Last fall, I had the privilege of visiting Ukraine when the country was holding its parliamentary elections. The colorful campaigns—and a general lack of faith among the middle-class Ukrainians I met that the process would improve their lives—offered special insight into the country.

My electoral timing is good again on my current trip to India. Karnataka, the state in which Bangalore is located, will hold elections May 10. The emphasis that India puts on education as a key to growth is evident from the campaign manifesto released by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In that document, the party pledges to establish cyber-cafes in every village. The goal is to take the IT energy evident in Bangalore to the countryside. Based on the number of billboards in rural areas advertising computer and business classes, it is clear that plugging poor—often destitute—people into IT prosperity is a priority.

The national government also is getting in on the act. Over the weekend, Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said that if the country puts as much effort into human capital development as it does into attracting investment and increasing productivity, it could add 1 percent to 2 percent to the country’s already rapid annual growth rate.

One program under way is the National Skill Development Mission, which is designed to help prepare Indian students for the job abilities they’ll need beyond what they get through classroom instruction. Chidambaram also said the country must increase the number of primary school students entering college from the current 11.6 percent to the world average of 23.2 percent, or the developed-country average of 54 percent.

In addition to this activity, the Indian Human Resource Development Ministry announced on April 20 that all central educational institutions should offer reservations for positions in upcoming courses to members of “Other Backward Classes.” This mandate is the result of an Indian Supreme Court order to increase educational opportunities for poor Indians.

Now, apply simple math to these moves and you see the talent potential in India. After visiting the country for even a day, you notice that there is no one-child policy here, as there is in China. Kids are ubiquitous. The Indian population is estimated to hit 1.2 billion by 2011.

In a country this huge, there already are big and growing middle and upper classes. From those strata, India is producing some of the world’s top engineers and scientists, many of whom graduate from U.S. colleges and universities. When lower-income Indians are given a better chance to join their ranks, there will be even more young professionals in Bangalore eager to take advantage of the country’s proliferating IT opportunities.

Almost every 20- or 30-something Indian I met during my weeklong visit to Bangalore had some kind of IT job—and so do some of the American expats I encountered. U.S. companies will continue expanding operations here. In a visit to Bangalore on April 24, Accenture CEO William Green said the company intends to increase employment in its Indian operations to 50,000 from 37,000 within a year.

These developments present an opportunity for the United States. For Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Dell and dozens of other U.S. companies, India is source of innovation and a growing market. The products and profits they generate here are good for the United States.

But the U.S. must also meet the challenge posed by India’s strong talent pool. U.S. students must be prepared not only to work harder in school but also learn how to be more creative in science, engineering and all other disciplines. It’s the best way for America to maintain its edge in global competition.

Of course, the U.S. also is in the midst of an election season. It would be refreshing to hear our candidates, from the presidential to congressional and state levels, engage in an intelligent dialogue about how the country could improve its educational and workforce development systems to help all Americans participate—and prosper—in the global economy.

Instead, we’re subject to their efforts to score political points by trashing trade liberalization and touting tax cuts. A challenge—and opportunity—of the magnitude represented by India requires a thoughtful political debate. There’s still plenty of time to have one.

At the risk of looking like a walking cliché, I am reading The World is Flat during a personal trip to India. And not just to India, but to Bangalore, the IT haven that inspired author Tom Friedman’s catchy title.

I am not an expert on India. In fact, my colleague Jeremy Smerd wrote an authoritative package of stories about people management trends in India last August. But my coverage in Washington often requires writing about globalization—and, hence, about China and India.

I decided a couple years ago that I had to get at least a glimpse of each place. I traveled to Shanghai in March 2006 and am in Bangalore now.

What I am offering is not academic analysis but my impression of India in the first days of my first trip to the country. After reading the beginning of Friedman’s book, I was expecting that Bangalore would be a mecca that rivals U.S. cities.

Maybe that’s what I’ll see later in IT office parks. But the images here that strike me are the paradoxes that infuse most developing countries. Expensive sports cars compete for the road with the teeming auto rickshaws.

I am staying in one of the “posh” sections of town with a friend. But a couple blocks over, a Louis Vuitton store is about to open on a dilapidated street.

On tours of the city, it is clear that many of the people here—perhaps a majority—live in abject poverty. Their neighborhoods aspire to step up to gritty. Your heart goes out to those who are battling such grinding poverty while making less than $2 a day.

Of course, I know that there is another large section of the town that is thriving in an IT boom. I am staying down the street from a call center. I see the workers there coming and going. Every day in the paper, there are stories about IT companies making billions of dollars and expanding their operations.

