By Nalliah Thayabharan

In the 1980s, India and China’s GDPs were relatively close, but the countries have since diverged significantly:
GDP: In 1980, China’s GDP was $302.9 billion, while India’s was $189.4 billion.
Per capita GDP: In 1980, China’s per capita GDP was $306.9, while India’s was $276.3.
Growth rate: China’s average growth rate was typically 100% higher than India’s.
International trade: In 1980, China’s exports represented 1% of the world’s exports, while India’s represented 0.5%.

The gap between the two countries has widened over the past three decades.  In 2022, China’s per capita GDP was $12,720, while India’s was $2,388. Not to mention the total length of Chinese high-speed rail is more than the total sum of Japan and the whole EU. China has been built on infrastructure, investment and manufacturing; India has barely scratched the surface on all three. China has better nation building engineers than India. Even Europe doesn’t look as cool as China anymore.

There are many companies who moved from China to India. All of them ended up biting the dust and moved back to China. Because India has very poor quality control, people are careless in manufacturing and produce less. Indians talk, whereas the Chinese work hard and produce excellent-quality products. Indians just chase the big money and don’t worry about the company’s reputation.

Though we are yet to see an Indian CEO manage a struggling company and turn it into a star company, so far all Indian CEOs only managed already big monopoly corporations like Starbucks,IBM and even Microsoft and Google. When the CEO is Indian, the whole room is filled up with Indians. Indian CEOs are good at cost cutting, replacing highly paid employees with cheap Indian labour throughout the entire organization. This results in huge savings in salary cost thereby boosting profits during the initial years for the greedy shareholders. Over time, the entrepreneurial nature of the Company is being compromised by mediocre performance up failing to cope with changes; fault lines creeps in to destroy the Company credibility and critical assurances; Microsoft, Google and Boeing are good example of sad victims but the blame lies with their top greedy management who have soft ears to sweet words of Indian sleek oratory.  Indians really can talk their way to a solution” but when it comes to delivery it’s always not even half baked due their gross incompetence. To be fair not all of them are like that but most of them are. Most of the Indians can’t think on their own. Most Indian students resort to malpractices in examinations.

Boeing hired a large number of Indian engineers including software and hardware engineers at the same time they also cooperated with a large number of Indian companies to determine that they are Boeing suppliers some of which are startups with no Aerospace experience and some are large Indian groups such as Tata. Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft experienced problems after an Indian manufacturer replaced titanium alloy valves with aluminum alloy. This led to propulsion failures and helium leaks, which affected the spacecraft’s performance. Boeing uses titanium and aluminum alloys from India in many of its civilian and military products, including the 737 and the F15. Boeing sources vertical fin structures for 737 airplanes from India. TBAL manufactures the vertical fin structure for the Boeing 737 aircraft, with over 90% of the parts manufactured in India. Boeing sources fuselages for Apache helicopters from more than 300 local companies in India. Boeing has also partnered with the Indian firm AIESL to support the navy’s P-8I fleet. Boeing mentioned in a previous investigation that Indian companies use aluminum alloys to replace titanium alloy parts from China which makes Boeing’s aircraft unable to withstand pressure in extreme environments resulting in frequent safety accidents. They also pointed out that the code quality of Indian Engineers is very poor resulting in a surgent bugs which seriously threatens flight safety. Boeing then made a decision to lay off Indian management and employees on a large scale. In fact it is not only Boeing, Twitter has also fired Indian CEO and executives.

It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing company’s 737 Max crisis, how Boeing made basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers said the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower paid contractors. The 737 Max software plagued was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. Boeing and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software often from countries lacking a deep background in Aerospace notably India. In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies limited occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight test group that supported the 737 Max. The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing, still it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code.

Mark Rabin  said frequently he recalled it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly. Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends in recent years. It has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft such as a 22 billion dollar order to supply SpiceJet an Indian low-cost airline that order included ten 737 Max 8 Jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an India where airlines are dominated by Airbus.

HCL Engineers helped develop and test the Boeing 737 Max’s flight display software while employees from another Indian Company Cyient(formerly Infotech Enterprises Limited) handled software for flight testing equipment.  Sales are another reason to send the work overseas in exchange for an $1 billion order from Air India, Boeing promised to invest 1.7 billion in Indian companies that was a boon for HCL and other software developers from India such as Cyient whose Engineers were widely used in Computer Services Industries but not yet prominent in air space space.

Boeing Engineers were saying they had to keep fixing the work of the Indian Engineers. Boeing was celebrating the fact that Air India made a big order of the 737-Max and the 787-Dreamliner both planes that whistleblowers have said are dangerous and poorly designed. Boeing outsourced Engineers to India for $9 an hour as an effort to save money. Now Boeing is losing panels, wheels and even getting people stuck in space.

If India is a source of vast technical talent, why does India look like India? Boeing was literally destroyed by Indian software developers. The incentives of capitalism destroyed Boeing because in the end a company that was run for decades with a philosophy of just build the best plane eventually merged with McDonald Douglas which had a culture of chasing the stock market and that culture wound up eating the company because the incentives of making the best plane aren’t really compatible with the incentive of driving the stock price higher for the next quarter that involves cost cutting and showing how much money you saved and how much the labour costs are coming down and it is inherently in conflict with a company that is known for engineering the best plane no matter what the costs are to do that.

They brought in a bunch of college kids to design software that millions of lives are going to be dependent on. Hiring people for less money; paying someone $9 an hour to design a plane you’re going to get a poorly designed plane.

