South Asia Investor Review

"Indians live like cockroaches and die like cockroaches", argued Jayant Bhandari in an  X post  in April this year. "They vote for bottom of the barrel cockroaches as rulers, who rightly treat them as cockroaches", he added, faulting the people of India for this state of affairs. More recently, Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant said during a hearing that certain unemployed youth were "like cockroaches" who enter professions with fake degrees or become social media and RTI activists attacking the system.  Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian graduate of the public relations program at Boston University, picked up on it. He posted on X on May 16: “What if all cockroaches came together?” Dipke created a political party, named it Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a parody of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and established a  website  that quickly gained tens of millions of followers, according to the  New York Times .  Cockroach Janata Part...

The United States is the biggest export market for India. Among its top 5 trading partners, the US is also the only country with which India runs a trade surplus. This surplus is now at risk with the 50% tariff recently imposed by President Donald Trump on imports from India. Can Prime Minister Narendra make up for it by cozying up to China and Russia ? Recent trade data shows he can't.  While India has enjoyed a significant surplus in trade with the US,  the South Asian nation has been running large trade deficits with China and Russia. Last year, for example, India had a $100 billion trade deficit with China and a $62 billion deficit with Russia. On the other hand, India ran over a $40 billion trade surplus with the US. Given these figures, it's hard to understand what India hopes to achieve by getting closer to Beijing and Moscow. The fact is that the US is the world's biggest economy that offers the largest and most profitable export market for most countries. Loss of t...

Pakistan has outranked India yet again on the  World Happiness Index , making Indians very very unhappy. Indian media commentators' strong negative emotional reaction to their nation's poor ranking  betrays how unhappy they are even as they insist they are happier than their neighbors. Coming from the privileged upper castes, these commentators call the report " absurd ", citing India's higher per capita incomes and its space program. They seem detached from the real conditions in which the vast majority of Indians find themselves. They fail to acknowledge the high levels of  inequality  and  unemployment  prevalent in their country. A  CNBC  report last year found that one billion Indians have a per capita income of just $1,000 a year, lower than that of sub-Saharan Africans. 92.5% of Indians live in conditions similar to or worse than those experienced by the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. No wonder India ranks alongside the poorest su...

A US Air Force transport plane landed in India today with 104 illegal Indian immigrants in handcuffs and shackles, according to media reports. Speaking with reporters, a deportee said: “For 40 hours, we were handcuffed, our feet tied with chains and were not allowed to move an inch from our seats. After repeated requests, we were allowed to drag ourselves to the washroom. The crew would open the door of the lavatory and shove us in.” Illegal Indian Immigrants Deported in Handcuffs and Chains. Source: News18 The inhumane treatment meted out to citizens of  India , a US ally, has sparked a lot of anger against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. The critics are citing the example of Colombia, a small South American nation, whose president protested similar treatment of its citizens by the Trump administration. Colombian President Gustavo Petro turned back the US military planes carrying deportees and then sent his own aircraft to transport them back home in Colombia.  Ill...

Illegal immigration from India to the United States is soaring. A record 96,917 Indians were detained while attempting to enter the US illegally from October 2022 to September 2023, representing a 50% jump from the corresponding period in the prior year. Vast majority of the arrested Indians came from Prime Minister Modi's state of Gujarat while others came from the state of Punjab. There are about 725,000 undocumented Indian immigrants in the US – the third-largest population of illegal immigrants after Mexicans and El Salvadorans – according to a Pew Research Centre report.  Illegal Immigration to the US From India. Source: Strait Times The number of Indians attempting to cross into the United States illegally has accelerated in recent years on Prime Minister Modi's watch. These immigrants take the Latin American route to reach the US-Mexico border before making a run for the US. They cross the Darien Gap, a dangerous thick forest region between Colombia and Panama, taking th...

India occupies 126th position among 137 nations ranked in the  World Happiness Report 2023  released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In South Asia, Pakistan (score 4.555) ranks 108,  Sri Lanka 112, Bangladesh (4.282) 118 and India 126 (4.036). Only Taliban-ruled Afghanistan ranks worse at 137. Finland is the happiest nation in the world, followed by Denmark and Iceland in 2nd and 3rd place. Least Happy Countries in 2023. Source: Quartz Bottom Third Countries in World Happiness Rankings. Source: World Happiness Report The latest country rankings show life evaluations (answers to the Cantril ladder question) for each country, averaged over a 3 year period from 2020-2022.  The Cantril ladder asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale. The rankings are from nationally representative samples for the ...

Female labor force participation rate in India has recently fallen to just 19%, the second lowest after Afghanistan's 15% in the South Asia region. By contrast, Pakistan's  women's labor force  participation rate is 21%, Sri Lanka's 31% and Bangladesh's 35%. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's mishandling of the COVID19 pandemic has hit Indian women particularly hard, with 90% of those who lost their jobs now shut out of the workforce.  Female Labor Force Participation Rate in South Asia. Source: World Bank The precipitous loss of women workers is disastrous news for India's economy, which had started slowing before the  COVID19  pandemic, according to a  Bloomberg  report. Rosa Abraham, an economics professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, tracked more than 20,000 people as they navigated the labor market during the pandemic.. She found that after the first lockdown, women were several times more likely to lose their jobs than men and far less lik...

The World Health Organization estimates that India had 4.730 million COVID19-related  deaths in 2020-21, nearly a third of 15 million global excess deaths attributed to the pandemic. India is followed by Russia with 1.073 million deaths and Indonesia with 1.03 million deaths. The United States with 933,795 deaths and Brazil with 681,219 deaths round out the top 5 countries that suffered the heaviest losses of life believed to be related to the pandemic. Mexico (625,923 deaths), Peru (289,654 deaths), Turkey (264,279 deaths) Egypt (251,635 deaths) and South Africa (238,893 deaths) are ranked number 6 through 10 in the world for excess deaths in 2020-21 period. Although Pakistan too had 8 times the official figure, it still does not figure in WHO's top 10 list for total number of COVID deaths.  Total Excess Deaths Recorded During the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020-21. Source: WHO Excess deaths measure how many more people died than expected compared with previous years. Although it i...