For all its problems, India is still an attractive place for Canadians to do business

MUMBAI, India — Playboy is opening a club by the beach next month in the predominately Christian Indian state of Goa. This development shows how much India has changed. And how much it hasn’t.

The first of what may be many Playboy clubs in India will emphasize luxury and glamour rather than sexuality, according to a spate of Indian and international news reports. The bunnies, who elsewhere usually have rabbit ears, cotton tails and skimpy costumes, are to dressed modestly in Goa, whatever that means. The state’s tourism ministry is said to be insisting on it.

Bollywood has spent years figuring how far it dares to go in depicting onscreen romances, with new frontiers regarding intimacy being slowly crossed over time. Playboy has been trying to make the same calculations.

But in many ways India remains a deeply conservative country despite the glitz and razzle dazzle of Mumbai and more recently of Delhi and high-tech and innovation hotbeds such as Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune.

An Indian woman is to appear for first time on the cover of Playboy magazine’s flagship US edition and in a pictorial on its inside pages. However, there are no reports yet that any of the same photographs will be published here.Figuring out how to respond to the dizzying changes now sweeping India, without offending local customs and traditions is a complicated thing for Indians, let alone for foreigners intent on capturing a share of India’s $2 trillion a year economy. It is a challenge that Indian hands from Canada repeatedly emphasized to me during interviews in advance of a four city, six day tour that Prime Minister Stephen Harper begins on Sunday.

There are other, perhaps bigger challenges for Canadians than adapting to India’s shifting cultural mores. India was ranked 95th in the world in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index last year.

The press, which is remarkably free and avidly read, carries wild, often accurate stories about corrupt politicians, policemen on the take and venal bureaucrats who dole out money for state-funded social programs or permissions regarding real estate deals and government contracts. Among those whose wealth has been intensely questioned by the media is India’s first family of politics, the Gandhis.

The government’s ominously named Central Vigilance Commission called on Saturday for the establishment of an association of Indian anti-corruption agencies to co-ordinate efforts to tackle graft, according to the Hindustan Times. By any measure, the investigators will not want for work.One of the main reasons that corruption has flourished is because the famously huge bureaucracy that the British bestowed on India is maddeningly complex and notoriously slow. Filling out paper work properly and getting the right approvals for many different departments often take years. As a consequence, generous backhanders are often the only way to get things done in a hurry.

India’s woeful infrastructure remains another serious hindrance. Although China has had some serious safety issues because it has developed roads, bridges and trains so rapidly, it remains far ahead of India in developing the networks over which its great economy moves. Great gains in India have been made in building new airports and hotels as well as highways around and between a few major cities in India, but many important routes are not yet even works in progress. Nor does India’s heavily over-burdened rail system have any high speed trains. Tellingly, an almost new 22 kilometre rail link from Delhi to Indira Gandhi Airport has been closed since July because of “technical problems” that triggered safety concerns.

Worst of all, India’s electrical grid is notoriously unreliable mostly because of supply problems with the coal that fuels the mostly thermal power plants. The world’s biggest blackout left 300 million Indians without power four months ago. Almost every day parts of the country have such outages for hours at a time.

The problems with roads, trains and electricity explain why India loses about one-third of all the food it produces to spoilage.All that bad news must be a caution to the Canadian businessmen flying to India with Prime Minister Harper. But it should not be a red light for them or any other Canadians doing business here.

The upside for Canadian businesses and for Canada is still obvious. India has 1.2 billion people and a rapidly growing middle class that is already thought to number about 50 million people. Although growth in India has slipped a little in recent months as the global economy slows down, the country’s GDP is still expected to rise by about six per cent a year for the foreseeable future. That far outpaces Canada’s predicted annual growth of about two per cent.

Some of India’s weaknesses play directly to Canada’s strengths. Canada is a world leader in food refrigeration and logistics, rail carriage and system design and knowledge-driven clean technologies.

Most tellingly, India has become a voracious consumer of oil and gas and will need a lot more of it in the near future. Like many other countries that are heavily dependent on supplies from the Middle East, India is urgently seeking energy security by diversifying where it gets its of dollars of fuel. Again, Canada has a lot of what India needs tens of billions of dollars of.

Canadians must be honest, prudent and wary of potential pitfalls. Nevertheless, India, like China, with all its pressures and uncertainties, is far too big an opportunity to be missed.

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