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| | TheStar.com - Business - India's rough passage to prosperity |
 | | There is the India that is casting off decades of post-independence socialism and a stubborn inferiority complex, now challenging China and Japan for global economic leadership by the mid-century, and making its mark with extraordinary GDP growth and daring foreign takeovers ranging from the world's biggest steel makers to the five-star Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. |
 | | But the India of stereotype remains, the one described by Toronto Star foreign correspondent Gordon Sinclair in the 1940s of widespread destitution, and not only in the nation's 680,000 rural villages, where many homes are made with buffalo dung, tuberculosis is widespread, and the literacy rate is estimated at 33 per cent. |
 | | And abroad, India is promoting itself as a low-cost source of highly skilled labour, dispatching industrial-development ambassadors to sell the "New India" to bankers in Frankfurt, potential joint-venture corporate partners in London, and merger and acquisitions dealmakers in New York. |
| www.thestar.com /Business/article/185412 (1320 words) |
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