections. . While the standard of living has improved significantly in Indian cities, those living in the thousands of rural villages continue to lack access to schools, hospitals and clean water. The discontent of the millions of India’s rural poor is reflected, says the author, in the recent defeat of Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of the technology-friendly state of Andhra Pradesh. Naidu was responsible not only for getting multinational companies like Microsoft to set up shop in his state’s capital, Hyderabad, but he also supported economic and political reform at both the state and national levels. With Naidu’s defeat, the current coalition government at the center led by Vajpayee might either be defeated or weakened when all the results are in. The possibility of political instability has already begun to affect the Indian stock market. However, some analysts are confident that the Indian economy is intergrated well enough into the global economic system to weather the results of the elections, whatever they may be. – YaleGlobal