India is Changing

chillibreeze writer — Ramani Ramanathan

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Sometime back, I had the pleasure of spending an evening with a friend after a gap of eighteen years. While we were crossing a busy street, he fairly jumped out of his skin as a rickshaw whizzed by. For him, it was a visit to India after several years. He had left in the days when Rajiv Gandhi was promising a resurgent new India to a cynical populace.

My friend still comes back on fleeting visits, only to see confusing signs of progress and retardation. After almost a couple of decades of living abroad, he has become the quintessential know-it-all type, berating India and Indians to anyone who would care to come within earshot. But this time around, he was singing a different note. He saw the throes of a change. The change, he felt, was not just palpable, but irreversible. This country of a billion people was finally shaking the cobwebs of an eternity and getting its act together.

We don't need someone else to tell us how well we're doing. But it our essential Indianness that makes our collective chests swell with pride, if an outsider edifies us. Never mind if his notions are not far removed from fantasies.

There are opportunities aplenty in infrastructure. A cursory drive through Mumbai will see old buildings being torn down to be replaced by towers of glass and chrome. Why even Gurgaon, not so long ago a one-horse town, has become a BPO haven. Our new world Indian felt that our new highways would drive the demand for two and three-star places on the outskirts of cities, and was looking if he could set up not one, not two, but multiples of these. Another talked about setting up multiplexes, while a third corrected him to say that was already old hat here.

Indian marketers have made homegrown products like pan masala hi tech, by selling them in sachets at paanwaalas. It's no big deal for us to see shampoo sachets on sale for a rupee each. But for a US mind, it is unthinkable to see something sell profitably at retail for 2 cents a piece. There is lots of talk on what else can sell in small package sizes. We are going to miniaturize packaging much like the Japanese did with electronics some time ago.

Several society ladies complain that it is easier for them to call Texas from Mumbai than it was from Boston, on their cell phones. Another area we're ahead in is mobile technology. Observations of vegetable vendors with phones and of cheap data access (I pay Rs 600 a month for unlimited mobile Net access - a tenth of what I'd pay in the US) led to talk of language applications on wireless devices. Today a Singh in Bhatinda can send messages simultaneously to Karthikeyan in Chennai, Ghosh in Kolkata, Deshpande in Mumbai and Rao in Bangalore. An unimaginable scenario a mere ten years back.

Money is pouring into Indian stock markets from private investors abroad. And our real estate market is booming. A lot of Non Resident Indians are pioneering the reverse brain drain, fuelled by the Swades syndrome. A couple I know, actually came over to see if they could get a feel of what it was like to buy and live in Mumbai as they were considering moving back after 20 years.

Yes, there are roadblocks. It isn’t about single-window clearances and bureaucracy. (It might be simpler to start a business abroad, in Norway for example, but there's far more red tape there once you actually get it running - from environmental clearances to labour issues to affirmative action to insurance and so on). It is about things like corruption, about how we could avoid it by paying our government officers more, officially. Pollution. Quality of life. And, yes, basic infrastructure.

The thing that strikes me most is the changing mindset. Every educated Indian now smells an opportunity. There is a new found conviction that at last, India will find its rightful place in the pantheon of nations. And hopefully my friend will not find a cultural shock awaiting him when he is back again on one of his visits.

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Ramani writes for chillibreeze.

India is Changing

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