The Indian PM Dr.Manmohan Singh was on a three day official (April 23- 25) visit to Germany recently. There weren’t any hi-fi co-operation agreements signed between the two countries during the visit. The visit also did not have any outstanding media coverage and any visibility given to the visit was because of the Hannover Trade Fair where India was a partner country. The Indian PM held talks with the first woman chancellor from the erstwhile East Germany Angela Merkel, and met the German President, previous Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and other personalities mostly as a courtesy call. India had some good visibility when Germany and India was famously working together when India and Germany together with Brazil and Japan were pitching for a permanent seat in the proposed expansion of UN Security Council. Apart from that, the doubling of the bilateral trade between Germany and India well before 2010, as agreed by the then Chancellor Schroeder’s last visit to India was a highlight. As the visit had come to an end without much usefulness, what can we learn from this visit for our common good?
India an emerging knowledge based economy and Germany too, mostly a knowledge based economy with very strong sectors like Automation, Automobiles, Bioinformatics and even IT and telecommunications gives one the impression that these countries could be an ideal knowledge based partner countries. India with its growing automobile market and growing base of auto parts manufacturing, and Germany with its very famous companies like Daimler Chrysler (Mercedes), BMW, Volkswagen to name a few can realize huge value working together. Germany could very well leverage India’s growing strength in IT and take advantage of the low cost high talented human resource available in India. Despite this high potential between the two countries its easy to wonder, why aren’t they working together as they should be. There are sporadically some Indo-German business development meetings organized by Indians without any active support from the Indian government and hence lack the leverage.
The media too is largely reflecting the mood of the common men here in Germany. Most Germans doesn’t know anything about India and some who do, believe India is just another poor country. Though this is changing by many Indian students taking up work after studies in Germany, it’s still fair to say not enough is being done. The blame for this largely lies on the Indians, who should take the initial steps to reach out to Europe’s biggest economy and world’s largest exporter. Germans are very famous travellers and India is doing a poor job in even attracting the tourists who have mostly visited Srilanka and Thailand. When Srilanka, which the world knows mainly because of its in-country fighting can attract tourists, why not India, a largely peaceful country with so rich a history and culture. Even the Indian consulate in Frankfurt sports portraits of past presidents and Indians in the villages without highlighting any of India’s recent achievements and attractions. Also, the growing presence of Indian student community in Germany largely doesn’t speak very good German and take admission in English taught courses. Although this opens up a cost-effective opportunity for Indian students, it doesn’t help much in, they being India’s real ambassadors to Germany as it’s with the US, where most students later march on to achieve higher goals thereby serving as the true ambassadors of India. The lack of local language knowledge tends most Indians to be reserved within their community and hence gives a very little understanding about Germany and the German ways. This is in quite contrary to the fact that most Chinese students who are comfortably a notch above the Indian student community in terms of numbers, largely takes up German taught courses and 99 out of 100 have a communicable German knowledge. This obviously has its effects with more Chinese restaurants and more knowledge about China among Germans.
Although no one disagrees on the fact that German is not an easy language to learn, the Indian state could still play a huge role by actively encouraging Indians to learn other foreign languages like German, French and Spanish, which would open up huge opportunities for India and reduce our dependency on the American market. Learning a language is like learning another culture and the mere learning of these languages gives an unique understanding of their respective markets, which otherwise isn’t possible. Indian state should encourage institutions starting at nursery school level to introduce foreign languages in addition to English.
India also could do a lot better by running their own advertisement campaigns in local German television channels and newspapers. A cent well spent would have very well returns in Euros, in a long term. So, the two main immediate steps that the Indian state should take are, one, Encourage Indians to learn at least one European language in addition to English and two, increase India’s visibility in non-English speaking bigger markets like Germany, France et al.
Posted byPraveen J
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u're rite. i second ur thought
Good analysis.