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Before people get out their pitchforks. These laws in India are a direct result of 200 years of British 'free' trade. Imagine the amount of damage something li

Before people get out their pitchforks. These laws in India are a direct result of 200 years of British 'free' trade. Imagine the amount of damage something like NAFTA has done to the american working class - multiply that with 200 years. While america was in its infancy - before it industrialized - it too used protectionism as a way to allow its local industries to grow, how is it bad if India is trying to do the same thing ? The indian unemployment/underemployment problem will laugh at the face of the European/American moaning about jobs. Just to give you an interesting statistic - 85% of student loans in India is under water ( compared to 50% in america ). There was this interesting story of engineers in India accepting jobs as pions ( gaurds/watchmen ) for a miserable 200 dollars salary a month. Could you imagine yourself in that position ? So I do not fault the govt for these laws or else there will be serious civilian unrest. Indian markets, products and the economy in general is really bad and unsophisticated. There is no way they can compete with american, European and Chinese companies. Of'course some bureaucrats within the Indian Govt uses this as a way to extract wealth from foreign companies who want to set up shop in India. But that is a corruption problem rather than an argument against the law. Even simple law in India is hard to enforce due to corruption, the reward greatly outweighs the risk. Hopefully things will improve in India.

arey_abhishek 10y ago
I'll add that America is the most protectionist country according to Credit Suisse: http://www.businessinsider.in/The-country-that-imposes-the-most-restrictions-on-trade-might-surprise-you/articleshow/49170319.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/The-country-that-imposes-the-m... (Couldn't find link to original report) Worked out well for America. Protectionist laws are a legitimate tool for social and economic progress.
- velodrome 10y ago
  This is the original Credit Suisse report: The End of Globalization or a more Multipolar World? https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?document_id=x657558&serialid=CKNMlWfHjw7rZyk%2BUGmvnQWrpsyCCwGev4oQ/ngdrE8%3D https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?document...
- baddox 10y ago
  What is the evidence that Americans wouldn't be better off if there were less protectionism?
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Protectionism shrinks markets, drives up prices, and reduces consumer choice. The decreased competition from protectionism also decreases technological development.
- argonaut 10y ago
  Your links cites a report that itself gets its numbers from the "Global Trade Alert," which is an org that aggregates a variety of trade-related actions published by the governments of each country. Only a fraction of these are actually related to governments being protectionist. A huge number of these "actions" appear to be petitions by companies inside a country for trade investigations against other companies or nations. Another big chunk appear to be listings of every law enacted that gives even a few million to some factory in a given nation. Not unsurprisingly, the aggregator just lists a bunch of state laws in the US. The fact that America, with its very transparent political/legislative/corporate-grievances system would be recorded more often by this aggregator, is not surprising. In other words, this aggregator is going to be biased to record more trade-related events coming from more transparent nations that have more corporations located inside of them, and whose corporations will tend to try to resolve their trade disputes in the courts. But I guess you couldn't be bothered to investigate the numbers when you could just cite BusinessInsider.
  - esterly 10y ago
    Agreed. Friends use an up vote for this parent.
    - maskedinvader 10y ago
      why is this downvoted ? I didn't read this as an endorsement to upvote but rather as witty response to @argonaut , unless i'm missing something else entirely here and the downvotes are warranted.
      - teh_klev 10y ago
        See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Rallying the crowd for up-votes (even for another user's post) falls pretty much in the same ballpark.
        10y ago
- rgbrenner 10y ago
  That chart at the top the _number_ of protectionist actions... As in, Country A takes 2 actions that affects $1 in trade. Country B decides in 1 action that no imports are allowed. And so it concludes Country A is clearly more restrictive. Does that conclusion seem correct to you? Don't you think you need more information than just that?
- bduerst 10y ago
  > Protectionist laws are a legitimate tool for social and economic progress. Just not technological progress. The auto manufacturers in the U.S. are a prime example of how protectionism stagnated industry development.
baddox 10y ago
> While america was in its infancy - before it industrialized - it too used protectionism as a way to allow its local industries to grow, how is it bad if India is trying to do the same thing ? I was under the impression that anti-protectionism was one of the least controversial positions among economics. Obviously it can help the specific local industries that are being protected from competition, but it seems almost obvious to me that it's going to be a net negative for the people of India. (I am not an economist.)
- nicoburns 10y ago
