New Delhi, February 10 Twenty two companies, a 300-member strong contingent, participating in more than 200 meetings and speaking at 60 session, in a $4 million marketing programme that involved over two years of planning — the ‘‘India Everywhere’’ campaign at the World Economic Forum at Davos certainly caught the eye of global political and business leaders. But Wharton University professors who were at Davos, though impressed by the campaign, are saying, ‘‘Unless India now walks the talk on infrastructure improvements and frees up policy and procedural bottlenecks, it’s credibility could be at risk’’.

At the Davos summit, Industry and Commerce Minister Kamal Nath had said, ‘‘In tourism, it’s incredible India... but in business, it’s credible’’. But the grey cells at Wharton are skeptical.

Stephen Kobrin, a management professor at Wharton, says people looking at India have concerns about ‘‘a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of controls, a lot of restraints, a lot of difficulty in establishing an enterprise and barriers in the way of entrepreneurship’’.

Echoing what several participants at the summit articulated, Ravi Aron, an operations and information management professor at Wharton, faulted India’s privatisation moves. ‘‘Any move to privatise meets with fierce resistance from organised labour, and it is by no means clear that the government has either the political will or the wherewithal to do the right thing economically,’’ he said.

Kobrin debunks the usual Indian argument in an India-China debate that India is a democracy, while China is not. ‘‘That argument is used too often as an excuse for a lack of progress. A lot of problems that India is experiencing are not because it is a democracy, but are leftovers from the British Raj and the socialist system early on. They don’t have as much to do with democracy as the nature of governance in India, he believes. “Just simply adopting laissez faire free market economic policies, deregulating and privatizing are probably not going to work either,’’ Kobrin adds. ‘‘They (India) have a very difficult task treading between deregulation and privatisation on the one hand, and protecting the social interests of a large part of the population on the other’’.

Aron recalls a delegate telling him: ‘‘The real contest is not between India and China. It is between India and India. One India exports $14 billion worth of software and services, runs multinationals and provides the offshore brains...the other India is unable to escape material privation and disenfranchisement, and elects representatives who are captives of vested interests and perpetrate the politics of poverty’’.