By Ruma Dubey

If you are not doing too well, that’s not good but it is still acceptable. But if your neighbor is doing better than you then the pain becomes unbearable, unacceptable.

This is the pain which India is undergoing today. S&P lowered India’s outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’ yesterday and it is more of a forewarning that tougher downgrades will follow if the Govt does not get the act together. We all are miffed at it, raved and ranted against S&P and the Govt. It was painful but an acceptable situation. But today, the pain has exacerbated as Moody’s has confirmed that China's sovereign rating outlook remains positive, supported by favourable medium-term growth prospects and strong government debt dynamics. And if this was not painful enough, Apple Inc, the iconic company and brand which refuses to set foot in India, is gung-ho about China. Apple posted a set of blockbuster numbers for its first half ended 31st March 2012, showing a growth of 26% in its revenue at $39.2 billion of which $12.4 billion came in from China alone. This is huge when compared to the revenue of $13.3 billion it had from Chinese sales for the year ended 31st Dec 2011. So China makes the Apple products and also snaps it all up equally fast.

On the other hand, India currently looks like a child who has been given detention, asked to stand at the corner of the room, facing the wall. The rating agencies are not happy and forget setting shop for outsourcing from India; Apple does not even want to set up retail shops in India. The number of retail outlets selling Apple gadgets is about 11,000, a number expected to double within two years. Apple plans to increase its investment in China and even localize its products for the Chinese.

So where did India lose out in this race? Why does Apple make a sour face like having sunk it’s teeth into a rancid orange when thinking of India? There are many who question the veracity of the Chinese economic data, just as questions are today raised about India’s data too. With so much control over all information, doubts are raised time and again about the information itself being meted out in China. Transparency is a bad word in China and human resource simply means hands which produce goods. Despite all this, China continues to draw one and all like a magnet. Every company worth its name in salt has set up shop in China or has outsourced manufacturing to China. Every single piece of data which comes out is dissected and debated and usually, makes it to the front page of every business newspaper around the world.  Is it the draw of its US$3.3 trillion forex reserve, the sheer panache with which it delivered the Beijing Olympics or its infrastructure wonders like Three Gorges Dam, the world's highest railway line to Lhasa, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail link; the list is endless. Did you know that five of the world’s top 10 contractors, in terms of revenue, are now Chinese?

Like mountaineers vying to climb the Everest, with unpredictability threatening at every step despite years of experience, China too is an enigma. No one, not even the best brains at Goldman or Moody’s or GE or Apple, are able to lay a finger on the exact working of its development model. Forming alliances with some of the most dangerous and authoritarian countries in the world, while signing the dotted lines with developed countries, one cannot really fathom what really lies beneath. Yet China is the second largest economy in the world.

Seen the disaster movie ‘2012’ where the world comes to an end? That movie to a large extent depicts the global scenario – it was an Indian scientist at NASA who predicts the end of the world but it is China which is assigned the task by USA to build a huge structure which will withstand the disaster and thus save a few human beings after the entire earth is destroyed.  One can shrug this off as movie fiction but it is the perception which is a learning - India can be the grey cells to the world but it will neither earn enough moolah nor will it help save the world. But it is China which the rest of the world thinks is capable enough to build infrastructure of mammoth proportions. Huge and strong enough to save the world. “Made in China” anyone?