Elon Musk is wrong about the H-1B visa, which is designed to bring foreign workers to work in the United States to exploit foreign workers while enriching corporations. The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire the best and the brightest, but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured foreign workers. The cheaper the labour they hire, the more money the billionaires make.

The Indian Institute of Technology has trained a large number of elites and it is no less difficult for these people to get admission in the fierce competition than to be admitted to MIT. All handed in beautiful transcripts.

Once a company hires an Indian executive, it will soon be filled with a large number of Indians and then quickly become Indianized, entering a terrible strange disease: the company’s efficiency rapidly declines, the product quality rapidly declines and reliability becomes unknown.  
Rather than looking at Boeing and IBM which are already on the verge of crisis or Twitter which has been hit hard, let’s look at Microsoft which is still quite successful. The probability of Windows crashing is much higher than Apple. In the past my MacBook has only crashed three times in its more than four years of operation, which is the same number of crashes that happened to my Windows laptop last week. I was even forced to turn off Windows automatic updates because this stupid update program always caused my laptop to not work properly and I had to reinstall drivers.   Microsoft’s stock price is high but has Microsoft developed any revolutionary products after Steven Anthony Ballmer stepped down?

Let’s look at Google again – it also has a high stock price and beautiful data but Google has also lost its ability to innovate. Google used to be a leader in AI and the DeepMind team can be said to be far ahead of other AI teams.  However when open AI became popular and launched ChatGPT, Google’s various AI assistants from Bard to Gemini couldn’t challenge ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the more powerful option for doing tasks like decoding a cipher text, solving a crossword, and correctly answering math and English questions. ChatGPT’s memory functionality is turned on by default for all ChatGPT Plus accounts and automatically picks up on the details and preferences shared in your chat to tailor its responses. With Google Gemini, you need to manually add memories in your settings, making it operate more like ChatGPT’s custom instructions. ChatGPT can convert files from one format to another—for example, you can turn an article into a presentation and vice versa. Google’s Gemini doesn’t offer this functionality. You can extend ChatGPT even further by using Zapier’s ChatGPT integration to send data across thousands of other apps and incorporate AI into your other workflows. Google was once the world’s first large-scale IT company to carry out driverless research and development and its driverless experimental model made other companies out of reach. However when the driverless business in many large cities in China has been commercialized Google seems to have fallen behind big time.

A very simple question  – has India created any popular apps like WeChat, TikTok, Temu? Has there ever been even one Indian hardware company like Huawei, DJI, or BYD?

Greedy Americans believe that Indian Engineers will make their products well. In fact when the Indian team poured into Blizzard Entertainment, they ruined favorite classic games such as Diablo and World of Warcraft making Blizzard Entertainment-a company with no ambition and only relying on past glory to make money Blizzard’s Warcraft and World of Warcraft used to dominate the desktop games. But now the overlords of desktop games are League of Legends and Dota 2 – the former is a subsidiary of China’s 10 cent and the latter is a substitute developed by a group of gamers who are dissatisfied with Blizzard and joined VALVE. On the mobile side, top games such as Honor of Kings and Genshin Impact are basically developed by Chinese companies. It is difficult for Indian Engineers at Blizzard Entertainment to keep up with the pace of competition.

Indians moreover are very good at talking and their words make leaders and shareholders feel comfortable and fulfilled. Chinese can do nothing except bury their heads in work. The United States is shorting India on a large scale. Western capital is also withdrawing from India on a large scale and American companies have to clean up Indian executives and employees. The elusory glory will quickly fade in the face of reality. Bragging is not necessarily a crime but it is really harmful.

India has grown oblivious to the realities of its neighbours: this is the principal driver of the anti-Indian sentiment currently sweeping its neighbours — a warning that New Delhi may pay a price if it fails to recalibrate its diplomatic toolkit toward regional wellbeing. At the same time, at the political level, a de facto shift toward closer ties with China is unfolding in the region. Public sentiment perceives Beijing as less intrusive in domestic political affairs than New Delhi.

India has failed to promote robust people-to-people relations that could establish it as the organically embraced, legitimate moral leader of its neighbours, capable of voicing the collective interests of the neighbourhood on the global stage. Having less historical baggage, with fewer past grievances and a cleaner slate with India’s neighbours, Beijing has leveraged India’s missteps in these areas to strengthen its position in the region.

Modi’s Neighbourhood First policy, which in reality relies on behind-the-scenes head-of-government interpersonal ties, has fueled anti-Indian sentiment among citizens of neighbouring countries. The outcome is bad for New Delhi: India is seen as an antagonistic, aspiring hegemon.

In Sri Lanka, during the 2018 constitutional crisis, India’s lack of a clear stance and delayed response were perceived as signs of diplomatic indecisiveness. Although India provided a $1 billion credit line and other financial assistance packages during Sri Lanka’s economic crisis in 2022, these efforts were overshadowed by China’s strategic long-term investments, such as the 99-year lease of the Hambantota port and funding for the Colombo Port City project.

In the Maldives, India’s influence has been waning. The election of President Mohamed Muizzu, who ran on a strong anti-Indian platform, marked an unprecedented shift in Maldivian foreign policy. Muizzu’s India Out campaign, calling for the withdrawal of Indian military personnel, echoed nationwide discontent with Indian military presence in the islands and gained traction across the region, including and most forcefully in Bangladesh.

India’s dream of being the next Global Superpower is like people house-hunting for mansions after buying a few lottery tickets.