<B>By Baljinder SHARMA</B>

Last week, India entered its sixth decade of independence, flushed with success and confidence. An eight percent growth rate for an eight-hundred-billion dollar economy meant adding sixty five billion dollars of income this year alone.

Such positive outlook on economic growth prompted one euphoric businessman in Bangalore who has seen his business grow 200% to comment that opportunity in 2006 is not ‘once in a decade’, ‘not once in a millennium’ but ‘once in the lifetime of a country’.

India is adding an average of five million mobile phone connections every month making it the second largest mobile phone market in the world. This kind of growth is not limited to the telecom industry, which is red hot but extends equally to other sectors such as manufacturing and the new economy business process outsourcing.

Strangely this is despite all odds. In a recent ranking of 155 countries by ease of doing business in 2006, the World Bank and its affiliate, the International Finance Corporation, list India at 116, two places below Iraq, 56 below Pakistan and 25 below China. India could certainly do better without its myriad network of bureaucracy and redtapism.

India remains a land of contradiction. India “is the best of the world, it is the worst of the world – and the gaps are growing.” India’s top technology colleges set global standards. Yet “many, if not most, children finish government primary schools incapable of simple arithmetic”, observed the Economist in a recent edition.

Some 260m people survive on less than one dollar a day. Nearly half of the country’s children below the age of six are undernourished. More than half of its women are illiterate. Half its homes have no electricity. For a country that had more than a fifth of the world’s wealth and a quarter of the world’s trade in textiles in the 1700, why did it take three whole centuries to regain a fraction of its past glory?

Many people blame the British rulers in the eighteenth century with their mercantilist policies that turned India’s wealth into scarcity. From a producer and exporter India became a consumer and importer of essential commodities. While such policies filled the coffers of the British government, it emptied India’s wealth at the same time.

Ironically, the English language, that the British inadvertently introduced into the country to ease their own administrative pains during the colonial times became the common language of the intelligentsia; was largely responsible for uniting the leaders of India’s independence struggle and is today the key to its success in the offshore services sector.

Nehru’s independence dream “We end today a period of ill fortune, and India discovers herself again” has taken nearly six decades to materialise. A strange mix of socialist command and control economy and free market capitalism operating side by side did not succeed for good three decades until the 1980 when India was forced to liberalise under the weight of its own failure.

Economists, today, describe India as a caged Tiger that has been let out. Many others think of India as ‘China fifteen years ago’. Unanimously they all expect it to become one of the top five economies by 2010 and the top three by 2020.

What does India’s unprecedented economic success mean for Mauritius? A lot – as one would imagine. Yet Mauritius has failed to cash on the tremendous opportunities that a close economic relationship between the countries could unleash. Without doubt there has been significant investment by state companies like Indian Oil and Mahanagar Telephone (Mauritius) Ltd. In the recent past, private companies have found Mauritius less than exciting. Countries like Dubai and Singapore are far more preferred destinations for large Indian corporate businesses houses.

Double Taxation Agreement with India, the foundation of the last known Mauritian economic pillar, the offshore sector, is under pressure. There may be hope under the new Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. It was once believed that the Indian Information and Communication Technology sector could help transform Mauritius into a knowledge economy. Infosys was the beacon of a brand new hope for the country in the year 2000. Six years down, the hope stands – only on one leg.

The deterministic investment approach with a closed economic model that Mauritius pursued till recently did not sell well to the Indians. The last budget has created a renewed hope. Perhaps with a dash of luck and loads of sincere effort, Mauritius would be able to attract the Indian private sector. The challenge, nevertheless, lies in creating a compelling case for investment and in understanding that the Indian middle class is larger than the size of European population. To begin with it could send the extra one million or so tourists that Mauritius needs, single-handedly.