Our way is the highway

The King Cobra is not the fastest snake, and it is not the biggest snake, but it just might be the most revered. The city of Nagercoil, at the southern tip of India, contains a temple to the King Cobra, worshipped as a deity. India’s new mascot might be the King Cobra. It is not the fastest growing economy, nor is it the biggest, and who doesn’t like Ghandi?

India’s newest metaphorical cobra is a 3,633 mile long highway connecting its four major population centers, Delhi; Kolkata; Mumbai; and Chennai. Dubbed the “Golden Quadrilateral (GQ)” by the Indian Government, officials expect it to stimulate further economic development in rural India, where 70 percent of India still live, by facilitating the movement of goods into and out of the country.

Combined with past-established Special Economic Zones (SEZs) providing tax holidays to foreign direct investors, the GQ already appears to be a major success in its own right:

Every factory on the GQ, including Hyundai, creates its own “ecosystem,” opening dozens of specialized niches that are quickly filled by energetic Indian entrepreneurs. Hyundai, for example, is surrounded by 83 smaller companies, which supply it with windshields, fasteners, headlights, rearview mirrors, and other specialty parts. Each of these companies in turn has suppliers of its own to provide truck transport, warehousing, clerical services, and logistical support….Today there are more than 200 SEZs in India, which generate more than $15 billion in annual exports and provide jobs for more than half a million Indian workers. The vitality of these ecosystems is partly responsible for India’s soaring economic growth rate of 9 percent a year, second only to China among comparable market economies. Read the rest of this story in October’s National Geographic Magazine…

Next to China, the GQ and its many adjacent SEZs may soon become even more attractive to multinational companies, as China’s seemingly endless supply of surplus labor dries up.

Despite India’s status as the world’s largest democracy, property rights do remain an issue, as officials were not consistent with compensation for land seized to build the GQ, as the same National Geographic article notes. But, based on this exchange at the article’s end, don’t blame that on capitalism:

“Did you ever happen to meet Gandhi?” I asked.

“I did,” he said. Just after independence, there was a big push for new roads, and the government planned to put one here. “But they wanted to run it right through our farm, where the highway is today. So my father and I and a group of other people took the train to Delhi to ask Gandhi and Nehru to move the road to the edge of our land so it wouldn’t be cut in half.”

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Oh, it was very nice,” he said. “They met with us and shook our hands and listened to our arguments very politely. And then they went ahead and did exactly what they were planning to do all along.”