Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation

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Table of Contents

 

Copyright Page

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

 

Part One - INDIA REIMAGINED

IDEAS THAT HAVE ARRIVED

INDIA, BY ITS PEOPLE

FROM REJECTION TO OPEN ARMS - The Entrepreneur in India

THE PHOENIX TONGUE - The Rise, Fall and Rise of English

FROM MANEATERS TO ENABLERS

HOME AND THE WORLD - Our Changing Seasons

THE DEEPENING OF OUR DEMOCRACY

A RESTLESS COUNTRY

 

Part Two - ALL ABOARD

IDEAS IN PROGRESS

S IS FOR SCHOOLS - The Challenges in India’s Classrooms

OUR CHANGING FACES - India in the City

THE LONG ROADS HOME

ERASING LINES - Our Emerging Single Market

MOVING DEADLINES

 

Part Three - FIGHTING WORDS

IDEAS IN BATTLE

THE SOUND AND THE FURY - Our Biggest Fights

JOSTLING FOR JOBS

INSTITUTIONS OF SAND - Our Universities

A FINE BALANCE

 

Part Four - CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

IDEAS TO ANTICIPATE

ICT IN INDIA - From Bangalore One to Country One

CHANGING EPIDEMICS - From Hunger to Heart Disease

OUR SOCIAL INSECURITIES - The Missing Demographic

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES - India’s Environment Challenge

POWER PLAYS - In Search of Our Energy Solutions

THE NETWORK EFFECT

 

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgements

NOTES

A TIME LINE OF KEY EVENTS

INDEX

VIKING CANADA

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Copyright © Nandan Nilekani, 2008

Foreword copyright © Thomas L. Friedman, 2009

 

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For
Nihar, Janhavi and Rohini,
who keep me grounded

FOREWORD

EVERY TIME I go to India, people ask me about China. Every time I go to China, people ask me about India.Who’s going to win between these two emerging giants?

I always give them the same answer: India and China are like two giant superhighways, and each has a big question mark hanging over its future. The Chinese superhighway is perfectly paved, with sidewalks everywhere and streetlights and white lines neatly down the middle of the road. There’s just one problem. Off in the distance, there is a speed bump called “political reform.” When 1.3 billion people going 80 miles an hour hit a speed bump, one of two things happens. One is that the car jumps into the air, slams down, and the drivers and passengers turn to each other and say, “You okay? You okay?” Everyone is okay, and so they drive on. The other thing that happens is that the car jumps up in the air, slams down, and all the wheels fall off. Which will it be with China? We don’t know, but I am hoping for the best—the stability of the world depends upon it.

India is also a giant superhighway, only most of the road has potholes, some of the sidewalks haven’t been finished, a lot of the streetlights are out, and there are no visible lane dividers. It’s all a bit chaotic, yet the traffic always seems to move. But wait a minute. Off there in the distance it looks like the Indian road smoothes out into a perfect six-lane superhighway, with sidewalks, streetlights, and white lines. Is that perfect Indian superhighway a mirage or is that an oasis? Will India one day claim its future or will it always be chasing it, teasing us with its vast potential?

My teacher and friend Nandan Nilekani is bound and determined to make sure it is not a mirage. Like me, he remains an optimist, a sober optimist, but an optimist about his country’s future. He knows that the shape of India’s future, as the great environmentalist Dana Meadows once said about the future of our planet, “is a choice not a fate.” And this book is a loud, engaging, noisy, spirited argument about how and why India and its friends need to go about making the right choices—and never resign themselves to fate.

I can think of no one better to make this argument. There are not a lot of executives around the world who are known simply by their first names. Silicon Valley has “Steve”—as in Jobs. Seattle has “Bill”—as in Gates. Omaha has “Warren”—as in Buffett. And Bangalore has “Nandan”—as in Nilekani.

Nandan helped to found Infosys Technologies Ltd., based in Bangalore—India’s Silicon Valley. And Infosys, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy Services are the Microsoft, IBM, and Sun Microsystems of India. What makes Nandan unique? For me it comes down to one moniker: great explainer. Yes, he, the other cofounders, and N. R. Narayana Murthy, Infosys’s legendary chairman, have built a great global company from scratch. But the reason Nandan is so sought out is that he has a unique ability not simply to program software but also to explain how that program fits into the emerging trends in computing, how those trends will transform the computing business, how that transformation will affect global politics and economics, and, ultimately, how it will all loop back and transform India. It was his insight that the global playing field was being “leveled” by technology that inspired me to write my own book The World Is Flat. And nowhere are his explanatory skills more on display than in this, his first book.

While this book is an enormously valuable explainer of where India has been and needs to go, it is much more than that. It is a prod to his fellow Indians, and India’s American friends, to imagine and deliver on a different future by refusing to settle anymore for an Indian politics and governance that is so much less than the talents possessed and needed by the Indian people. Nandan knows what Indian entrepreneurs have accomplished without government or in the face of government obstruction and political dysfunction. He knows what sort of energy is exploding from India’s youth bubble. And on every other page I can almost hear him saying: “If only our political system performed with the same energy and high aspirations. India would be unstoppable. It would be unstoppable. It would be that smooth six-lane superhighway.” India, he rightly insists, despite its age and size, has barely scratched its potential.