  > I was under the impression that anti-protectionism was one of the least controversial positions among economics. It is, but I think this says more about the sorry state of economics than it does about whether protectionism is ever a good idea.
  - baddox 10y ago
    Why do you say that? Again, I'm not an economist, but opposing protectionism makes sense to me intuitively.
- ep103 10y ago
  Most important piece of the following post? http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html I'm not an economist, but I've gotten the impression from reading lots of articles like this, that it is net negative overall, as in, world wide. But I have never, ever seen a source claim that it is net negative on a national or local level outside of very, very narrowly defined parameters. I have, however, read academic papers that state the opposite. Let's use NAFTA as an example as the canonical example. A corporation that makes tires moves to Mexico. As a result, tires for everyone in America are now half price, people who had no jobs in Mexico before now have jobs, which helps build out Mexican infrastructure, 20k people across the US no no longer have jobs; but the US economy is healthy, so those people will hopefully be okay and the US economy will likely not even notice such a slight change in labor demand. Net result: 320 million people have cheaper tires in the US, Mexicans get better jobs, infrastructure and technology, 20k us lose jobs, the corporation saves money, and hopefully reinvests in something to stay competitive. Using the above scenario, it is easy to see why any legislation against this behavior is seen as damaging and a net loss. Lets further assume, that the US passes legislation that trailer hitch manufacturers have to pay an import tarriff from Mexico. Using the above scenario, an economist would say not only are you damaging what should be a net positive economic change, and artifically manipulating prices, but chances are Mexico will pass a law adding a tarrif to rubber imports, which will hurt your tire corporation in retaliation. And now the whole thing starts falling apart, with economic losses. The counter arguments start with the following: 1) The above scenario assumes that those 20k people can find new jobs. If they can't, the math now becomes something along the lines of: 20000 people * 30000 $/year income >?< 320000000 people * 1000 $ saved for a set of tires * 1/6 (once every 6 or so years) + 20000 people * democracy destabalizing factor * wealth inequality factor 2) Before NAFTA, let's say there were 6 tire making companies in the US, one in detroit, one in newark, etc. Then one of them moves to Mexico City, and helps build up the local technical knowledge and infrastructure needs to support that industry. When the next 5 companies choose to move to Mexico, they will have the choice between also moving to Mexico city, or spending the money to do that same work elsewhere. So you may very well end up with 6 companies operating out of mexico city. While these firms will now be competing against each other, what you've also done, now is replace all of the economies that used to support those industries across the US, with one centralized economy around Mexico City. That's going to be a massive decrease in competition, job growth, etc, overall. Read this for more information: http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html
dxbydt 10y ago
What's really going on in India ? You paint a pretty bleak picture. Then I read firsthand reports by someone like yummyfajitas who lives and works there - https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11766615&goto=item%3Fid%3D11766493 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11766615&goto=item%3Fi... According to that, it is the US that's in the dumps. India has jobs for everyone at every level, whereas in the US people are living in filthy homes because maid service too expensive because $15 minimum wage. I'm not sure what to believe anymore.
- notahacker 10y ago
  India has jobs for everyone at every level if you consider "temple beggar" to be a job and wizened old women in their sixties to be appropriate people to be doing road maintenance. $200 dollars per month sounds like an unusually generous salary for unskilled labour there too - engineering degree or no engineering degree. Of course, it also has plenty of opportunities for a growing middle class that didn't exist for their parents. The reality is it's a developing country facing significant challenges, and no amount of trade liberalisation (or increased protectionism towards domestic manufacturing) is going to change that overnight. It's pretty hard to pin most of those challenges on the British destroying cottage weaving industries by dumping machine-made Manchester cotton on them in the early nineteenth century, or to argue that banning Apple Stores is a rational response likely to solve that problem.
  - dxbydt 10y ago
    Yeah, I'm not so sure. On the one hand, there's stuff like this - https://twitter.com/pankaj/status/729417379730448384 https://twitter.com/pankaj/status/729417379730448384 Here you have SF entrepreneurs with vastly more capital & information than the average person in the US buying one way tickets to India. Just last week, I had coffee with a YC founder who mentioned casually that "YC16 has dozens of startups out of Bangalore". He had conducted mock interviews for the accepted candidates & he was very excited for them & the Indian ecosystem. One or two companies is an outlier, but dozens ? That's a gamechanger. At the same time you talk of "temple beggar jobs and 60 year old women doing road maintenance". Am honestly unable to reconcile these opposing narratives.
argonaut 10y ago
