Worswick -
Thank you for a lucid example of Indian business dealings. I've spent only 1 year there, and could never have stuck it out long enough to finish the story as you have.
Your story should be published. It would have helped me.
BTW, I recently spent a year in Zimbabwe - can't say things are all that different. I tried to establish a buy-out/employee ownership (buying white-owned businesses at market, increasing profitability and selling over time to employee fund) fund there, but the government didn't go for it. They said yes/yes, but when it came down to actually acquiring a company, they said no (without, of course, actually saying it).
Some of this is due to suspicion of the powerful foreigners, which Americans are. We Americans don't know what it's like to be vulnerable and to having been exploited, nor how we would react in that position. I can't blame them, but it is counter-productive. Maybe not, it's condescending for me to judge - I have not lived their lives.
I got out. They'll just have to find their own way, whatever that may be. I've come to oppose all governmental foreign aid, which tends inevitably to interference by the giver and corruption by the givee. Aid is not free-market, particularly USAID.
Just my opinion. peter michaelson |