One of the primary reasons they can do this is because of a talented technology workforce. Many of the world’s best engineers and scientists come from India. Even in the first few days here, I can tell India is a society that values education.

Colleges dot the landscape. Billboards call out for people to enroll in courses. All around Bangalore, I get the feeling that education is seen as central to advancement.

Many thousands of Indian students also come to U.S. universities.

That brings me around to an issue I have covered extensively: the annual controversy over H-1B visa caps. U.S. technology companies—and firms in many other sectors—say that they are desperate for talent and can’t hire enough foreign-national workers.

U.S. computer programmers complain that H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants reduce wages and job opportunities. That could be true.

But there’s another subtle argument that employers are making: By and large, foreign-national students are more talented and numerous than their U.S. counterparts.

Leaving aside whether that quality assessment is fair, there doesn’t seem to be any excuse for U.S. workers not to compete effectively with those from India. For one thing, Americans have a tremendous head start.

In the Bangalore area, down the street from signs encouraging enrollment in local universities often is a neighborhood that illustrates the dire economic straits of most Indians.

Just look at the numbers. The literacy rate in the U.S. is 99 percent. In India, it’s 60 percent. There’s 54 percent enrollment in Indian secondary schools, compared with 94 percent in the United States.

After seeing Bangalore for a couple days, it’s clear to me that a kid from a randomly selected American family has a much better foundation for success than a child from a randomly selected Indian family.

The complex and difficult task Washington must tackle involves reforming education and workforce development policies so that more Americans take advantage of the country’s blessings to become the talent that U.S. companies crave.

Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama created a political firestorm when he waxed philosophical at a San Francisco fundraiser about the plight of the working class—a group of Americans under constant threat of job loss.

“It’s not surprising that they get a little bitter; they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” he was quoted as saying.

Leaving aside the potential offense the remarks could give to people whose faith or firearms are genuinely important to them, Obama may be on to something when he says that many American workers are bitter.

But it’s unlikely their economic fears are assuaged by what they hear from presidential candidates, including Obama, or from elected officials. Helping those who have been left behind by global economic competition and technological advancement requires a complex policy approach based on management, labor and government cooperation.

It will take the combined efforts of those three entities—along with presidential leadership—to modernize U.S. workforce training programs, streamline health care and wage assistance for displaced workers, and develop a portable benefits system so workers don’t lose their safety net when they lose their jobs.

These issues deserve a prominent place in political discourse. They’re not getting it. True, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi halted the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, a top priority for President Bush, in order to “put the leverage back into the hands of America’s working families” and force Bush to consider Democratic economic proposals.

Chief among them is an expansion of Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers who are adversely affected by trade. Another is a second economic stimulus package that focuses on an extension of unemployment benefits.

But when Pelosi and Bush tangle, they usually fight over Bush’s insistence on making his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent. Democrats say they are a sop for the wealthy.

Bush only brings up Trade Adjustment Assistance when he is looking for support for trade agreements. The administration has shown little interest in it otherwise. But Democrats tend to talk more about cushioning the hurt of unemployment than they do about how to help all workers—including those who already have jobs—improve their skills and their standard of living.

On the campaign trail, Obama has devoted at least one speech to workforce training. But the rest of the time, he stokes worker anger about tough economic times rather than outline ways to help them move their career arc higher. He’s consistently pitting workers against management.

“What we can’t do is sign trade deals that put the interests of multinational corporations ahead of the interests of our workers or our environment,” Obama said in an April 15 speech before building trade unions.

In reality, international companies depend on a strong workforce. The firms’ success is inextricably linked to their employees’ success—and for that matter, unions’ success. Despite his rhetoric about uniting management and labor, Obama rarely explores how to leverage that relationship for the good of the economy and individuals.

Sen. John McCain is not necessarily providing much hope for struggling workers either. In a major speech on economic policy April 15, he concentrated on tax breaks—an issue that won’t bring immediate comfort to those whose factory is moving to Mexico or China.

He did outline worker retraining and unemployment insurance reforms. But those policies came up in paragraphs 33 through 35 of a 43-paragraph speech. People who are worried about how to improve their skills to get a better job had to wait a while for McCain to get around to them.

Bush, Pelosi, Obama and McCain could do a better job of addressing workers’ fears.

The world has a way of intruding on Democratic presidential campaigns. Although Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have cast skeptical eyes on trade liberalization, opposing a pact with Colombia and calling for a rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement, their aides have been sending different signals.

