Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures—and Yours

Chapter Nine

Village Engineering and Reengineering

In Search of Rural Fortunes

Paramount in Westerners’ thoughts of China and India are images of desperate poverty: malnourished children trudging barefoot down a dusty road, emaciated cows in a dry river bed, ragged peasants toiling in a rice field. In India as many as 290 million people live in grinding poverty, a number that rises to 390 million if poverty is measured by the international standard of those existing on less than $1 a day.¹ The situation is a bit better in China. In 2001 the World Bank estimated that 400 million Chinese had been lifted out of poverty over the prior two decades. By then China had also met the foremost of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals—to reduce ...