> Imagine the amount of damage something like NAFTA has done to the american working class - multiply that with 200 years. Citation needed. This is still a controversial issue in policy, and anyone certain of any one side has no idea what they're talking about. There is evidence it net hurt jobs. There is evidence it net gained jobs for the US.
- Retric 10y ago
  Not all jobs are created equal. NAFTA was great for destroying Unions and lowering costs, not sure if it created good jobs. Of course it was just another attack on the middle class. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/are-unions-necessary/258356/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/are-unio... PS: I don't 100% agree with this, but it's a viewpoint I rarely see on HN and fits the discussion.
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  What about robots replacing jobs? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36376966
  - argonaut 10y ago
    Irrelevant to my point?
    - praxulus 10y ago
      They might be saying that evidence of job loss to Mexico is further complicated by the fact that the jobs may have been lost to automation anyway. I.e. that's one more reason nobody can definitively say NAFTA was good/bad for American working class employment.
      - perseusprime11 10y ago
        Bingo!
whatever_dude 10y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but expecting the company to bend over backwards is pretty naive. It's more likely that'll make products more expensive or just harder to find, not help the country advance.
kapilkaisare 10y ago
Sorry for nitpicking, but: s/pions/peons s/gaurds/guards
- wrong_variable 10y ago
  thanks !
sokoloff 10y ago
> interesting statistic - 85% of student loans in India is under water ( compared to 50% in america ) What does "loan under water" mean in this context? In a collateralized loan context (car or house), "under water" means that the borrower owes more than the market value of the collateral.
- morgante 10y ago
  I suspect that the GP simply meant that 85% of Indian loans are past due. Rhetorically, you could consider them as being underwater if the asset purchased (human capital) isn't providing sufficient value (income) to service the loan.
- maskedinvader 10y ago
  think he means student loans with collateral not doing well due to variety of reasons defined here [1] and I think you are thinking about underwater mortgages as defined here [2] 1. http://goo.gl/21TmQm http://goo.gl/21TmQm 2. http://goo.gl/UVNIFr http://goo.gl/UVNIFr
- wrong_variable 10y ago
  Essentially for some reason or other the loans are not being repaid - and mostly likely wont be repaid due to high unemployment among the people who took the loan.
walrus01 10y ago
India's extremely complicated bureaucratic nightmare of inter-state borders and customs/tariffs is the fault of the British? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/31/india-economic-growth-new-national-tax http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/31/india-economic-... Imagine if you had cargo truck borders and customs paperwork between every one of the US 50 states and what a nightmare it would be for trucking/logistics/distribution/warehousing/cold chain/etc. Indian states have a significant degree of regulatory autonomy, far beyond what a US state or a Canadian province has, to the extend that some states are looking at banning alcohol entirely and others have unique tax code and criminal code laws not found in the rest of India.
- wrong_variable 10y ago
  The post has nothing to do with inter-state commerce. Its to do with Federal Laws set by the Indian Govt, which overall seems to be deeply protectionist. If you ask any historian the reasoning for this attitude in India and why its tolerated - is mainly because of the holdover from the time India was colonized by European Powers. Essentially what I am saying is that its not easy to sell 'Free Trade' in India. I wasn't blaming anyone for anything - just staying the facts. I personally think it would help India to loosen up some of its protectionist laws and be a little bit more like China - but that is just my own opinion.
- RealGeek 10y ago
  My personal car was stopped by octroi officers near a state border in India. They searched my car, and then said that I should have paid octroi tax on the personal computer I was carrying in the car. I told them that all taxes were paid including VAT and Octroi for the computer when I bought it 5 years ago. The said it doesn't matter, I must stop at the Octroi office and pay taxes again every time I am crossing a state border for everything I am carrying in my vehicle. He said my only option is to pay them bribe, or they will impound my vehicle indefinitely.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    Out of curiosity are you ethnically from somewhere in India / South Asia, or a foreigner?
eru 10y ago
> Indian markets, products and the economy in general is really bad and unsophisticated. There is no way they can compete with american, European and Chinese companies. Lots of previously poor countries have industrialized via exports. One can argue they used protectionism at home---misguided as it is. But nevertheless their companies managed to sell to fickle foreigners in the foreigners' home markets---all sophistication issues aside.
agmohit01 10y ago
Default of student loans in India is around 8% which is about 1 Billion USD. Source http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report-banks-learn-a-hard-lesson-worth-rs-5192-crore-on-education-loans-2125507 http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report-banks-learn-a-hard-less... Default of student loans in USA is around $1 trillion. Isn't this what is called comparing Apples and Oranges.

