We've been doing a lot we've had a lot of interactions with dignitaries from India,
we just had the Dalai Lama here a couple of weeks ago. And we're going to have Sri Sri
Ravi Shankar who is a very prominent guru who has many many millions of followers here.
And we're talking about Indian issues, in particular of late. Sanadand Dhume is our
resident scholar in Indian studies and he has a question about that country. Thank you
very much. I have a broad question about India. When you look at your engagement with the
country, what do you think it's done well, and where do you think it needs to do the
most work? Well India has a lot of very socialistic policies, having to do with labor, and land.
The fact that it has not risen as a manufacturing power is an indictment of its government policies.
That is as China's incomes went up, the place that the world should have moved to next as
the manufacturing hub of the world absolutely should be India. And that's only happening
to a very very tiny extent. And it has to do with regulatory complexities, infrastructure
quality. Now, I'm optimistic about India. We put more into India than any country in
the world. India benefits from a funny form of competition, which is competition between
the states. And so when one state really gets its act together, the other states tend to
feel jealous. And they you know are kind of looking at what policies led to that. The
states in the north that were particularly focused lagged in every human development
numbers, as well as income. But the improvements, and we have a big partnership with Ni'Dish
Khamar's Chief minister in Behar. The new chief minister in Bhutar Kadesh, decided that
these health things that we care about he'd get very involved with. And so we're seeing
a very fast rate of improvement there. Vaccination coverage, and we've got polio, the last polio
case there was three years ago. Which is an amazing triumph. We've taken the polio quality
audit group, and we've turned it into a primary health care audit group that's looking at
where do workers not show up. Where does supply chain not work, why don't people go, uh. India's
health is very complicated because they have a lot of these, a private sector that's very
low quality. And the government hasn't figured out how to get the private sector to be high
quality. And yet they haven't built the capacity in the public sector. But, things, time is,
um, on our side in India. It's just frustrating, you know they haven't adopted a few new vaccines.
That between, there's two new vaccines that will save over four hundred thousand lives
per year in just India alone. And they're being quite slow on that, that issue. India's
great. And in fifteen years, we'll probably be out of India because its budget will get
bigger, and they'll allocate more of it to health. What were the delays in permitting,
and what owes to that? I suppose the viruses didn't unionize there. The suspicion of...the
bureaucrats really like the status quo. The way the (unclear) system works, you're much better
off not to change things. So getting somebody to say yes, we'd like to spend more money
on a new vaccine, knowing that there's a crowd that going to come in and attack that. There's
a little bit of conservatism. And there's an election coming up, hopefully ...as you
get close to an election, you get particular paralysis in a bureaucracy. Post the election,
there's a lot of optimism that things will, both in terms of deregulation and taking on
new health initiatives that things will be even more aggressive.