I am moving from Patanjali’s India to the current day. Fast forward, some five thousand years. This is a review of one of my favorite books Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani. All of you yogis and others that claim to be interested in India and is beyond the curiosity of what is the meaning of the red dot on an Indian woman’s forehead will find this book interesting.
This is Nandan Nilekani’s first book. But, it is brilliant for someone who is not a writer and is a business entrepreneur. He says if he had not met Narayan Murthy, he would have been a techie (boring!) living in New Jersey suburbs (boring boring!), taking the train to Manhattan. Am I glad he met Narayan Murthy and that he wrote this book.
NN has so much to say and I think he wanted to say much more. The book is quite huge with eighteen chapters covering most things India. Population, English language, education, democracy, pre independence India, India since then and move from socialist to capitalist India, his ideas about how India should move forward and the differences in the way China and India operates.
On to the book.
People eating, people washing, people sleeping…people visiting, arguing and screaming…people clinging to buses…people, people, people.
This is how India is described in some books. The idea that this population bomb has been a burden is not so true anymore. In fact, it is an asset that is driving India today. India is currently benefiting the demographic dividend which most of the Industrialized nations have gone through. Economic growth normally coincides when there is a large number of working young people and fewer dependents. India has one of the youngest populations in the world, with a median age of twenty-three, at a time when the rest of the world is going grey.
The role of English language is significant, the chapter called ‘The phoenix tongue’ is interesting as it traces the fall and the rise of English, how it got finally accepted as an official language. When the British’s East India Company was bankrupt, they decided to replace British workers with cheaper Indian graduates. So, Outsourcing jobs is really not a brand new idea. If the costs are low, then that is the way companies operate. At the time of Independence, it was decided to let go of English and use Hindi. This caused such an uproar in the south especially in Tamil Nadu. With Kannada and Tamil languages having such rich history, people did not agree to using Hindi. So, it was decided English would be used for just another 15 years until every one agrees and has learnt Hindi. Again, the debate was on and finally it was decided to add English as an official language.
NN says that this worked out in India’s favor. He says that Singapore had chosen English as the language of the government over so many other languages. But, Sri Lanka did the opposite. Replacing English with Sinhalese, was a move that triggered the sectarian war and we all know how it turned out.
Of course, the civil war in Sri Lanka has affected India quite a bit as LTTE assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. He gets very high marks in NN’s book. Rajiv Gandhi was one of the first people in the government that was pro-technology using telecom and computers. Sadly, it was halted for sometime. Until then computers were known as man eaters and there was so much resistance to use technology. NN talks about the difficulties of convincing people in the government and the policies which were making things difficult for his software company and others. He goes on to say how Infosys has had such an impact on entrepreneurs. Until their time in 80s, the Indian industry was monopolized by the prominent business families. It is commonly said that everything from love to war is a matter of timing, and for India, IT was at the right place at the right time.
He talks about other technological achievements like electronic voting, railways reservation system, Stock exchange and the IT kiosks in the rural areas. The farmers can get to know the price for the crops and the weather conditions. Until this, the farmers were always behind with weather and crop patterns and were losing so much of their revenue.
The tipping point that truly transformed IT attitudes was the rise of the telecom sector. India is set to soon become the second largest telecom network. This is amazing progress when just a few years back, getting a land line was extremely difficult and only a small percentage of Indians were connected. The rural Indians have embraced technology and think of it as a passport to opportunities.
Globalization and the opening up of the economy to integrate with the world markets has not been easy. It has paid off very well. Our current prime minister Manmohan Singh gets very high marks for this. NN says that India was a very open economy until the late eighteenth century. India and China accounted for 40 percent of the global market. Colonialism sapped India’s strength and the country since independence had been looking inwards, like a frog in the well. We have the opportunity now to return to our roots and become a fearless, outward looking country of the past. This is full of challenges, no doubt and they are all within the country. India can either benefit from the current opportunity if we make use of it or just lose it for good.
Urbanization is a recent phenomenon as India was considered to be in her villages. Now, people are moving away from the caste based villages to the cities in search of jobs. Finally, the urbanization schemes are getting more funding from the government. The highways and the infrastructure only recently became a concern for middle class, entrepreneurs and the farmers. The election promises used to be roti, kapda, makan (food, clothes, shelter) and now it has become sadak, bijli, pani (roads, electricity, water). NN says a million rupees spent on roads, lifts an estimated 123 people out of poverty. A million rupees spent on roads can reduce poverty seven times more effectively than the same spent on anti-poverty programmes.
At the time of independence, India’s leaders were well educated and were clearly ahead of the people. Now, the roles have changed. The people have gained confidence, the politicians are tactical but not visionary. NN does address the caste system and how voting does tend to go along those lines. But, he says Indians are finally becoming more than that is defined by caste and religion. I guess the current elections would support NN’s thoughts. He has also mentioned that the polyester pants helped solve the caste problems a bit. Until this affordable material was available, people would dress up according to their castes. Now, one cannot really tell the difference that easily. Long live technology.
In the last section of the book, he proposes many ideas that the government should implement to make use of the golden opportunity at hand. As a late bloomer, India can see the mistakes of the developed countries and learn from them. He talks about eGovernance, health care, tele-medicine and remote diagnostics, pensions, citizen id, subsidies tied with citizen id and the renewable energy sector.
The concern for environmentalism comes at a cost for the economic growth. And, India is facing a new challenge that the developed world never did- of driving the growth around an entirely new energy model. He concludes his book with the renewable energy sector, which he thinks will play a powerful role in providing solutions. This is one of the quotes by Rajiv Gandhi -
Development which destroys the environment eventually destroys development itself.
Good advice for everyone. If Nandan Nilekani ever decides to run for the elections, he gets my vote. Although, he says he is unelectable, which I doubt.
Enjoy this speech given by NN at the Columbia University.
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