What if an entire country had no saleable natural resources? What would they do for food? How would they power their homes, factories, office buildings and cars? How would that country create GDP, where would it find capital to keep its government and it citizens going? It happens that India faces almost that exact problem.

The Asian subcontinent is lacking in valuable goods like grains, sugar or oil. Surjit Bhalla, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics notes that commodities such as oil, minerals, and agricultural raw materials added up to 8 percent of India’s manufactured exports. That equals less than one percent of the nation’s GDP, in 2000. Indians, therefore, have had to come up with alternative jobs and ways of creating capital. What they have done is something extraordinary.

Indians have turned to entrepreneurship. They use their minds and non-natural resources in entrepreneurial endeavors to keep themselves and their country on its feet. Fields like technology, the sciences, and the arts have exploded in India because jobs in those areas require more ingenuity than natural goods. When discussing the way the citizens of India have used what resources they do have to create what they need, Prajakt Raut, a cofounder of Indus Medinet and affiliate of the Indus Entrepreneurs, says “There is an inverse relationship between the presence of natural resources and entrepreneurialism. It is only when entrepreneurs are hungry that they innovate.” Without raw materials given to them by the earth, Indians have come up with creative and innovative ways of doing business, earning capital and keeping their country going.

The United States and many first world nations have always leaned on their natural resources to keep up a standard of living for their citizens. Just imagine, though, for a second, that all of those countries ran out of those valuable resources; what would they do? Perhaps we should all take a page from India’s book and learn to make what we need without assuming something is going to be given to us to make it. Just for one day try to live your life with the least amount of natural resources possible. It’ll be hard but it’ll make your mind hungry to innovate and find new and creative ways of doing things.

Post reproduced from pluGGd.in - written by Sanjay Anandaram…

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games would have just begun by the time this article appears in public. 10,500 athletes will be participating in 28 sports and 302 events for personal and national glory.

The Indian contingent consists of only 57 athletes representing the dreams of a country with over a billion people! With the Indian hockey team failing to qualify for the Olympics for the first time, the Indian contingent will compete in shooting, track and field, boxing, archery, tennis, wrestling, rowing, table tennis and badminton. For the first time, interestingly enough, India’s medal hopes rest not on a team sport like hockey but individual sports like shooting and boxing. Our national game has been reduced to becoming an inconsequential non-entity on the world stage. (more…)