arey_abhishek 10y ago

I'll add that America is the most protectionist country according to Credit Suisse: http://www.businessinsider.in/The-country-that-imposes-the-most-restrictions-on-trade-might-surprise-you/articleshow/49170319.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/The-country-that-imposes-the-m... (Couldn't find link to original report) Worked out well for America. Protectionist laws are a legitimate tool for social and economic progress.

velodrome 10y ago
This is the original Credit Suisse report: The End of Globalization or a more Multipolar World? https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?document_id=x657558&serialid=CKNMlWfHjw7rZyk%2BUGmvnQWrpsyCCwGev4oQ/ngdrE8%3D https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?document...
baddox 10y ago
What is the evidence that Americans wouldn't be better off if there were less protectionism?
- bduerst 10y ago
  Protectionism shrinks markets, drives up prices, and reduces consumer choice. The decreased competition from protectionism also decreases technological development.
argonaut 10y ago
Your links cites a report that itself gets its numbers from the "Global Trade Alert," which is an org that aggregates a variety of trade-related actions published by the governments of each country. Only a fraction of these are actually related to governments being protectionist. A huge number of these "actions" appear to be petitions by companies inside a country for trade investigations against other companies or nations. Another big chunk appear to be listings of every law enacted that gives even a few million to some factory in a given nation. Not unsurprisingly, the aggregator just lists a bunch of state laws in the US. The fact that America, with its very transparent political/legislative/corporate-grievances system would be recorded more often by this aggregator, is not surprising. In other words, this aggregator is going to be biased to record more trade-related events coming from more transparent nations that have more corporations located inside of them, and whose corporations will tend to try to resolve their trade disputes in the courts. But I guess you couldn't be bothered to investigate the numbers when you could just cite BusinessInsider.
- esterly 10y ago
  Agreed. Friends use an up vote for this parent.
  - maskedinvader 10y ago
    why is this downvoted ? I didn't read this as an endorsement to upvote but rather as witty response to @argonaut , unless i'm missing something else entirely here and the downvotes are warranted.
    - teh_klev 10y ago
      See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Rallying the crowd for up-votes (even for another user's post) falls pretty much in the same ballpark.
      - 10y ago
rgbrenner 10y ago
That chart at the top the _number_ of protectionist actions... As in, Country A takes 2 actions that affects $1 in trade. Country B decides in 1 action that no imports are allowed. And so it concludes Country A is clearly more restrictive. Does that conclusion seem correct to you? Don't you think you need more information than just that?
bduerst 10y ago
> Protectionist laws are a legitimate tool for social and economic progress. Just not technological progress. The auto manufacturers in the U.S. are a prime example of how protectionism stagnated industry development.

baddox 10y ago

> While america was in its infancy - before it industrialized - it too used protectionism as a way to allow its local industries to grow, how is it bad if India is trying to do the same thing ? I was under the impression that anti-protectionism was one of the least controversial positions among economics. Obviously it can help the specific local industries that are being protected from competition, but it seems almost obvious to me that it's going to be a net negative for the people of India. (I am not an economist.)

