Imagining India

If there’s a place that can be described as ground zero for New India, it is my home town Bangalore. This is not because of  its identity as India’s IT city, or its aspiration to be the ‘Silicon Plateau’ of the world, the next stage after California’s Silicon Valley. What gives the city this promise is that in its successes and its struggles, Bangalore is a microcosm of the new, emerging India.  

Nehru had once called Bangalore ‘India’s city of the future’. For him, the city was untainted, relatively unburdened of the imperialist architecture that dominated the Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta skylines. And for the entrepreneurs entering Bangalore in the 1970s and 1980s, the city – then a hub mainly for the textile and public sector industries – was also untouched in another way. Bangalore was distant from the chaos and politics of Bombay and Delhi, which had limited the rise of firms without the connections and clout to get past the red tape and old boy networks.

For this new breed of first-time entrepreneurs – and Infosys was among them – this city was a refuge. The companies that came here were therefore, disproportionately young and new-industry. The focus of both IT and the textile industry on the international market also meant that Bangalore developed as a city with a global outlook, welcoming to outsiders and strongly aware of international standards and practices when it came to doing business. The city’s firms, especially in the IT industry, have tried to envision a more responsible role for the private sector, focusing on transparency, fairness to their stakeholders, and ethical management. And they made early efforts to expand the role of business within the broader community, by participating in India’s first public-private partnership, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (which I chaired), which worked to improve the city’s governance systems. 

A different kind of business also attracted a different kind of community – a large proportion of Bangalore’s workers are educated, white-collar, and middle-class. These workers have often either lived or travelled abroad, and have a global outlook, fully aware of best practices when it came to public services, governance and social welfare. 

With these entrepreneurs and workers have come new possibilities, and a potential framework for reforms in India. Civil activism is vibrant and thriving in Karnataka – from MYRADA’s work in microfinance lending to the poor, to Srikanth Nadhamuni’s egovernments Foundation which is working towards technology for urban management and Akshara Foundation’s work in primary education. New experiments in entrepreneurship and government are also seeing success here, from Sriram Raghavan’s Internet community kiosks, to the Bhoomi land reform project led by the bureaucrat Rajiv Chawla. In these efforts, we are seeing a push for positive change that is reshaping the growth of the city. 

Even the struggles that Bangalore faces foretell what India shall encounter as we develop. The whispers of future conflict are right here – as the city faces the influx of millions of migrant workers.  It is telling for instance, that the death of the Kannada actor Rajkumar in 2006 triggered violence across the city, with cars and buses attacked and glass-fronted offices pelted with stones. Rajkumar was an icon for many of the older city, a quieter, less modern and chaotic place, one whose identity was unequivocally Kannadiga. Bangalore today, with its growing migrant middle and working classes, its industries and restaurants that are so obviously cosmopolitan, has become an uneasy melting pot. The challenges of inequality emerging across the country are also all too visible here. Nowhere is the secession of the middle classes as stark as it is here with the walled gardens of corporate campuses and gated communities. And the rapid growth has laid bare the complete inadequacies of our urban governance.      

But this city is exceptional in that it is also relatively young, and has the opportunity to tackle the challenges of inequality and of housing and land shortages that left unaddressed has sharpened inequality so severely in cities like Bombay and Delhi. Bangalore’s entrepreneurs, NGOs and civil activists are fighting for better urban planning and infrastructure, with the support of the city residents. Citizen groups pressure the government towards better environmental practices; a variety of organisations have cropped up to manage waste and sewage disposal issues that the government has ignored. 

We can thus see tentative steps forward to the future as Bangalore searches for better solutions, and attempts to overcome its divisions. Rural politicians have tried to capitalize on the urban-rural divide by championing the ‘common man’ of the rural country while inveigling the city ‘elites’. In recent years however, this pitch has had far less power over Karnataka’s voters, as even our farmers aspire to educate their children, and send them to the city for a better life. The 2008 state elections, the first after delimitation has also increased urban voice. 

Bangalore is where we will have to look closest when we try to predict the long-term success of India’s rise – in how we address our divisions, the tensions of large-scale migration, provide equitable access to education, health and housing, build infrastructure and reform governance. It is our weathervane, when it comes to imagining a new India.

Adapated from an article written for the Bangalore edition of the DNA [15 December '08]

When I attempted to chart the ideas and policies India needs to ensure stable, long-term growth, I was keenly aware that we have always responded best in crisis. Indian economists and policy analysts remarked to me time and again, of our lethargy unless we are faced with economic disaster. Our 1991 reforms were pushed through as the country teetered at bankruptcy, and after we had mortgaged our family jewels – our gold reserves – for emergency loans.

Since the global financial meltdown that began in September this year, there has certainly been a keen sense of urgency to frame better, smarter policy and regulation – an urgency that is visible both globally and in India. I am not happy about the meltdown – the world is almost certainly headed for a rocky, tumultuous  period. But this now widespread sense of urgency might be the  one silver lining during these  turbulent times .

For India, this does not come a moment too soon. Our reluctance to push a reform agenda  of expanding access has resulted in large and growing disparities when it comes to the opportunities available in India’s  economy. Good education for example, is  only accessible to the children whose families can afford private schools, and coaching classes to get into the top institutes. Public-funded education that the rest of India’s children rely on, on the other hand, is a miserable failure, with dropout rates over 90% despite initiatives such as the mid - day meal and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. The result of this are children and teenagers who make their living as street hawkers, construction workers and factory labour. The unfairness of this is overwhelming. 

Such disparities in access are all too visible across the country, and have greatly limited class and income mobility across India. While infrastructure in urban India has begun to show tentative progress, farmers lacking roads connecting them from their villages to markets have to rely on corrupt networks of middlemen to sell their crops. Transporting their produce across vast distances without cold chains means that they lose over a third of what they grow due to spoilage. Across rural India, caste relationships still hold sway, limiting the opportunities for backward castes and Dalits to own land and start businesses – to date, India has not seen a single major Dalit entrepreneur. Migrants who leave these harsh livelihoods and come into cities find that finding a home is a distant dream outside the slums that form urban India’s fringes, its messy and chaotic boundaries. Most of the poor in both the slums and in rural India lack reliable electricity and water supply, and the people who can afford it resort to private solutions in the face of such shortages – they buy their own generators, live in gated communities with private security, and use private sources for water. 

When our markets seem ineffective in terms of providing widespread access, people turn to other solutions. As a result, India’s markets exist alongside a complicated structure of subsidies, loan waivers, hand-outs, tax exemptions and government sponsored jobs and reservations. And people who have watched the economic boom from the sidelines, see these concessions as their best options, and  are hostile towards markets. 

In fact, the global financial crisis that has erupted underlines why our issues of access may be our most critical challenge. Across countries, we have seen a populist backlash against markets when they have failed to address crises around access – such as in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, and more recently in large parts of Latin America. Even the US, a country that supposedly holds the values of the free market close to its heart, is seeing a new rhetoric and anger against big business as income inequalities and unemployment rise across the country. It shows how easily a country’s economic mood can change – since the financial crisis has required  over one trillion dollars of US taxpayer money to bail out American banks even as millions of houses across the US are foreclosed, even the staunchest free-market believers are expressing hostility against Wall Street. Governments clearly ignore such challenges of inequality at their peril. Without more reforms to create access, India’s entire  progress will totter.  For those Indian leaders ambivalent about reforms and who believe that they have only led to creating rich businessmen, now is the time to catch the bull by the horns and promote the reforms that drastically expand access to opportunity in education, jobs, incomes and markets for all.