India is a fascinating country with the highest diversity in ethnicity, religious views, lifestyles and economic class. India can be called the spice of the world. America on the other hand is the superpower that is reining the world largely in economical, political areas. Since the recent recession that has badly hit the United States, the world is looking towards Asia as the upcoming greener pastures.   Today the US has some of the best Indian brains serving for it. Indian Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen, an economist and Professor of Economics at Harvard University is one of them.

Mint Blog has chosen to compare   the two on a huge range of dimensions that can be broadly classified into the economic, people, environment, military, and offbeat categories. Here I shall discuss the economic comparisons. They are all visuals.  For the rest, you can always visit the rest here.  An amusing observation is that they haven’t put any exact number on the visuals for which they direct you to the CIA World FactBook and Nationmaster.com.  As they have some fun statistics also they say they haven’t included the exact numbers in their graphs. But for the sake of comparison the graphs are just correct. I agree with Mint Blog when they say that though America and India are vastly different in their culture, history, geography and religious makeup, they maintain close relationships. You know why? Both the Americans and Indians are a flexible lot, pro-progressive and most importantly an open lot.

Here are the comparisons. Even I’m not actually digging into the actual numbers because firstly a huge amount of statistics is going to put you to sleep. Moreover, when it’s only a comparison I think the proportion matters more than the exact figures. Those of you who are enthusiastic about the actual numbers can always visit the FactBook via Mint Blog.

Now the comparisons in the economy category are as follows:

• In terms of GDP, India has about one fourth that of US.
• Surprisingly enough, the growth rate of US seems to be less than one- fourth of India.
• The Indian per capita income bar hardly rises above the baseline in comparison to the US. Naturally that is understood, the dollar value being about fifty times that of the rupee. But now the dollar value has fallen right? This area with such a vast difference hardly qualifies for any comparison. No wonder there is such a lot of brain drain from India to the US from a long time now.
• India being a primarily agriculture-based country, its progress bar towers above that of US beyond comparison .The equation being almost exactly the same as that of the per capita readings, though this time India’s the leader.  But recently in a top ten prestigious careers of America report according to BillShrink, I found agriculture being one of the most esteemed professions of the nation. I wonder why its not practiced more then?
• The labor force statistics are not quite surprising with the US having only bit more than one fourth the labor force of India. After all, India is such a highly populated country.
• The unemployment rate graphs are shocking though not surprising really if you scrutinize the issue. Till the recent recession India might have had a much higher unemployment rate than America but, now both share comparable statistics. In fact India has a lesser unemployment rate than US which is almost 80 % that of US. However the Indian population in poverty is double the percentage of American population in poverty. That’s understood! Though India’s an economically developing country its still poor in comparison to America even after the recession.
• The government revenues and expenditures of America are much higher than India.
• Total public debt of India is almost nil in comparison to that of America. It hardly rises above the base line .So you know who’s in a bad position now.
• The inflation rate of India is double that of the US.
• US has four times the stock of money than India.