nicoburns 10y ago
> I was under the impression that anti-protectionism was one of the least controversial positions among economics. It is, but I think this says more about the sorry state of economics than it does about whether protectionism is ever a good idea.
- baddox 10y ago
  Why do you say that? Again, I'm not an economist, but opposing protectionism makes sense to me intuitively.
ep103 10y ago
Most important piece of the following post? http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html I'm not an economist, but I've gotten the impression from reading lots of articles like this, that it is net negative overall, as in, world wide. But I have never, ever seen a source claim that it is net negative on a national or local level outside of very, very narrowly defined parameters. I have, however, read academic papers that state the opposite. Let's use NAFTA as an example as the canonical example. A corporation that makes tires moves to Mexico. As a result, tires for everyone in America are now half price, people who had no jobs in Mexico before now have jobs, which helps build out Mexican infrastructure, 20k people across the US no no longer have jobs; but the US economy is healthy, so those people will hopefully be okay and the US economy will likely not even notice such a slight change in labor demand. Net result: 320 million people have cheaper tires in the US, Mexicans get better jobs, infrastructure and technology, 20k us lose jobs, the corporation saves money, and hopefully reinvests in something to stay competitive. Using the above scenario, it is easy to see why any legislation against this behavior is seen as damaging and a net loss. Lets further assume, that the US passes legislation that trailer hitch manufacturers have to pay an import tarriff from Mexico. Using the above scenario, an economist would say not only are you damaging what should be a net positive economic change, and artifically manipulating prices, but chances are Mexico will pass a law adding a tarrif to rubber imports, which will hurt your tire corporation in retaliation. And now the whole thing starts falling apart, with economic losses. The counter arguments start with the following: 1) The above scenario assumes that those 20k people can find new jobs. If they can't, the math now becomes something along the lines of: 20000 people * 30000 $/year income >?< 320000000 people * 1000 $ saved for a set of tires * 1/6 (once every 6 or so years) + 20000 people * democracy destabalizing factor * wealth inequality factor 2) Before NAFTA, let's say there were 6 tire making companies in the US, one in detroit, one in newark, etc. Then one of them moves to Mexico City, and helps build up the local technical knowledge and infrastructure needs to support that industry. When the next 5 companies choose to move to Mexico, they will have the choice between also moving to Mexico city, or spending the money to do that same work elsewhere. So you may very well end up with 6 companies operating out of mexico city. While these firms will now be competing against each other, what you've also done, now is replace all of the economies that used to support those industries across the US, with one centralized economy around Mexico City. That's going to be a massive decrease in competition, job growth, etc, overall. Read this for more information: http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

dxbydt 10y ago

What's really going on in India ? You paint a pretty bleak picture. Then I read firsthand reports by someone like yummyfajitas who lives and works there - https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11766615&goto=item%3Fid%3D11766493 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11766615&goto=item%3Fi... According to that, it is the US that's in the dumps. India has jobs for everyone at every level, whereas in the US people are living in filthy homes because maid service too expensive because $15 minimum wage. I'm not sure what to believe anymore.

notahacker 10y ago
India has jobs for everyone at every level if you consider "temple beggar" to be a job and wizened old women in their sixties to be appropriate people to be doing road maintenance. $200 dollars per month sounds like an unusually generous salary for unskilled labour there too - engineering degree or no engineering degree. Of course, it also has plenty of opportunities for a growing middle class that didn't exist for their parents. The reality is it's a developing country facing significant challenges, and no amount of trade liberalisation (or increased protectionism towards domestic manufacturing) is going to change that overnight. It's pretty hard to pin most of those challenges on the British destroying cottage weaving industries by dumping machine-made Manchester cotton on them in the early nineteenth century, or to argue that banning Apple Stores is a rational response likely to solve that problem.
- dxbydt 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm not so sure. On the one hand, there's stuff like this - https://twitter.com/pankaj/status/729417379730448384 https://twitter.com/pankaj/status/729417379730448384 Here you have SF entrepreneurs with vastly more capital & information than the average person in the US buying one way tickets to India. Just last week, I had coffee with a YC founder who mentioned casually that "YC16 has dozens of startups out of Bangalore". He had conducted mock interviews for the accepted candidates & he was very excited for them & the Indian ecosystem. One or two companies is an outlier, but dozens ? That's a gamechanger. At the same time you talk of "temple beggar jobs and 60 year old women doing road maintenance". Am honestly unable to reconcile these opposing narratives.

argonaut 10y ago

> Imagine the amount of damage something like NAFTA has done to the american working class - multiply that with 200 years. Citation needed. This is still a controversial issue in policy, and anyone certain of any one side has no idea what they're talking about. There is evidence it net hurt jobs. There is evidence it net gained jobs for the US.

