让印度人尴尬的中国投资 India

It was one of the big ironies of Wen Jiabao’s visit to New Delhi this month: while China has encircled the Indian Ocean region with projects from Pakistan to Burma, India has struggled to spend money within its own borders. Premier Wen left Islamabad, his next stop, with a pledge to invest up to $30bn more in Pakistan by 2015, which is about as much as the entire Indian private sector spent on its own infrastructure in the year to March.

在中国总理温家宝本月访印之旅中，这可谓是最具讽刺意味的事情之一：从巴基斯坦到缅甸，中国参与的项目包围了整个印度洋地区，而印度在本国境内的投资上却捉襟见肘。在离开印度下一站——巴基斯坦时，温家宝承诺，在2015年前再向巴基斯坦投资至多300亿美元。这个数字大致相当于印度整个私人部门在截至3月份的财年、在本国基础设施上的总投资。

India’s economic momentum is impressive: over the next few years, the country’s real gross domestic product growth seems likely to move above China’s, a crossover rarely seen in the past 20 years. But it is achieving this development in spite of its infrastructure, not because of it. Road traffic is slowed by single lanes and uneven surfaces. Ships take almost 96 hours to unload and load at Indian ports, about 10 times longer than in Hong Kong. And 18 per cent of India’s urban population defecates daily in open spaces, compared with 6 per cent in China.

印度的经济势头令人瞩目：未来几年，印度实际的国内生产总值(GDP)增幅看起来有可能超过中国，这种情况在过去20年内很难见到。然而，印度的基础设施未能推动其经济发展，反而起到了拖累作用。单车道和凸凹不平的路面，让公路交通异常缓慢。轮船在印度港口装卸货物要花将近96个小时，约是香港的10倍时间。而印度18%的城市居民每天在露天场所排便，在中国这一比例仅为6%。

Unlike China, of course, India is burdened by democratic government, a respect for private land rights and a very zealous environment ministry, which means that the state cannot simply bulldoze settlements or drain wetlands to make way for power plants. Even so, the country’s plans to triple private spending on infrastructure in the 12th five-year plan to 2017 are long overdue. The infrastructure deficit is one of the main reasons China’s GDP per capita has grown at an average annual rate of 9.6 per cent since 2000, according to World Bank figures, compared with 5.5 per cent for India. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel-winning Bengali poet: “One can put in as much water as the size of the pot.”

当然，与中国不同，印度的民主政府给经济造成了负担——该国尊重土地私有权，环境部的表现也相当积极。这意味着，国家不可能去强行拆迁，或抽干湿地为发电厂让路。尽管如此，印度在截至2017年的第12个五年计划内、将基础设施建设方面的私人支出提高两倍的计划，也来的太晚了。世界银行(World Bank)的数据显示，基础设施方面的差距，是中国自2000年来人均GDP一直以9.6%的平均速度增长、而印度人均GDP增速仅为5.5%的主要原因之一。用诺贝尔奖获得者、孟加拉语诗人泰戈尔(Rabindranath Tagore)的话说：“有多大锅，盛多少水。”