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In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India | 
 enlarge | Author: Edward Luce
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  57 reviews
Sales Rank: 4606
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 1400079772
Dewey Decimal Number: 954.053
EAN: 9781400079773
ASIN: 1400079772
Publication Date: March 11, 2008
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Product Description
As the world's largest democracy and a rising international economic power, India has long been heralded for its great strides in technology and trade. Yet it is also plagued by poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and a vast array of other social and economic issues.
Here, noted journalist and former Financial Times South Asia bureau chief Edward Luce travels throughout India's many regions, cultures, and religious circles, investigating its fragile balance between tradition and modernity. From meetings with key political figures to fascinating encounters with religious pundits, economic gurus, and village laborers, In Spite of the Gods is a fascinating blend of analysis and reportage that comprehensively depicts the nuances of India's complex situation and its place in the world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 52 more reviews...
India: Land of Extremes February 16, 2007
Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA)
58 out of 71 found this review helpful
Any discussion of the India's current economic ascent begins in 1991 when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao began dismantling the decades-old system of controls and permits known as the "License Raj." With the subsequent influx of foreign capital and the proliferation of business activity, the economy began to grow robustly and has continued to do so at a 6% annual rate - only China has performed better over the same period of time. Edward Luce, who was the Financial Times bureau chief in New Delhi from 2001 to 2005, chronicles India's rise with a series of anecdotes that make up the chapters of this book. It is a very personal account - he includes his wedding - of the powerful and contradictory forces that are driving India to great power status.
India is often compared to China and this book is no exception. The comparison is helpful because they both started to pull away from socialist-statist economies after the end of the Cold War. Luce predicts that they and the US will be the three key nations that shape the 21st century.
Speaking of extremes: India graduates over 1 million engineers every year, as opposed to the US and Europe who graduate about 200,000 between the two of them. India now ranks third in scientific capacity behind Japan and the US. Yet India's literacy rate is only 65%, whereas China's is 90%. This is explained, according to Luce, by the fact that India remains a very poor and rural country. About 750 million people live in some 680 thousand villages, and about 300 million of them in extreme poverty. There are chronic shortages of land and water making subsistence a daily struggle - under these circumstances education is not even a consideration.
In another comparison to China, Luce notes that India only has 7 million people involved in manufacturing, whereas China has 100 million. Labor laws in India - some remnants of Nehru-Gandhi socialism - make it difficult for employers to lay-off workers. Therefore many factory owners have invested heavily in high-tech, minimizing the need for manual labor. If anything good can be said about the Communist party in China it is that they have done away with such laws making hiring and firing much easier. This may sound unjust to some but it employs an additonal 93 million workers.
Luce also points out that India has basically bypassed the industrial revolution, going directly from agriculture to high-tech services. This shows that they invested heavily in higher education for the elite while neglecting the poor. The result is having a middle class about the size of France or Germany and at the same time having an underclass of about 900 million. That there is not enough money for universal education is not surprising since only about 35 million in a population of 1.1 billion pay taxes.
India, unlike China, remains a vibrant democracy. It has witnessed the rise and fall and rise again of the Gandhi dynasty, it has experienced the rise and fall of Hindu nationalism. There have been many incidents of Hindu-Muslim strife, not to mention border wars with Pakistan. Compared with Western countries, India is unique because it became a democracy before it had a middle class. India is currently governed by a 24 party coalition which is actually not much more inefficient than when it was run by a single party - in both cases corruption was epidemic. The running joke is that "the economy works at night when the government sleeps."
In 2006, India completed a 3,000 mile interstate highway called the "Golden Quadrilateral" running from New Dehli to Mumbai to Chennai to Kolkata and back to New Delhi. It was a remarkable feat since many of the politicians sitting in the ruling coalition would try to prevent its completion because the highway disrupted many of their constituents' communities. All of it was settled, however, through bribes and the legal system. In China this kind of development is done by decree. In many ways the Chinese system is more efficient but no one would vote for its authoritarian tactics.