In some ways Nandan’s views are summed up in this one passage: “At the time of independence, India’s leaders were clearly ahead of the people. The creation of a new, secular democracy with universal suffrage, anchored by the Indian Constitution, was a leap of faith the government took with an uncompromising, yet trusting country. Sixty years on, however, it seems that the roles have reversed. The people have gained more confidence and are reaching for the stars. India’s leaders, however, seem timorous—our politics has become more tactical than visionary and, as Montek points out, what we now see among our politicians ‘is a strong consensus for weak reforms.”’

Nandan repeatedly and usefully reminds us that India’s economic revolution since 1990 has been a “people-driven transformation.” It has actually been, in its own way, the biggest peaceful revolution in the last sixty years. It has never quite gotten its due because it happened peacefully and in slow motion—and the people did not topple a monarch or bring down a wall. But it did involve a society throwing off something huge—throwing off the shackles of a half-century of low aspirations and failed economic ideas imposed from above and replacing them with its own energy and boundless aspirations. And it wasn’t just the famous software entrepreneurs like Nandan who were engaged. They started it. They showed what was possible. But they were soon followed by the farmers who demanded that schools teach their children more English and the mothers who saved for their kids to have that extra tutoring to get into a local technology college and by the call center kids, who worked the phones at night and hit the business school classrooms by day—sleeping God only knows when in between. It was the revolution of a post-Nehruvian youth bubble that refused to settle anymore for its assigned role or station in life. That is what makes this Indian people’s revolution so powerful and that is what makes it, as Nandan tells us, “irreversible.”

To be sure, this book does not ignore India’s massive income inequalities and challenges in job creation. It simply says that to get there will “require the courage and optimism to embrace good ideas and not remain imprisoned by bad ones.” It is all about execution. It is not enough, Nandan insists, to get the ideas right; they have to be adopted. And it is not enough to adopt them; they have to be implemented correctly. And it is not enough to implement them correctly; they have to be constantly reviewed and adjusted over time as we see what works and what doesn’t.

Nandan Nilekani’s life and book are testament to the fact that the new India has truly arrived—in many ways and many places. Yes, the new India, he declares, is now present in the business community. It is now present on the college campuses. It is now present in many villages. It is now present in many schools. But will it achieve a critical mass—will it spread so far and wide, so up and down, that it will truly add up one day to that smooth, sleek superhighway? Or will that India always remain just off in the distance?

Nandan is optimistic but not naïve. He would tell you it all depends: It all depends on India having a government as aspiring as its people, politicians as optimistic as its youth, bureaucrats as innovative as its entrepreneurs, and state, local, and national leaders as impatient, creative, and energetic as their kids—and, in my view, as Nandan Nilekani.

 

Thomas L. Friedman
Washington, D.C.
November 2008

NOTES FROM AN ACCIDENTAL ENTREPRENEUR

IF YOU CAN have such good roads in the Infosys campus, why are the roads outside so terrible?” demanded my visitor. I had just ended my pitch to him about why India was emerging as the world’s next growth engine and how the country was rapidly catching up with the developed world. But my guest, who had flown in from New York, was openly skeptical, having spent two hours on Bangalore’s chaotic, unforgiving Hosur highway to get to my office.

Although his question was one that I had heard several times, it always gave me pause. How could I respond without offering a long-winding explanation? I usually picked the short answer: “Politics,” I mumbled. “Well,” he persisted, “why don’t people like you get into politics?” I told him this was not the United States, where a Michael Bloomberg could be the CEO of a large company one day and get elected as New York’s mayor the next. Being an entrepreneur automatically made me a very long shot in Indian politics, and an easy target for populist rhetoric. I was, I said, quite un-electable.

But his questions got me thinking. The fact that the roads inside the Infosys campus were so good and so bad outside it was certainly not due to a lack of resources, technology or expertise. India has always seemed to be defined by such contradictions, to the point that our contrasts are clichés: Asia’s second-largest slum is here, in the world’s fastest-growing democracy. A nation that is a burgeoning knowledge power also has the largest number of school dropouts in the world. Our biggest businesses are building international brands, yet red tape continues to throttle the new entrepreneur and frustrate the small business owner.

My years as an entrepreneur have especially brought home to me how much India, despite its recent tremendous growth, is straining against the challenges that hold it back. Today, we are a nation that has barely scratched its potential. Almost two decades after economic liberalization, the absence of critical reforms means that for a majority of Indians daily life continues to be a struggle—for the millions of marginal farmers unable to find alternatives to bare, hard livelihoods; for people living in slums for want of cheaper housing; for families cobbling together their savings to send their children to private schools because our government schools are a mess.

A big reason for our struggle lies in our inability to push through and implement critical ideas. Once in a while, at a committee consultation in Delhi or in a state-level advisory role, I have had the chance to have candid conversations with our ministers. Admittedly, an Indian politician for all his faults faces a complicated balancing act in our government, where the socialist ethos is still dominant. Being a legislator in this system means negotiating for money from both the central and the state governments; getting work out of an often reluctant bureaucracy; navigating an agenda through the various, often unconnected, state organizations; and of course meeting the demands of one’s constituents and somehow retaining power through our unpredictable election cycles. These various pulls and pressures mean that when it comes to policy the urgent wins over the important, tactic triumphs over strategy and patronage over public good. The result is a certain cynicism, evident in what a prominent politician said to me when I buttonholed him with some policy ideas: “I don’t see much upside in talking to you—you’re neither good for notes [money] nor votes.”

During such conversations I have felt very far away from India’s new optimism and its...