Where are these #'s coming from? Yes, they "need" this much new stuff, but who says they're going to get it? China already has acres of empty urban apartments and is facing fast-rising labor costs. India, well--they need a lot more than some new cities and I bet they're not going to get that either!

I dont understand how india can meet these standards with 400 million people living worse life than poor african states?

Speculation, speculation, speculation...of course, it never works out that way with the pretty graphs, charts, and statistics.

Both these countries have shown that they can beat the predictions and overcome the colonial hangover.

China is well on the path to growth and prosperity. India needs to get those disparate millions to work collectively on a shared vision, while addressing their individual needs. Hopefully, the democracy should take care of that and the paradigm shift from agro based economy to and industrial one. The growing free market and competition should take care of the economic growth part.

The challenge is to achieve growth and ensure prosperity without causing the earth to fall apart.

India's elite is totally preoccupied in aping the US, while ignoring the sustainability of the US growth model in the Indian context. Life in an Indian city is already a nightmare. More of the same growth is clearly a prescription for disaster.

The basic infrastructure to provide adequate power, safe water, sanitation, transportation etc is antiquated or non-existent. Can Indian roads handle any more traffic or its sewers handle more high-rise apartments? Schools that once used to have playgrounds are now like chicken coops stacked in crowded buildings. City parks and the majestic roundabouts have all disappeared.

India should shift its priority to developing its rural economy and also shift manufacturing activity to labor and land abundant rural areas to reverse the urbanization trend. For the first time Indian GDP associated with manufacturing has surpassed agriculture. Further erosion of the rural and agriculture segment will involve a very high economic and human cost.

A linear projection of the present or the immediate past into the future is always the easiest thing to do, but not necessarily the most intelligent thing to do. Richard Dobbs' article and/or the sources of his data also chose this easier path to look into the future.

Just consider one simple fact. Almost 70% of the labour force in most of the developed countries and even some of the developing countries like India are engaged in information processing activities. Why do a lot of them have to continue to commute up to five hours a day to primarily use a computer at the work place that is generally connected to a lot of other computers?

With increasingly cheaper communication costs and faster broadband services, I hope the day is not too far when a lot of these jobs will be shifted to homes as a cost-saving measure, thus reducing the demand for transportation infrastructure. Appropriate use of fiscal tools (incentives and penalties) can make this happen faster, and hopefully, long before people are forced to stop breathing by polluted air.

Any intelligent forecasts of the future will be meaningless unless such possibilities are taken into account.

Tridib K Biswas

Visiting Professor
Graduate School of Business
The University of the South Pacific
Fiji

Jew/Arab cooperation will bring salvation from gloomy predictions.

Spain has a population of about 46 million, the second section states that with 68 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants and 212 million living in those cities India has a urbanised population of more than the population of Spain.
... By about 150 million it does! Have I missed something?? The predicted population of Spain isn't going to be that much in 2030!
The US - China comparision is closer by a long shot.

"Sixty years of independence cannot overcome the lost centuries of colonization."

How many centuries was that? And you do know that India was not a nation before France, Portugal and of course Britain came along, right? It was a tangled mess of petty kingdoms, more often at war with each other than not. Britain didn't hold India back because there was no India to hold back. Before Britain, there was no common language, no common culture, and only the most ad hoc forms of diplomacy and foreign relations. In short, it was barely out of the Dark Ages.

Read any objective history of the British Empire and you'll understand that in many, many cases, it was the most reluctant of Empires, often having to accept protectorates it didn't want to be responsible for purely because their rulers saw Britain as the best of the worst in terms of colonialism, ie. we either join the empire of our choice or get swallowed, robbed and abused by someone else.

As for world population, the key term to remember is 'Entropy'. By the time we figure out there's too many people in the world it'll be too late. We need to assume we have too many right now, this week!

As of now the labor is pretty cheap in India in comparison to US / Europe. But do feel that it will start changing soon. Pitneylodnes

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