India: Biggest Provider of Cheap Labour || Acharya Prashant, in conversation (2022)

Acharya Prashant

Video Information:   Context:  ~ Why India provides cheap labour? ~ Does Indian economy is responsible for cheap labours? ~ How Indian economy can growth? ~ What is the solution to control population in India?  Music Credits: Milind Date  ~~~~~

Transcript

00:00 India has been gaining economically because India can provide cheap labor.

00:10 China too has gained.

00:12 India in services, China in manufacturing.

00:18 But fundamentally that's just in some way an exploitation of the fact that we are just

00:25 too many and too poor.

00:30 So people produce kids and then what do those kids end up as?

00:42 They end up as laborers, helps, maids, cooks, cleaners, plumbers.

00:49 I am not berating any of these professions, but for sure I also know that being a maid

00:57 or a cook or a helper is not obviously the fullest expression of one's potential.

01:05 In that sense I am calling it unfortunate.

01:14 These days we are calling it here in India as the demographic advantage or demographic

01:21 dividend.

01:22 We are thinking that this is what will catapult India to the foremost league of prosperous

01:33 nations.

01:34 We have so many young people who can work.

01:38 So India will either export their work to the rest of the world or export the workers

01:45 themselves to the world.

01:48 Nice, but I would have rather had a situation where these many people in surplus didn't

02:03 exist in the first place because most Indians from the lower classes and the lower middle

02:13 economic classes, they live pretty wretched lives.

02:18 They do provide a lot of comforts and conveniences to the moneyed people, but their own lives

02:26 are quite miserable.

02:31 Imagine dollar one a day is not available to a lot of people.

02:38 Just imagine dollar one a day.

02:43 So I guess I actually, sometimes you get the feel for it just maybe from the general kind

03:06 of vibe you get from people.

03:10 Sometimes there can be this kind of a... it's hard to find the right word for it.

03:22 But for example when I see the shop clerks and the guards and well the maid is very nice

03:34 though, she is very polite, but it's clear that they are not enjoying themselves.

03:43 It's a very like...

03:44 Of course, of course.

03:45 The average Indian lives a very confined, very joyless life and you would not want to

03:59 trade positions with him, no way and believe me a lot of that is just due to the population

04:10 we have and somehow leaders both political and spiritual have not been able, rather not

04:22 been willing to drill this down to the Indian mind that kids are not an important part of

04:34 the happiness package, that having kids is not a random event, that kids are not sent

04:49 down by God, they are not divine gifts.

04:58 So that concept that having kids and having more kids is a very central thing in life,

05:12 especially that of a woman, is very deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche and that needs

05:22 to be corrected, not just to control the population, but to develop the Indian mind itself.

05:32 As long as Indians keep taking reproduction so seriously, they will not have time or space

05:41 or energy to give respect to the more important things in life and I am talking especially

05:50 of women.

05:53 You can't imagine how much an average Indian woman spends of her whole life in just giving

06:09 birth to and raising kids.

06:13 Now the fertility rate has dropped to less insane levels, but just a few decades back

06:24 the average Indian woman was just continuously pregnant, one kid after the other, 4 kids,

06:33 5 kids and one or two of them would die early and then more kids and then you want a baby

06:42 boy in particular, so more kids.

06:53 And it's the funny counterpart in the West, I mean probably many Western women also want

07:00 kids but then they have fewer ones, but they get more resources than the normal.

07:11 Now the fertility rate I think TFR is about 2.1 or something in India, I may not be accurate

07:19 in that case, I do want to stand corrected, but it's now greatly fallen, but still with

07:28 the population that we already have, it needs to, 2.1, 2.20, it needs to fall even further,

07:42 2.2 is still alarming.

07:44 [MUSIC PLAYING]

07:47 (electronic music)

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