In Obama’s case, one of his economic advisors told Canadian diplomats that his attacks on NAFTA are essentially campaign rhetoric and cooler heads will prevail on trade after the election. Clinton’s strategist was dismissed this week after it was revealed that he met with Colombia officials to talk about building support for that agreement, in his non-campaign role as head of a major public relations firm in Washington.

Despite fierce denunciations of trade on the campaign trail, we can’t be sure what kind of globalization policies Obama or Clinton would pursue in the White House.

The approach they would take on labor law is transparent. Neither they nor their aides waiver on backing the union agenda. The latest example comes from Obama.

He owes his lead in the polls and in fund-raising in large part to his soaring oratory. He says that words matter.

His language couldn’t have been clearer in an April 2 speech to the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO. He promised to change a system in Washington in which “corporate lobbyists use their clout to shape laws to their liking.”

He vowed to stand up for American workers and “play offense” for “a decent wage … retirement security … (and) universal health care.”

He also pledged to move the ball down the field for organized labor and back its top priority—legislation that would facilitate unionization.

“If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union,” he said. “It’s that simple. Let’s stand up to the business lobby that’s been getting their friends in Washington to block card check. I will make it the law of the land when I’m president of the United States of America.”

The only thing likely to stand in the way of making that campaign promise a reality is a dwindling cadre of Republican senators. The Senate GOP may barely number enough to sustain a filibuster by the time the party loses several seats in November.

The business lobby argues that the so-called card-check bill would rob workers of the right to a secret-ballot election monitored by the National Labor Relations Board. But a Democratic member of that panel says that the Republican-majority board has been too sympathetic to management during the Bush administration.

In Senate testimony last week, NLRB commissioner Wilma Liebman previewed what may be in store next year for labor law, when Democratic majorities will be stronger on Capitol Hill and a Democrat might occupy the White House.

She cited rising income inequality as a reason for Congress to consider changing the National Labor Relations Act.

“I would welcome comprehensive re-examination of a law that has not been substantially revised for more than 60 years,” she said.

Liebman may get her wish, if Obama becomes president. Some of his opponents have accused him of not outlining specific policy amid his moving oratory. When it comes to labor law, however, Obama is precise. What you hear is what you will get.

As Congress returns to Washington from a two-week spring recess, worries about the housing market—and the economy—are more abundant than cherry blossoms. Congressional attention is focused on JPMorgan Chase’s takeover of Bear Stearns.

Most of the concern centers on the $29 billion guarantee that the Federal Reserve made to JPMorgan to cover what could be enormous amounts of bad debt remaining in Bear’s burning embers.

Another dimension of the deal that is drawing attention is the level of pay that Bear executives received even as their firm collapsed.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has indicated that he will explore whether shareholders can reclaim hundreds of millions in executive compensation when a company fails. Frank is the author of legislation that passed the House last year that would allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation packages.

Republicans, too, are raising questions about Bear pay.

“I’ve instructed my staff to delve into the details of the deal,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. “[A] longtime interest of mine is how insiders such as senior executives are treated in these kinds of deals. Corporate bigwigs shouldn’t be able to profit from a deal while employees, shareholders and creditors have to carry the burden of a company’s demise.”

But it may be difficult to make the case that Bear Stearns is an example of executive pay run amok. Last week, Bear Stearns chief executive Jimmy Cayne sold his company stock for $61 million at about $10 per share. True, you can make $61 million go a long way, even in New York, but Cayne has lost hundreds of millions of dollars on Bear shares, which sold for about $170 each in January 2007. About one-third of Bear stock is owned by employees, including executives. When the company tanked, so did their personal fortunes.

“It’s hard to say how [Cayne] made out [well] in all this,” says Alan Johnson, managing director of Johnson Associates, a New York compensation consulting firm. “If you looked at it objectively … you would say this is an executive compensation plan that worked.”

That may not be how members of Congress see it. During the spring recess, they likely met with constituents who are threatened with losing their homes, their jobs or both. During the economic downturn, the Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill are focusing on the difficulties faced by individuals.

From that point of view, the JPMorgan takeover of Bear may generate examples of folks, albeit Wall Street folks, getting tossed into unemployment as the two operations merge.

JPMorgan will try to keep revenue-producing Bear brokers. But many investment bankers, analysts, IT and other redundant staff will be shown the door in an effort to streamline the operation and make a quick profit for investors.

Barry Miller, manager of alumni programs and services at Pace University in New York and a private placement consultant, says JPMorgan has a reputation for being ruthless.

“They want to take [Bear] over and raid it,” Miller says. “They do what’s best for their bottom line.”

What’s best for business may make Congress queasy.