Retric 10y ago
Not all jobs are created equal. NAFTA was great for destroying Unions and lowering costs, not sure if it created good jobs. Of course it was just another attack on the middle class. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/are-unions-necessary/258356/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/are-unio... PS: I don't 100% agree with this, but it's a viewpoint I rarely see on HN and fits the discussion.
perseusprime11 10y ago
What about robots replacing jobs? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36376966
- argonaut 10y ago
  Irrelevant to my point?
  - praxulus 10y ago
    They might be saying that evidence of job loss to Mexico is further complicated by the fact that the jobs may have been lost to automation anyway. I.e. that's one more reason nobody can definitively say NAFTA was good/bad for American working class employment.
    - perseusprime11 10y ago
      Bingo!

whatever_dude 10y ago

I agree with the sentiment, but expecting the company to bend over backwards is pretty naive. It's more likely that'll make products more expensive or just harder to find, not help the country advance.

kapilkaisare 10y ago

Sorry for nitpicking, but: s/pions/peons s/gaurds/guards

wrong_variable 10y ago
thanks !

sokoloff 10y ago

> interesting statistic - 85% of student loans in India is under water ( compared to 50% in america ) What does "loan under water" mean in this context? In a collateralized loan context (car or house), "under water" means that the borrower owes more than the market value of the collateral.

morgante 10y ago
I suspect that the GP simply meant that 85% of Indian loans are past due. Rhetorically, you could consider them as being underwater if the asset purchased (human capital) isn't providing sufficient value (income) to service the loan.
maskedinvader 10y ago
think he means student loans with collateral not doing well due to variety of reasons defined here [1] and I think you are thinking about underwater mortgages as defined here [2] 1. http://goo.gl/21TmQm http://goo.gl/21TmQm 2. http://goo.gl/UVNIFr http://goo.gl/UVNIFr
wrong_variable 10y ago
Essentially for some reason or other the loans are not being repaid - and mostly likely wont be repaid due to high unemployment among the people who took the loan.

walrus01 10y ago

India's extremely complicated bureaucratic nightmare of inter-state borders and customs/tariffs is the fault of the British? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/31/india-economic-growth-new-national-tax http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/31/india-economic-... Imagine if you had cargo truck borders and customs paperwork between every one of the US 50 states and what a nightmare it would be for trucking/logistics/distribution/warehousing/cold chain/etc. Indian states have a significant degree of regulatory autonomy, far beyond what a US state or a Canadian province has, to the extend that some states are looking at banning alcohol entirely and others have unique tax code and criminal code laws not found in the rest of India.

wrong_variable 10y ago
The post has nothing to do with inter-state commerce. Its to do with Federal Laws set by the Indian Govt, which overall seems to be deeply protectionist. If you ask any historian the reasoning for this attitude in India and why its tolerated - is mainly because of the holdover from the time India was colonized by European Powers. Essentially what I am saying is that its not easy to sell 'Free Trade' in India. I wasn't blaming anyone for anything - just staying the facts. I personally think it would help India to loosen up some of its protectionist laws and be a little bit more like China - but that is just my own opinion.
RealGeek 10y ago
My personal car was stopped by octroi officers near a state border in India. They searched my car, and then said that I should have paid octroi tax on the personal computer I was carrying in the car. I told them that all taxes were paid including VAT and Octroi for the computer when I bought it 5 years ago. The said it doesn't matter, I must stop at the Octroi office and pay taxes again every time I am crossing a state border for everything I am carrying in my vehicle. He said my only option is to pay them bribe, or they will impound my vehicle indefinitely.
- walrus01 10y ago
  Out of curiosity are you ethnically from somewhere in India / South Asia, or a foreigner?

eru 10y ago

> Indian markets, products and the economy in general is really bad and unsophisticated. There is no way they can compete with american, European and Chinese companies. Lots of previously poor countries have industrialized via exports. One can argue they used protectionism at home---misguided as it is. But nevertheless their companies managed to sell to fickle foreigners in the foreigners' home markets---all sophistication issues aside.

agmohit01 10y ago

Default of student loans in India is around 8% which is about 1 Billion USD. Source http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report-banks-learn-a-hard-lesson-worth-rs-5192-crore-on-education-loans-2125507 http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report-banks-learn-a-hard-less... Default of student loans in USA is around $1 trillion. Isn't this what is called comparing Apples and Oranges.