Trip to India - Entry 24 - Last Company Visit!

Today, we visited GE Healthcare, our last company visit here in India. During the presentation, I have to admit I was shocked at what was developed here in India, both in the complexity of the item being made, and the size and breadth of the GE campus in Bangalore. The office we were in was actually incomplete, the whole campus having been conceived under Jack Welch, which gives you an idea of how long this construction of the campus project has been going.

I really enjoyed the part of the lecture where we learned that items being developed and intended for rural India - which in general has no electricity or running water - are being snapped up like hotcakes by people in rural India and around the globe, because they run either on batteries, or using no running or electricity. For example, the water purification system runs on reverse osmosis, making it the most eco-friendly product possible. I am reminded of the Lowe Lintas presentation, in which the second presenter said that India is one of the greenest countries on earth per capita almost by accident, due to how many people are simply too poor to afford pesticides, use fossil fuels, or electricity. I am interested to see in the future if India can use this opportunity to simply leap frog the developmental pattern of the West and skip traditional forms of infrastructure and energy usage altogether.

According to the CIA, Indians make, per capita, $2900/year. Divide that out, that's $7.95/day on average. As some people make quite a lot of money, that would mean that there are a lot of people making less than that. US per capita income? $46,900, or $128.50. Of course, these are straight per capita numbers, meaning that the wealthiest people in both countries skew the results, but I think that sometimes our complaints seem a lot more trivial when compared to some of the people we've seen here.

One last item of note at the GE company visit - the preemie baby warmer sold in India and other parts of the world meet US regulations, but it isn't sold in the US. Rather, a much more expensive version with lots of bells and whistles is sold in the US - at a much higher cost, of course. And we wonder why our healthcare costs so much.