IN MANY WAYS, WE INDIANS STILL ACT LIKE colonized people. I mean this quite seriously. When the British ruled India for two centuries, they employed simple tactics to consolidate their power; they divided Indians along lines of religion, culture, language, class, and vocation. They used India as a launching ground to hook vast swaths of the Chinese population on Opium. They had Indians competing with each other and with other subject peoples to see who could be “Slave #1.” And many Indians saw their own personal fortunes attached to the success of the British and thus calculated, complied, collaborated, and conspired with the British—against their own people and other people weighed down by the yoke of extractive colonialism.

In some sense, we’ve come a long way from there. In some sense, we haven’t. And every time I hear Indians involved in business talk about China, I get the sense that we still have a long way to go to liberate ourselves. Very simply put, we are obsessed with being better than China, with “proving” that we really have more potential as a country, that India really should be THE destination for investment, that they only “cook their books,” that we are THE best at servicing the needs of the powerful economic triad (the U.S., EU, Japan.)

This obsession has to stop. We need to think about India not in comparison to another poor country but in terms of what we would like to be.

Let’s try and be realistic. First on the social front.

The facts are undeniable. On matters of poverty, healthcare, women’s rights, per capita income, availability of potable water, and basic education, China has outdone us hands down and substantially. 35% of India’s population lives below the povertyline (which is set egregiously low) as compared to 10% of China’s population. We should emulate, not repudiate their model.

Second, on the political front. The facts are unassailable. China has far more political clout than India does, is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and in all ways is far more powerful than India. Let’s neither forget the trouncing India got in the 1962 War nor the graceful and unilateral recession of Chinese troops after their decisive victory.

On the macroeconomic front, the facts are equally unequivocal. Irrespective of mode of measurement, China’s GDP far outstrips

India’s and its national income per capital is about double India’s. China ranks second in the world in terms of electricity consumption while India ranks seventh. The net is that while both countries enjoy high growth rates, China is able to grow a higher base at a faster rate.

From an IT perspective, the facts are even more stark. There is simply no doubt that if one wanted to find a boom market in Asia (or for that matter anywhere in the world) for IT (hardware, software, services), China is it.

Look at a good proxy for IT growth: PC shipments. According to Gartner, in 2002, India accounted for 9.5% of all PC shipments in the Asia-Pacific region, registering just about 2M new shipments. In that region, the countries closest to India were Australia (with 2.1M and South Korea with 3M). China, on the other hand) registered a whopping 43% of all Asia-Pacific (about 10M) new PC shipments and in 2002 surpassed Japan on this parameter.

Why am I laying this out in such brutal terms?

Partially, I must admit, to bring some humility into our thinking. Unfounded pride is a sure recipe for disaster—if not now then soon.

Don’t fly too close to the sun with wings of wax. My experience of Indians is that we are riding too high on our successes and running roughshod over objectivity.

Partially also is for the sake of simple honesty. Despite the astounding successes of many of our software service giants like TCS and Infosys, we still account for less than 2% of the global software market. For a country with 1 out of every 6 human beings, I’m not sure that this is really such a big deal. Of course, if economic indices registered our biggest IT export, we’d be doing better in the global rankings—but I’m not sure that anyone has been able to monetize properly the value of the thousands of youths educated at the expense of the Indian state who leave India the first chance they get. It would be worthwhile to compare the rate of emigration with the analogous population of Chinese—I’m pretty sure I know what you’ll discover if you undertake this exercise.

But the most profound of the reasons I write this is to challenge us to give up the colonial mentality which pits us against other developing peoples. Let’s get over our obsession with being better than China and get down to the real business of building a nation on the principle of growth with equity and social justice.

Romi Mahajan is a Lead Marketing Manager at Microsoft. Educated at UC Berkeley and UT Austin, he has written and spoken extensively on innovation in general and the Indian software industry in specific. He can be reached at romimahajan2000@yahoo.com