Hope for India, and Welcome to Mauritius

(Bob:) My last entry for India, and my first and only entry for the island nation of Mauritius, strikes a distinctly different note than my first entry for India. That entry centered on our first port of call, Chennai (formerly Madras) on the southeast coast of India, plus the three northern India cities of New Delhi, Varanasi, and Agra. It was so depressing, bordering on despair, to see such utter poverty in a country with the resources of India.

But there is another Indian story in the state of Kerala on the southwest coast of India, and a related story on Mauritius, since 60 percent of its population are Indian descendants, whose forebears were brought there in the 19th century to work on the sugar plantations as indentured laborers when slavery was outlawed by Britain in the 1830s.

Kerala is the most international of the Indian states and the least Hindu, with only about 50 percent of the population following that religion. About 25 percent are Christians, the highest percentage in India, about 18 percent Moslems and then various other faiths. Kerala was a prime area for the first European explorers who came around Africa in search of the spice trade. Also a prime area for the first European missionaries. It’s a very tropical area, getting about 120 inches of rainfall a year. This provides abundant water, allowing the state to produce a lot of hydroelectricity from the more mountainous area in its north.

Kerala has the highest literacy rate in India -- about 95 percent. This, I think is key to its success, along with a weak caste system.

The state also had a communist government that won elections and took over state government in 1956 and has been in power much of the time since. (It’s one of the few communist governments to ever take power through elections and maintain the elections.) The communists are currently part of the coalition government that rules the state. The communist government enacted land reform in 1968, so land ownership is relatively widespread. I was also told that the state has done a much better job of enforcing gender equality than many other Indian states.

There are things you don’t see in Kerala: there is very little garbage along the roadsides; I never saw a cow, let alone have them stand in the middle of the road. I saw no hovels of untouchables along roadsides; with the lesser number of Hindus, the caste system appears to be weak in Kerala.

More important are the things you do see: high-rise construction in many places, some of it apartments, some hotels and some offices. Kerala, probably because of the high literacy rate, has been a prime spot for American outsourcing of such things as call centers. This was also the only state where I saw family planning advertising -- “One child per family.” One indication of the growing prosperity of the place: our port city of Cochin, with about 1.5 million people, had brand new Audi, BMW, and Mercedes dealerships.

Kerala supposedly has nice beaches, although I didn’t make it to them, so it also has a growing tourism sector.

In short, Kerala seems to have it figured out in terms of economic development, I think primarily through education. But I plan to research this further to find out what the experts say about the place. I only hope that what’s happening there can spread to the rest of the country, but the task is so daunting.

One thing you discover even if you are in India for only a few days is that Indians are very vocal, very talkative and very opinionated and argumentative. It’s said that if you put 10 Indians in a room, you’ll have 25 opinions on any subject brought up. That’s one reason it seems unlikely that any governing system other than democracy would ever work for India, even though it doesn’t work very well.

In Mauritius, Indians have proved they can run a democracy well. Mauritius is an island about the size of Rhode Island, located several hundred miles east of Madagascar and west of the American bases on Diego Garcia. Mauritius is known to much of the world, particularly Europe, as a big beach resort with 200 miles of white sand beaches and a coral reef surrounding the island. There are many luxury and more moderate hotels lining the beaches, and the island has been discovered by McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.

The French ruled the island in the 18th century; the British took over in 1810 and ruled it until independence in 1968. The result: a French culture overlaid by a British bureaucracy. The people speak a Creole French; advertising signs are in French, but road signs are in English.

The island has 1.2 million people, and is visited by 900,000 tourists each year. The per capita GDP is more than $12,000, about six times the level of India and the highest in Africa, where Mauritius is placed for classification purposes. The country has a government paid health-care system (What a concept!) as well as old-age pensions, unemployment compensation, housing assistance loans and a whole variety of social welfare programs funded at an appropriate level for the country. You see poverty -- slums in the city, poor shacks for sugar cane workers, etc. -- but it appears manageable. Again, to me it appears to be Indians who don’t have the burden of the caste system being able to run things efficiently, as in Kerala.

Probably most important for the country has been the smart economic planning by the government: Realizing that sugar cane and tourism weren’t enough to provide needed employment, the government first in the 1980s created export processing zones where textile manufacturers could bring in material duty-free, have it sewn into finished clothing and then exported duty free. That proved 70,000 jobs. Then in the 1990s, the country loosened its banking regulations so off-shore banking became a growth industry, and banks built big office buildings in the capital. Today the government is building a big high-tech office park called Cyber City. Now, if you are a high-tech CEO, would you rather have your overseas office in India with all its problems, or in Mauritius where the CEO can have a beachfront house 10 minutes from work?

The country has had regular elections since 1968. Maybe we could convince this government to come over and run the United States for a few years.

We were only in Mauritius for about 36 hours, and Luana had the most interesting trip in that time, which she will relate.

In addition to going all over the downtown of Port Louis, I went a little way out of town to a sugar museum. I learned that Mauritius is one of the chief exporters of sugar to Europe, that there can be about 10 kinds of sugar, each tasting slightly different (I tasted them), depending on boiling time, and that Mauritius gets 40 percent of its electric energy by burning sugar cane waste.

Now you can rest from factoid exhaustion.