India like China still has many serious problems to tackle, among them energy, environment, poverty, and public health. The fact that they have a democracy is a plus in a country divided by many languages, religion, and caste. On the downside they have a huge bureaucracy that is corrupt and resistant to change. Yet India seems to work, moving slowly toward economic development and great power status inspite of the gods.
 Where we are, How we got here February 11, 2007
Kashyap Deorah (Mountain View, CA United States)
42 out of 49 found this review helpful
If you are looking for a book that tells you where India is today, where she's going and how she can get there, this is NOT the right book for you. However, if you are looking for a book that tells you where India is today and how it got here in the last century especially since independence, Ed Luce does as good a job as anyone can given the complex glob of a million entangled threads that is India. The book is not futuristic, it is introspective. The book does not speculate, it reveals.
At the time of release of this book, it is hip to write about India's growing economy and laud the unbelieveable potential that lies ahead, what with the booming IT and Biotech industry and scores of parallels one can draw with other countries that passed this phase. While those books present great hypotheses, imagination and optimism; they either focus on a section of India that is not representative of the country as a whole, or miss some fundamental understanding of the realities of the country.
The issues covered in this book are given as much relative priority as a top Indian diplomat or policy maker ought to give. In that sense, the book provides a holistic view of India in a manner that is investigative, well informed and insightful. The author's criticism is far from cynicism, and his admiration is far from adulation. For a country that incites much emotion among authors, Ed Luce's objective view is quite refreshing. The author is probably at just the right viewing distance from India: not too close to let emotions cloud his judgement, and close enough to be wise and vested (not just well informed) in the topics he writes about.
After reading this book, I have learnt about topics that I did not expect to learn about when I picked up the book. Having said that, the book does not explore the depths of all topics, though cites other works that do. Ed Luce is certainly on my watch-list of authors now.
 Disappointing January 30, 2007
Peter G. Keen (virginia usa)
30 out of 43 found this review helpful
I'd expected to love this book and to learn from it. It is, though, somehow lifeless, full of information and insightful analysis but there is no drive to it. You get the main points early -- the politics, caste issues, incredible corruption and most of all the Hindu movement. The business side of India's growth is poorly handled; there is very little on the dynamics of IT, medical tourism -- one of India's main growth industries -- or its increasing leadership in pharmaceutical R&D, AIDS drugs and stem cell research.
It's an OK book and if you don't know much about India, it's a useful orientation, though a narrow one.
A clear eyed look at modern India, written with depth, wit, and insight January 22, 2007
Yesh Prabhu, author of The Beech Tree (Plainsboro, New Jersey)
25 out of 32 found this review helpful
This book is based on the enormous amount of research the author did when he worked in Delhi as the South Asia bureau chief of the Financial Times, in the years 2001 to 2005. An Oxford graduate, Edward Luce, the author, has gathered an astonishing amount of data to support his analysis of the social, political and economic conditions he observed in modern India. His witty comments, startling observations, broad-mindedness, and deep insight into Hindu religion and Indian culture have endowed this book with weight and depth.
America's attitude towards India has changed and evolved drastically: from benign neglect in the 1950's to suspicion during the cold war period, to grudging admiration in the 1990s, to downright coziness now. Even the president of USA has been warming up to India and trying to draw it into America's sphere of influence. The author explains the reason for this remarkable change in attitude. It has an ulterior motive, says the author. India is a rising economic power. "The US would want to promote better ties with India to counterbalance China's emerging dominance and prolong American power in the coming decades."
In 1967, America pressured India to devalue its currency, and in 1991 it pressured India to devalue its currency again, for the second time, stating that the large deficit created by the government was not beneficial to its economy. Writes the author about the devaluation of the rupee, "The first was in 1967, when Indira Gandhi, who had taken over as prime minister in 1966, two years after her father's death, was forced to devalue the Indian rupee under pressure from the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)." "In exchange for emergency balance of payments assistance from the IMF, India again devalued its currency and was required to move much of its gold as collateral to London." Ironic, isn't it, when you look at the enormous deficit accumulated by the US government in the last six years, and the IMF hasn't even whispered a word about it?
