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