This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 20th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

India is among the fastest growing economies in the world, but a hyper-regulated economy,

illiteracy, and insecure property rights continue to hold back India's poor rural

populations.

Parth Shaw, president of the Center for Civil Society in India, believes the same liberalization

granted to the high-tech Indian economy, should also come to India's rural areas.

Shaw visited the Cato Institute earlier this month.

I saw an ad on YouTube produced by the India Brand Equity Foundation

and the slogan essentially that they had devised for India was fastest growing free market democracy

and they particularly focused on independent judiciary they flashed up on the screen and free press which they

flashed up on the screen as well. I just found that to be very interesting.

Yeah, I agree with you. Actually when you see the words they have used and the phrases they are using

it's quite clear whom they are targeting, whom they are comparing India with, right? So it's China. So the free markets, democracy, independent judiciary, free press,

are actually the good institutions that we have in India which largely don't exist in China and I

think that's has been a very important sort of no topic of discussion in terms of

China versus India which country is going to move forward and achieve the kind of things we want in a good society.

Actually, my concern with China is not so much in terms of economics, it's largely in terms of demographics.

China because of the one child policy that they have implemented for last two generations.

You now have a family in which the child has no brother, no sister. In the second generation the

child has no uncle, no aunt because the child's parents are also single child of the

grandparents.

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