I remain wary of India's industrialization pace. With the world's largest and youngest population, the entire Western world is now trying to build a second super manufacturing hub in India. Looking at India's manufacturing PMI over the past few years, it is clear that India's manufacturing sector in the 2020s and 2030s will be completely different from what it has been over the past 20 years.
Indian manufacturing is basically repackaging Chinese parts and components. To be a true manufacturing superpower requires colossal investment in infrastructure, education, power generation and government efficiency. And all of that are just the prerequisites before you even get to the manufacturing part. If you want to have any chance of breaking out of low-end, low-value added manufacturing, you also need to invest massively for world class R&D and even more education for your workers.
India is so far behind the curve they are literally falling faster and faster behind.
Soon automation will take the basic entry level manufacturing they might have been able to handle with their workforce skill level and domestic tech level. But robotics and automation are advancing light years faster than Indians are up-skilling and up-tooling. Their much vaunted demographic dividend is fast turning into a democratic time bomb with whole generations getting left behind in the dirt and filth, and as they grow old the care burden is going to be utterly unbearable for the Indian economy. Just to really hammer home how screwed they are, Mother Nature is slowly but surely roasting their homeland to desert.
As the Indian baby boomers age and climate change hammer their homeland, Indian life expectancy is going to drop off a cliff. As soon as you get too old to work enough hours to earn enough to keep you alive, you starve and die. Either the Indian nation succumbs to revolution as the people reject such a peak dystopian fate, or the Indian race genocides itself through its own incompetence and cruelty.
Indeed, the only ‘out’ I can realistically see for India to avert this fate is if WWIII kicks off and they export their excess unskilled population as cannon fodder for the highest bidder by the millions. Of course, they will probably have to supply troops to both sides or else the side their mercenaries are fighting against will probably just carpet nuke them. But so what if Indian brothers have to fight and kill Indian brothers? Mother India earns double! Jai Hind! But knowing India’s track record, it would be lottery jackpot winning odds for their leaders to be able to thread the needle to achieve such a perfect outcome. Far more likely they piss off both sides and get carpet nuked by both sides.
Who knows, maybe this is the ‘Gollum’ role some have fantasised India playing in WWIII, that in uniting against the Indians, the original belligerents of WWIII find enough common ground for peace talks to stop the war before we glass the whole planet.
