Résumé en français : économie de service dépendante de la sous-traitance occidentale, exode rural, baisse de la production agricole et inflation : l'Inde est face à de grands défis.

India is an overloaded dinner plate sitting halfway off the table—overfull, one shake away from tumbling to the floor in a heap of disaster. To wit…

India is a country of incredible growth—a population that has doubled in the last few decades, to more than 1.2 billion people. Compared to Europe, India has 60% more people, but covers only 32% of Europe’s landmass…and their economy is one of the fastest growing in the world.

America and Europe rely on India for call centers, technology support, tourism, and other low- or medium-skilled jobs that can be easily outsourced. All in, “service” makes up 54% of their gross domestic product (GDP).

Agriculture, which produces the food to feed their teeming masses, by comparison makes up only 28% of GDP—just under half of the money generated by service, which produces nothing but money and the kind of inflation currently devaluing the rupee at an alarming rate…and you can’t eat money.

Half of Indian children are underweight, most children under 3 are malnourished, and 35.2% of the country is illiterate; women fare the worst with barely more than half being able to read. Fawned over in public, as is the custom, millions of Indian women are still seen as baby machines and domestic servants in the home.

Tasked with the low-profit work of feeding the country, the rural population is making quick and easy money selling agricultural land to developers around Delhi, Bangalore, and other major cities—India has more than 35 cities with over a million residents.

Sometimes they reinvest that money in more land, farther out, and continue farming…but always, that money brings home a television. And that’s where India’s other big problem really gets going: that television shows the uneducated masses just how far they’ve fallen behind the televised ideal of India. There is still a restricting, demeaning caste system in India.

Since Ghandi, there has been a somewhat popular, sort of successful drive to abandon the caste system…but the old-mindset Indians keep it alive and well across the subcontinent, and western-style consumerism with new, cheap mass communication fosters a new era of jealousy and envy that reinforces class distinctions.

There are more than 160 million “untouchables” in India, those members of the absolute bottom rung of the social ladder. Locked away from any opportunities created by the new economy, they—and other low-caste people—are actively excluded from sharing in India’s future…while their numbers increase.

The average Indian is 25 years old, and they’ve been raised to shun the countryside and physical labor in favor of those service jobs in the cities. That huge number of twenty-somethings is creating the next population boom, carrying forth the old agrarian values of large families as a sign of virility, affluence, and social esteem… The next population boom won’t have cities to run to—they’ll already be there, relying ever more on food produced in the areas they’ve abandoned.

The cities—that’s where the schools are opening; that’s where the overtaxed infrastructure is developed (rather than in the countryside, which is largely left to rot and collapse), and where the future is planned…but the countryside is tasked now more than ever with feeding the doubling hordes. India, full of fields and blessed with year-round growing seasons, already imports $34.4 million of cereals—wheat, barley, and the like—every year. In Indian rupees, for dirt-cheap grains, that’s a staggering amount of reliance on foreign supplies. And it won’t get any better at this rate.

The West pours money into India—into private businesses. And as fast as it is paid to Indian workers, it’s sucked out to the West through sales of cell phones, Western conveniences and fashions, and other consumer goods. What formerly was a self-sufficient country is abandoning its self-sustenance, doubling its population, and driving up its inflation, all by leaning heavily on service jobs that don’t create anything tangible for their country, and can disappear just as quickly as Indonesia or Thailand can provide the same for less money.

When that happens—and it will—India will have over-packed cities full of young families conditioned for office work and the luxuries that come with it, inflation that didn’t seem outrageous before the money stopped flowing in, domestic food production far behind their needs…and no more of the outsourced jobs they’re hinging their future on.

Then the precarious dinner plate will flip high into the air and land in that heap of disaster I promise.