Indo-UK relations

Dean Nelson in the Telegraph UK writes a poignant piece mourning the formal recognition of the passing of an era: Can Cameron reignite India's love affair with Britain?

David Cameron’s decision to take three of his four most senior Cabinet colleagues with him to New Delhi next week, along with his higher education minister, marks a historic moment in almost 400 years of British engagement with India. It gives ceremony to a state of affairs that has been the case for some time but not, until now, acknowledged: we need India more than it needs us.

Welcome to a brave new world, Dean ol' chap. Brave Old world actually. Sri Nandan Nilekani aptly says it in hos book Imagining India that India's rise is merely a recovery to a very stable equilibrium that existed for centuries before the Industrial revolution - India and China dominating world GDP, trade, tech, ideas and culture.

For those of you whose most recent glimpse of India was the brutal poverty shown in Slumdog Millionaire, or believed you had just elected a government committed to clamping down on south Asian immigration, think again and steel yourselves: Mr Cameron’s visit with the largest senior Cabinet delegation in recent memory heralds the arrival of an Indian century.

Indian century? Asian century will do, IMHO. Better not to draw premature attention. Am not sure India's ready for showtime yet.

His aim is not just to win contracts for British firms, but to establish a strategic relationship in which our scientists, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs will work with their Indian counterparts and combine British innovation and Indian costs to sell to the rest of the world.

It is a challenge to the more familiar view of India, as home to 456 million people living in poverty – just under half its population – and one third of the world’s poor. This grim statistic remains accurate but not as urgent as other developments: India is the world’s second fastest-growing economy. It is expected to overtake China as the fastest-growing within 40 years, and also replace it as the world’s greatest population with more than two billion people by 2050. As its population rises, so too will its number of highly educated graduates and skilled engineers – already qualifying at the rate of 160,000 per year.

The pressing need to “partner” India was explained to me two years ago by a professor heading a series of collaborations between British and Indian university research departments and technology companies. They were hoping to develop revolutionary communications systems which could run on minimal electricity and store sensitive data securely in disaster-proof circumstances. “It is better to help them develop now than be overtaken and alone later,” he said.

Good good good. Jai ho.