Edward Luce is an astute observer. His descriptions are vivid: "But it is at the side of the expressways in the glaring billboards advertising cell phones, iPods, and holiday villas and the shiny gas stations with their air-conditioned mini-supermarkets that India's schizophrenic economy reveals itself. Behind them, around them, and beyond them is the unending vista of rural India, of yoked bullocks plowing the fields in the same manner they have for three thousand years and the primitive brick kilns that dot the endless patchwork of fields of rice, wheat, pulse, and oilseed. There are growing pockets of rural India that are mechanizing and becoming more prosperous. But they are still islands."
400 million people are employed in India, says the author. (This figure is higher than the population of entire Europe, Canada and Australia combined.) Of these, only 35 million pay taxes. Poor people are neither expected nor required to pay taxes in India. In the year 2000, there were only 3 million cell phone users, but in 2005, the number of people who owned cell phones had risen to 100 million. (I think in 2007, the figure is closer to 250 million.) In the next few years, India is expected to attain the status of "the third largest economy" in the world. Is it any wonder, then, that the eyes of economists, businessmen, and people with money to invest round the world are now focused on India?
Interesting, but Leaves Lots More to be Learned! January 19, 2007
Loyd E. Eskildson (Phoenix, AZ.)
23 out of 28 found this review helpful
John Kenneth Galbraith, famed economist and former U.S. Ambassador to India is credited with describing India as a "functioning anarchy." After reading "In Spite of the Gods," I have some sense of why he made that comment, though I still feel the need to learn much more about India and wish Luce had explained certain situations better and integrated his material better.
Part of the problem is that India has 24 political parties, 18 languages, and deep religious and caste divisions. Another confusing aspect is the fact that 75% of its population live in extreme deprivation - yet, it is a nuclear power; still another the fact that most of its citizens are illiterate and unskilled, yet it provides 10 times the engineering students as the U.S. Government corruption is endemic, yet here and there are upstanding examples of outstanding public achievement - eg. the new Metro in New Delhi.
Given India's high level of poverty, it is not surprising that helping the poor is a high government priority - yet, its latest measure follows the same path that has already failed (paying minimum wage for minor public-works programs such as sweeping streets and sidewalks by hand, "cutting" grass by hand, and filling potholes), instead of taking a lesson from China's focus on attracting and utilizing capital investment to indirectly create jobs. Meanwhile, at the same time it retains in force laws that make it very difficult to reduce staffing, thus inhibiting corporate hiring.
Despite the focus on helping the poor, examples abound where those with money are treated better. Police, for example, are reluctant to enforce traffic laws against cars because their drivers have money. New Delhi's water utility provides service for the middle-class, and allows them to pay only 1/10th the cost while staffing levels run 15X that in other nations, and the poor are not served at all.
India's banking and insurance entities were nationalized in the 1960s, and are scheduled to face competition by 2009 - meanwhile, those qualifying for loans wait an average of 33 weeks and must pay bribes that make the total government-sourced loan cost about the same as those obtained through private usury.
The "good news" is that the situation is slowly improving - about 1%/year reduction in those in poverty, increase in life expectancy, and literacy. Additional, positive news is the fact that very few Muslims in India have participated in any outside jihad efforts - supposedly because they have great freedom in India (what about England, Germany, and France?). The "really bad news" is that antagonism between Muslims and Hindus is increasing, female infanticide is at high levels (eg. as much as 15%), and given the fractured nature of Indian government progress in any area is likely to continue at a pace far slower than necessary. Somewhat surprising news is that one Indian company alone edits 600 American and European technical publications already for $3/page (vs. $10 being the local rate; staffers are required to have a postgraduate degree within their area of focus), and hopes to move into magazine and newspaper editing as well. Clearly India (and China) are going to be increasing forces in the American economy.
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