NEW DELHI: India is teaching the world a crucial lesson about division of labour - where data from the West is crunched and processed in the East through outsourcing - and that is changing the world, says noted economist Jeffery Sachs.
"Who would have guessed 25 years ago that impoverished India would burst upon the world economy in the 1990s through hi-tech information services? Nobody... I saw first hand, repeatedly, how India's ability to take advantage of the new IT possibilities resulted from its longstanding investments in higher education," Sachs writes in his new book, "The End of Poverty".
"India is ... teaching the world a lot about the richness of the international division of labour, and how it changes in response to technological possibilities," Sachs writes in the book published by Penguin.
In it, Sachs charts out the route world governments, especially rich ones, must take to end extreme poverty by 2025.
With erudition and hard-hitting analysis, Sachs shows how woes like strife and terrorism will continue to fester as long as millions struggle for access to food, clothing and shelter.
"Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive," writes Sachs in the 368-page book.
"Every morning our papers would report, 'More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty'. They die namelessly, without public comment. Sadly, such stories rarely get written.
"The $450 billion that the US will spend this year on the military will never buy peace if it continues to spend around one-thirtieth of that, just $15 billion, to address the plight of the world's poorest of the poor, whose societies are destabilised by extreme poverty and thereby become havens of unrest, violence and even global terrorism."
Sachs, one of the world's most powerful preachers against poverty and one who has worked in around 100 countries, spans his view from an AIDS epidemic in Malawi to clothing sweat shops in Bangladesh to the checks and balances of the new Russia and the rapid fire growth in China.
"Extreme poverty can be ended not in the time of our grandchildren but in our time," declares Sachs, director of the Earth Insbreastute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
To do that, argues Sachs, hailed by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 Most Influential People, rich countries like the US and those in Europe, the haves as it were, must do more to help the have-nots.
A case in point is Africa.
Quoting former US Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill, Sachs shows how the rich develop myths about the poor. "We have spent trillions of dollars on these problems (poverty, AIDS, etc., in Africa) and we have damn near nothing to show for it," O'Neill is quoted as saying.
Sachs tears apart that theory in the very next paragraph: "Contrary to popular perception, the amount of aid per African per year is really very small, just $30 per sub-Saharan African in 2002 from the entire world.
"Of that modest amount, almost $5 was actually for consultants from the donor countries, more than $3 was for food aid and other emergency aid, another $4 went to servicing Africa's debts, and $5 was for debt relief operations. The rest, $12, went to Africa."
It is because of insights into the way governments handle poverty that Sachs is revered by none other than rock band U2's singer Bono, among many others.
In the foreword to the book, Bono writes: "Let me introduce myself. My name is Bono and I am the rock star student. The man with me is Jeffery D. Sachs, the great economist, and for a few years now my professor. In time, his autograph will be worth a lot more than mine."
