India Archive

It didn’t get much notice, but the first India-Africa Summit just wrapped up in Delhi today with the adoption of the Delhi Declaration and the Africa-India Framework for Cooperation. The biggest news to come out of the summit, which included delegations from 14 African countries, was India PM Manmohan Singh’s announcement of tariff-free market access for products comprising 92.5% of Least Developed Countries’ exports (34 of 50 LCD’s are in Africa), but the Framework is also noteworthy for the ambitious agenda it lays out for Indian economic and political involvement on the continent. Among other things, it includes a Post […]

In the aftermath of the Tibet uprisings, India’s External Affairs Minister called on the Dalai Lama, whose government-in-exile India hosts, to refrain from “. . . any political activity in this country that harms India-China ties.” Meanwhile, there’s news out of Xinjiang that Uighur “extremists” were arrested as they attempted to incite an uprising. I’ve argued before that this is a great advantage America has in the globalized age over multicultural countries that either, a) inherited their minority populations from arbitrary colonial maps (India); or else b) absorbed them through expansion (China). There’s still racism and xenophobia in the States, […]

Parag Khanna wrote an article for WPR recently about the challenges facing India as it rises to global prominence. This post on Indian education (via Think Change India) adds some more color to the image. With over half a billion students, the sheer size of the Indian education system orients thinking towards top-down models. But as the post’s author, Neil Patel of the Siksha Foundation, suggests, that sheer size also renders the system more resistant to top-down change. Siksha offers a different model, typically NGO and decidedly bottom-up: microfinanced scholarships for individual students with team-oriented follow-up. In his post, he […]