RI and India can collaborate

RI and India can collaborate

A recent letter by Kamath has triggered this response. I have
been championing the idea of extensive Indonesia-India co-
operation through my previous letters in The Jakarta Post. India
and Indonesia are democracies and secular states. All Indians are
proud that with 80 percent Hindu population India has a most
admired Muslim, Abdul Kalam, as its President and a Sikh, Man
Mohan Singh, as its Prime Minister.

I think the time has come for the Indonesian leadership to
take a fresh look at India not as a "developing" country but as a
"developed" country.

India today launches satellites, its INSAT is among the
world's largest domestic satellite communication systems, has
ability to build supercomputers and has a new supercomputer
capable of one trillion processes per second. Only four other
nations have this capability.

Since independence, India has laid great stress in the field
of education and has the second largest pool of scientists and
engineers in the world after the U.S. thanks to its universities,
research institutions and higher-education institutes turning out
200,000 engineering graduates and another 300,000 technically
trained graduates every year. I understand that 36 percent of
NASA scientists in U.S. are India-educated. India today is the
largest English-speaking nation in the world.

India can be a good partner in the educational field thanks to
its huge pool of trained teachers. Quality of education in
Indian-run international schools in Jakarta is second to none.
And perhaps because Indians are already multi-lingual in their
own country, they learn Bahasa Indonesia very fast.

Indian government has been highly successful in providing free
and/or low cost education to its masses. Indonesia can learn a
lot from India in this type of mass-schooling projects as
education in Indonesia is very expensive for an average wage
earner.

Indonesian leadership and our embassy may take note and take
necessary steps for closer collaboration between the two
countries.

K. B. KALE, Jakarta