There is a pot of gold at the end of a well lighted road.

Manufacturing is usually labor intensive and for a poor country like India with hundreds of millions of young people providing cheap labor we should be having a thriving manufacturing sector, like China has. In an effort to stay in power the Communist Party in China built up gigantic modern infrastructure and actively helped companies to set up factories to provide employment to its people and supply cheap products all over the world, helping to keep down inflation, which encouraged central banks to keep interest rates low which, in turn, encouraged people in rich countries to go on a borrowing binge to buy Chinese made products, making China the second richest country in the world. India, on the other hand, has a so called democracy which means elections every 5 years. Unfortunately for us our politicians, being largely of the criminal class, took the easy option of wasting taxpayer money on social schemes to bribe the poor instead of improving education, building wide roads, ensuring constant electricity, universal healthcare and measures to reduce population. The consequence is that vast numbers of Indians have remained poor, dependent on handouts to survive, which is what politicians want. More than 3 million jobs were added in the organised sector between 2004 and 2010 but a survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation showed that there was a loss of 3 million jobs in the total manufacturing sector. Which means that the unorganised sector, which employs many more people, lost 6 million jobs. The unorganised sector produced 12.6 million new jobs between 1993 and 2004 but only 1 million new jobs between 2004 and 2012. It was partly due to the strong rupee which hampered export related industries such as textiles, garments, leather and gem cutting. Exports have rebounded since the rupee depreciated against the dollar but the Congress is trying desperately to strengthen the rupee, probably to control inflation. The infrastructure sector is in absolute shambles because projects were given to cronies who wanted to make windfall profits but have been halted by the CAG. A report by Credit Suisse says that 10 large infrastructure companies have a combined debt of Rs 63.1 trillion. Will we always remain poor for the sake of winning elections?