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Born in God’s own country – Kerala – admiration for things natural is part of me. Vivid descriptions in books about Canada’s immense scenic beauty made me fall in love with the country at an impressionable age. Further, I am one of those badly bitten by the research bug and hence in later life went on to develop also considerable research interest in the field of Canadian studies. This resulted in my becoming the Founder Director for about a decade of the Centre for Canadian Studies of the University of Delhi and being currently involved from the Centre for Policy Research to track diplomacy between the two countries. All this coupled with the fact that I am a congenital tourist has enabled me to travel extensively in Canada. These travels have not been confined to big cities like Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax but have also meant visits to places like Banff, Peterborough, Quebec City, Wolfville and even Sudbury. During the course of these travels, I have had the opportunity to interact with Canadians from different walks of life. Besides substantiating my earlier view from books that Canada is a beautiful country, all this has made me aware that the country is inhabited by an extremely friendly set of people and convinced me that despite the enormous distance that separates India and Canada, that are actually almost poles apart in geographical location, there exists considerable untapped potential for the promotion of business and economic relations between the two nations which have a lot of well-documented commonalities.
I hence feel a little put off when knowledgeable people in influential quarters talk of forces of history, geography and political conditions being big impediments standing in the way of the exploitation of this potential. A simplistic argument of this kind proceeds along the lines of earlier history and of relations in the former bipolar world. It talks of India’s historical and political links with the UK and with the former USSR as against with the USA, with whom Canada has strong links on similar grounds.
A more sophisticated argument talks of emerging regional economic blocks and how India is trying to work out such arrangements with her neighbours and those in the east through the SAARC, SAPTA etc and Canada is similarly engaged in working out economic arrangements through the NAFTA involving USA and Mexico, leaving India and Canada little economic interest or incentive to improve business and economic relations with each other. Fuel is added to all this fire by the fact that there are doubts in some quarters as to whether India will continue with the policy of opening up of the economy when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), a coalition group of a large number of parties and supported by the left parties from outside, is in power at the centre in India.
Such a view however seems flawed on various grounds. For one thing doubts about the continuation of the policy of economic reforms in India do not seem well-founded This is so because, there have been a number of changes in government at the centre since the 90’s when economic reforms were launched in India in a major way and there has not been any reversal of economic reforms. Further, the National Common Minimum Programme of the UPA and the manner in which it is being implemented in the past few months show that in this age of Adam Marx and Karl Smith, such fears do not have much basis. On the contrary, some of the areas like infrastructure in which the new government is looking for foreign direct investment are the ones in which Canada has a cutting edge over many other countries. One of course has to admit that regional economic blocs have become the order of the day. But they are being increasingly looked upon these days as stepping stones, and not as stumbling blocks to the ultimate emergence of freer trade and business relations between countries of the world cutting across these blocks. This is hardly surprising because it is economic logic a la Adam Smith’s advantage of the extent of the market that is overcoming strong cultural, historical, linguistic and political differences between countries, inducing them to form regional economic blocs.
Such logic definitely warrants much stronger economic links between India and Canada. Canadian businesses are well aware of the billion plus population of India, but seem sceptical of the extent of the Indian market because of the low purchasing power of the people in India. The latest figures of income distribution in India brought out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) should make interesting reading to them. According to these figures 28 percent of the households in India had an annual income in 2001-02 of Rs 90,000 (CAD 2,600) or above and can be looked upon as belonging to the upper middle class. The NCAER has actually estimated that this percentage is actually likely to become as high as 48 percent by 2009-10. In fact if we consider only the urban areas more than half the households belonged to this category in 2001-02 and such households will form around three-quarters of Indian urban households by 2009-10. The percentage of low-income households in fact falls from 34.6 percent in 2001-02 to 15.6 percent in 2009-10.
From the side of Indian businesses, there is also a considerable information gap on Canada. There is very little appreciation of the fact that Canada provides a much cheaper and possibly much friendlier location to access the entire North American market than that provided by most places in the USA. Further, while the language barrier has not prevented the development of strong economic relations between India and France, India is almost oblivious in this regard, of the existence of the Francophone part of Canada. This is indeed a great pity because around nine million people in Canada speak French and they mostly inhabit Quebec – the largest province of Canada in terms of area. It is unfortunate that while there are some sporadic efforts to fill this information gap like the publication of a volume entitled Discovering French Canada by the Centre for Canadian Studies of the University of Delhi, there has so far been no attempt to bring out something similar to that excellent DFAIT brochure entitled Focus India stressing Canada’s cutting edges and giving all the requisite information regarding India in a succinct form to Canadian businesses. The urgent need of the hour seems to be the bridging of this huge information gap between the two countries possibly by attempting a similar exercise to economically induce Indian businesses to focus on Canada.
There are also two other fronts simply waiting to be utilised to promote Indo-Canadian economic ties further on a sustainable basis. Studies by many including the author clearly indicate that Canada ranks very high amongst the developed countries of today in terms of the percentage of Indian Diaspora in its population. A detailed analytical study based on considerable empirical evidence by Nissar Assanie of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada clearly indicates that this noticeable presence of the Indian Diaspora provides a built-in advantage for the promotion of economic ties between the two nations. The other rather unfortunate situation is that the two countries do not still take a holistic attitude towards the promotion of economic relations between each other. In both India and Canada, economic relations and education are looked upon as totally separate and water-tight compartments. It is yet to dawn on them that exchange of student interns through academia-corporate world interfaced at the global level in advanced professional programmes can promote sustained development in economic relations between the two countries without causing any strain on the taxpayer’s money in either country.
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