Indian Ambassador Interview
This morning I conducted my very last interview for this January issue with Skand Tayal, Ambassador of India. The Korea IT Times tries to interview each ambassador resident in Seoul whenever it becomes time for their national holiday. Since India’s Republic Day is coming up on January 26th, we made an appointment with him to ask a little about it.
You can see the main bulk of the interview in this month’s issue, but the focus of the conversation drifted away from IT related things near the end of the interview, which was still interesting, of course. Perhaps even more so. We talked for a bit about the global financial crisis and what its impact will likely be in 2009. The ambassador brought up something that I had not yet considered or read about, which is that even though the financial crisis has made a lot of jobs close and a lot of people lose investments, stocks, and homes, the agricultural output for 2008 was higher than normal. He said in India it was about 4% greater than the previous year. So while the financial crisis does have some problems, at least the world still has more food to eat than it did in previous years.
He also pointed out that India is relatively immune to the financial crisis, since it is pretty much a closed financial system. In contrast to Korea, most of India’s production goes into the domestic market, and foreign investment is only 4% of total investment in the country. This means that despite the problems the outside world is going through, India’s economy is almost the same as always. He says that the country expects 7% growth next year, when most of the world is worried about a recession.
Look in this month’s issue of the print magazine for the full country report about India with more detail about that sort of financial thing. Ambassador Tayal armed me well with a hefty amount of figures and statistics.
