How soothing to listen from the representative of World bank from Japan that Washington Consensus is dead and we are following the lessons learnt from fall of south-east Asian tigers in 1997-98, current traumatic financial crisis and not to forget the increasing debt of national governments across the globe including abrupt negative fall in trend of booming growth of developed economies !!!
Mr. Kazushige Taniguchi, Acting Special Representative for World Bank Japan Office was very confident about the role World Bank and IMF is playing in mitigating the global crisis characterised by fall in demand and likewise fall in demand. He was talking in special lecture organised by UNU here. He tried to explain what special effort bank is taking with cooperation of developiong countries to improve the infrastructure citing the example of India that how the country is reaping the fruits by concentrating on the connectivity issues.
World Bank is sponsoring one Transmission project of which development objective is to strengthen India's electricity transmission system in order to increase reliable power exchange between regions and states. The project will finance five regional transmission schemes for strengthening the transmission system and/or facilitating inter-regional power exchange for the National Grid.
The project is to be spread over various parts of the northern, western and south-west regions of the country. The project is primarily aimed at building a strong national transmission network. The five schemes include works in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.
Representative was very much taken aback by question of one delegate that what is the reason that people in developing countries are still looking at them as a mouthpiece of Washington Consensus? He said that reason behind all the Asian economies of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan which experienced growth due to high technology export led system was not policies which followed 'Washington Consensus'. He was assertive that world, in this time of financial crisis is learning from Japanese experience that how country tackled long term growth recession. This is also having one another silver line: Japan is experiencing fast decreasing population rate and at this rate it will reach half to the current figure around A.D 2100.
