Business & Technology
Read an excerpt from Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India (continued):
The way I see it, the fact that I am not a specialist of any particular stripe, whether in history, sociology, economics or politics, may actually give me a broader viewpoint on our most significant issues. At a time when our arguments are so polarized, what we need might indeed be an avid amateur, and someone who can avoid the extreme ends of the debate.
While this is a book on India, this is not a book for people fascinated with Indian cinema and cricket—I would not be able to add very much to either topic, colorful as they are. Instead, I have attempted to understand India through the evolution of its ideas. I think that no matter how complicated, every country is governed through some overarching themes and ideas—an intricate web of shared, core beliefs among a country's people is, after all, what unites them. The ideals of French nationalism, for instance, the notion of the United States as the land of opportunity and the emphasis on "harmony" in Singapore were all dominant ideas that shaped the economic and social policies of these countries.
India in particular, for all its complexity, is a country that is as much an idea as it is a nation. The years of colonialism have meant that India has not evolved through a natural arc; disparate regions were brought together by the ideas, good and bad, of British administrators and Indian leaders. My first glimmer of the power of these ideas came when I was five years old. I understand this in hindsight, of course. One day my father bundled all of us into his Austin motorcar and drove us to a rally. It was 1960, the Congress session was being held in Bangalore, and we were there to see the charismatic Jawaharlal Nehru. As a towering leader of our independence struggle and the country's first prime minister, his stature both within the country and outside was immense—to a whole generation, he was synonymous with India. My memory of standing on the sidelines, caught up in the large crowd and waving at this thin, intense man is an unforgettable one.
Growing up in those days, it was very easy to believe in the idea of a nurturing government and public sector. A paternal, socialist state would own companies that would create wealth and the wealth would be used for the betterment of society. Why allow wealth to be created in private hands where it would probably be used for nefarious purposes? It all made perfect sense. The logic of it, especially coming from the benevolent patriarch Nehru, appeared unimpeachable. My father, an ardent Nehruvian, would constantly rail against the evils of big business, and how the Indian approach was the ideal approach. Many Indians believed in these ideas then; few of us believe them now.
The structure of my book is based on this ebb and flow of ideas, and how this has shaped the changes in our economy and politics. For example, through the early days of independent India, many saw English as a language of the imperialists and did everything possible to marginalize the tongue. This included attempts to make Hindi the sole national language, and restricting or banning outright the teaching of English in state schools. But once outsourcing made English the entry ticket to a global economy and higher incomes, the language rapidly became a popular aspiration, a ladder to upward mobility for both the middle class and India's poor. As a result state governments across the country are now reversing historically anti-English policies, even in places where Hindi-language nationalism was trenchant. Such is the power of changing ideas.
I have divided the book into four parts, depending on where we stand on a variety of ideas. Part I discusses issues where our attitudes have changed radically over the years, and I believe it is the shifts here that are at the heart of India's dynamism today. For instance, many of us now see India's huge population—once regarded as a drag on growth—as potential for "human capital" and a tremendous asset. Apart from our new, widespread acceptance of the Indian entrepreneur, we also hold a more sanguine view on globalization than we used to. In the post-reform years, we saw plenty of protests against multinationals in India; Coca-Cola put up billboards announcing "We're back!" on which activists wrote, "Till we throw you out again"; KFC faced visits from local inspectors suspicious of their chicken and Hindu activists protested in front of McDonald's in Bombay, evoking pre-Independence era slogans with their demand that the restaurant "Quit India."Now, however, the entry of new international companies into India goes unremarked—and Indians take particular pride in domestic firms acquiring companies abroad.
The second part of the book examines those issues that are still in the ether: they are now widely accepted but have yet to see results on the ground. For instance, the idea of full literacy has gained popular appeal over the last two decades, but we are still framing strategies to implement universal education and address the discontent around the state of our schools.
Similarly, the India of our imagination has for long been a country that "lives in its villages." Our early governments went so far as to assert that rural-urban migration was an evil trend that had to be controlled and even reversed. Now, after decades of hostility toward urbanization, we are coming to terms with the fact that cities are both inevitable and necessary for our economic health. We have also accepted that we need to overhaul our woeful infrastructure, and do it fast. And we are finally beginning to abandon a system that created a hodgepodge of regulations restricting interstate trade— there is now widespread consensus that our laws have to be less provincial and must aim to create a common domestic market.
Part III of the book deals with our biggest arguments. These are the issues where partisanship has peaked and where the lack of any consensus has stonewalled progress on urgent policies. For example, there is a furious ongoing debate around higher education, in terms of how we regulate our colleges and what the role of the state should be vis-à-vis private universities. Labor is another breathing-fire debate, and even as there is an unprecedented demand for workers as every aspect of the Indian economy goes into overdrive, the government remains deeply polarized on the need to ease up our labor regulations. These issues have created a charged battleground—the divide here is a chasm between people who see reforms as empowering and those who see them as exclusionary.
The last part of the book goes into our forgotten nooks of policy, taking up those ideas that have been largely missing from our public discourse, even though they are growing critical to our future. This final set of ideas presents us with a challenge we are not as adept at meeting as we once used to be. Before the eighteenth century, our region was a dominant player in the world economy: at their peak, India and China together accounted for close to 50 percent of world GDP. Ideas from the subcontinent helped shape the culture, law, philosophy and science of the time. However, post colonial India has tended to follow the example of the countries that preceded it in development. We imported many of our existing structures—our parliamentary system and constitutional model, above all—from the British, and our early socialist ideas from Europe and the Soviet Union. Even our reforms, while courageously carried out, have followed economic templates that have proved successful across the world, and our corporations have modeled themselves on global best practices and standards.
But India's rapid economic growth is demanding much more innovative ideas from us as existing solutions for issues like health, energy and the environment have proved ineffective around the world. India cannot, for instance, have an energy policy that is based entirely on the heavy use of hydrocarbons. We should worry about the environment right now, rather than try like other developed countries to salvage it after industrialization has ripped through our natural resources. We also have to put in place a sustainable, realistic social security system and ensure that our public health challenges do not swing, as they have in the developed world, from one end of the health spectrum—starvation—to the other—excess. And finally, we must incorporate modern technology and innovation more fully into the economy.
