Editorial | PM’s India visit

There is no obvious big breakthrough from Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ three-day visit to India, which he wound up yesterday.

From a standpoint of optics, probably the most significant outcomes of the trip are Jamaica’s formal opening of a high commission in New Delhi, over which the prime minister presided; a memorandum of understanding between New Delhi and Kingston on cooperation in technology; and the naming of a street in New Delhi in honour of Jamaica.

However, but perhaps for the latter, it would be easy, and wrong, to underestimate the potential importance of these developments, unless Jamaica perceives its international relationships only in merely raw transactional terms – something for something now. No one should expect India, and especially its government, to settle large amounts of development aid on Jamaica, or that its big private sector firms will, on a signal from the State, steer capital from the island.

Nonetheless, there are great opportunities in India that Jamaica, given the long-standing relations between the two counties, if it is sufficiently nimble, can exploit.

First, as former British colonies, Jamaica and India, their relative sizes notwithstanding, have the shared experience of colonialism. In their post-colonial periods both countries have emerged as stable democracies and as critical voices on the global stage for greater equity in international relations, especially in dealing with critical issues such as climate change and the crisis of debt faced by emerging economies. Kingston and New Delhi have, for a long time, tended to be on the same side of the big issues of the day.

But there are other opportunities for a deepening of this relationship and for Jamaica to extract value from it. The fact is, mutual interests and equality of partnership notwithstanding, Jamaica, an island of approximately 12,000 square kilometres and three million is minuscule compared to India with its nearly 3.3 million square kilometres and over 1.4 billion people. However, both countries share many challenges of development, especially in areas such as the insufficiency of infrastructure, reduction of poverty, delivery of healthcare, improving education and delivering sustained economic growth.

LESSONS

With respect to the latter two, though, India may well have lessons from which Jamaica may learn and otherwise benefit. Indeed, India is seemingly on the cusp of a big economic take-off. With a growth rate average around seven per cent and a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of US$3.937 trillion, India is now the world’s fifth largest economy, having overtaken Britain. It ranks only after the United States, China, Germany and Japan.

Moreover, India is the home to several corporate giants, some of which are increasingly looking abroad for production venues in their efforts to access new markets. Jamaica, with its ambition to establish itself as a logistics centre and being a crossroads to the Americas, could, if it offered the appropriate skills and services, possibly be attractive to some of these firms.

A handful of Indian connected enterprises already do business in Jamaica. But these are mostly smaller enterprises that facilitated Indian residents in Jamaica. The presence of a full-time Jamaican diplomatic mission in Delhi can, apart from maintaining direct bilateral contact with the Indian government, help in spreading the message that the island is open for business.

On the technology front, the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between the two countries, based on the information so far available, speaks broadly to cooperation in public infrastructure and financial and social inclusion.

We hope that in its actual implementation this MOU carries a much broader interpretation, to include its application in education, especially in the area of STEM.

India is a good case study, we believe, not only in education generally, but of the possibilities in STEM.

Up to the start of the 1990s, adult literacy was below 50 per cent. Now, over eight in 10 Indians are literate. More critically, the literacy rate among young people in the 15 to 24 age group is over 90 per cent. The vast majority of the people in the illiterate or low literacy pool are over 50.

HIGHLY SOUGHT AFTER

Further, while the tertiary enrolment rate at around 28 per cent is in a similar range to Jamaica’s, India is churning out a large number of graduates in STEM and has gained a reputation as an exporter of science and technology talent. Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Science, Education and Research (IISER) are highly sought after.

This movement of skills abroad hasn’t slowed India’s growth, in part, perhaps, because of the sheer numbers. There is now a sufficiently large engine of educated and skilled people to drag the rest of caboose forward.

Indeed, an estimated 40 million Indians were enrolled in higher level (university) education in 2020. That figure is expected to be 53 million in 2025 and projected to rise to 70 million in 2030. Five years later, in 2035, it is expected to be over 92 million.

This growth in literacy and higher level education didn’t just happen. It is the result of concentrated policy efforts over the last four decades to improve access to, and the quality of, education, including, especially in their formative years, teaching children in their mother tongue – of which several are recognised. English, an important language of business and global engagement, is taught in a structured way as a second language.

Further, government programmes to advance STEM education have support from the private sector. Many businesses have their own STEM training initiatives.

It might be useful that as she works to fix Jamaica’s education system at its base, the education minister, Fayval Williams, has a look at the Indian project.