Indian Ghost Towns ...

India and China look like they are on track to follow the developmental path of the US. Our manufacturing and low-end service sectors are booming - Cheap manufacturing and call centers. Eventually, this development will feed and fuel the development of higher end revenue paths - Retail, financial services etc ...

In the US, as we know, manufacturing of almost any kind has become uneconomical and there is a large-scale push to move manufacturing overseas. This was not true 50 years ago -

Companies like US Steel, General Motors and Ford were huge producers on the US mainland - There were millions of people employed in this sector and there were large cities built around these plants - Steel in Pennsylvania, Auto in Michigan and Textiles in North Carolina.

Of course, most of these erstwhile manufacturing centers are dead now - And on the way to becoming "ghost towns". Flint, Michigan being one such town that comes to my mind.

If India and China follow the same developmental path as the US, will we have our own ghost towns ? Will Jamshedpur, the nerve centre of Tata Iron and Steel one day prove uneconomical to run, with rising Indian wages leading a shifting of production to Eritrea ?