India: The perfect partner

India: The perfect partner
6th Jan. 2007
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2007/01/06/india-perfect-partner.html

I refer to the Indian Ambassador's enlightening comments ( The Jakarta Post, Dec. 11) in which she advocated a strategic partnership between Indonesia and India.
I have been a staunch advocate of meaningful cooperation between Indonesia and India in my previous letters to the Post. There are many positive reasons to consider this idea seriously. Both countries are genuine democracies and genuinely secular states. And while it is a genuine (and occasionally chaotic) democracy, India's economy is galloping at a growth of about 8 percent.
I think the time has come for the Indonesian leadership to take a fresh look at India as a strategic partner. Apart from pushing for increased trade, Indonesia should learn how India made good with what it had. In the absence of adequate foreign exchange reserves, mainly due to India's non-aligned foreign policy, Indians had to find ways to keep their country and industry going without imports. Each company in India had an omnipresent ""import substitution cell"". Indonesia should learn from the hardships and scarcities India struggled through before it launched itself as an industrial power.
India has been highly successful in providing free or low cost education to its masses. Indonesia can learn a lot from India about these types of mass-schooling projects, since education in Indonesia is very expensive for the average wage earner. India could be a good partner in the educational field thanks to its huge pool of trained teachers.
Indonesia could use medical professionals from India, whose dedication to their work and patients is world-renowned. Multi-lingual by necessity, Indians seem to be born with a special ""language chip"" in their genes, and can learn Bahasa Indonesia in about six months.
Apart from high-tech areas like information technology and space, Indonesia could collaborate with the Indian pharmaceutical industry to produce high quality, affordable medicines. Alternatively, Indonesia could import these medicines from India at 25 percent of the prevailing prices here.
India is probably the only country in the world which voted 100 percent electronically in 2004. The results were out in a few hours. This is another potential area of collaboration.
With the keenness of India's new ambassador to forge a strategic partnership, things should move quickly in that direction.
K. B. KALE, Jakarta