somnath wrote:^^^ Well, just as a perspective, UK's debt-to-GDP ratio is about 60%..India's is about 80%+ (depending on what you include and what you dont)...
Re the bolded part, ain't that trivially true?
BTW, I'm all into perspectives only, rooted in pro-India-ness and nothing else. More perspectives the merrier. Here's an example challenging that 60% figure:
link
Let’s start first by looking back to 2008 to get an idea of where Canada, Britain and the US stood as the recession started.
How indebted were they? The US debt stood at 75% to GDP, Canada at 63% and
Britain at 47%. However, Britain’s debt of £697.5B (C$1232B) in 2008 was a steep climb since 2002, when it stood at just 30% of GDP. Its April 22, 2009 budget is forecasting that debt will rise to 75% of GDP by 2013. Not at all good.
If this isn’t bad enough, though, it gets worse.
Many analysts point out that Britain’s official government debt figures exclude certain liabilities – for example, the government’s pension commitment to its employees and to citizens, its bail out of the banks which, though the loans may be paid back, they may not, and so on.
Britain’s Centre for Policy Studies argues that the real national debt in Britain is already £1,340B (C$2,370) and now stands at 103.5% of GDP. 
But this pales into insignificance once we turn to the US. As of April 7, 2009, the total U.S. federal debt was US$11T (C$13T) – or about US$36,676 for each man, woman and child. After Obama’s budget is passed, the total debt will rise to US$15T, or 75% of estimated GDP by 2013, assuming both an economic recovery and significant growth from 2010. But, like Britain, the US also has unfunded liabilities for health care, pensions and its continued bailouts. As of the beginning of April, once these are added to accepted national debt, the total indebtedness of the US is US$53T (C$63T Canadian), or 122% of GDP – very not good. Most of the official debt is held by China and Japan.
Hence, I fully agree that "depending on what you include and what you dont", debt/GDP figs vary wildly only.
the reason why India can live with it is because of faster growth and favourable demographics, otherwise India's public debt levels are quite close to Greece!
Like shiv saar says, that's like saying 'If my aunt had a dikk, she'd be my uncle'.
And yes, liabilities are not costs - if you will, the cost of servicing the liabilities is...
Agreed. And what happens when you borrow to service your debts sir?
Poor Niall Ferguson has gone blue in the face screaming that a 100% debt/GDP is ominous because debt service costs jump to where military maintenance becomes problematic. ANyways, Ken Rogoff shows, empirically, that a 90% debt/GDP correlates strongly with slow-to-no growth scenarios only.
On household debt, UK isnt nearly as badly off as the US...bulk of the houehold debt is mortgages, which would be par for any country that has gone through the cycles - Indian households too would have fairly high debt levels as we gradate to middle income status...
We Indians are SDREs only. What better can be expected of poor turd world nations, eh?
About injustices et al, well, I posted above - the revenge is already underway in multiple ways...If every past "sinner" is to be socially shunned, countries would soon run out of interlocutors!
Oh, certainly. I am with you on that one. I continue to say that Indians must be open to doing business with the Brits as long as it is to mutual or at least our benefit. But never forget, forgive or fall for the 'we're jolly good fellas' shtick. The brits were never our friends. And their crimes against our people remain under-reported and glossed over. Only. There should be zero misplaced goodwill for Ukstan among Indians. Is that too much to ask for?
But yes, long before Jallianwala, Dadabhai Naoroji had chronicled the "Unbritish rule" of India..That is why so many of our "best" fought them in their own ways...
just 9 would be a good estimate.