In his riveting new book Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy, the New Delhi-based business journalist Mihir Sharma lays out an array of problems and possibilities for a vast and complex country. By turns acerbic and hopeful, the book asserts that India is ripe for economic reform. Restart was a co-winner of the Tata Literature Live! Business Book of the Year and was longlisted for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. Here we present an exclusive excerpt in four parts:
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PART ONE: THE FLYOVER
If you fly into Delhi from somewhere cool and organised, it takes a while to remember where you are. You land, after all, at the freshly built Terminal 3, still too new to have developed the air of overworked decrepitude that is characteristic of our transport system. You drive into town on a shiny elevated toll-road, and you permit yourself to imagine for a moment that China is not, after all, so far ahead of us.
And then you arrive, with minimal warning, at a permanent kilometre-long traffic jam near something called the Rao Tula Ram Road flyover, and reality bangs into your taxi and starts blowing its horn. You roll down your window and gape at the flyover in amazement: it is not so much a bridge, you realise, as it is an ugly concrete summary of India’s cussed unwillingness to create sufficient capacity. You don’t wish to believe it, but your eyes insist you must: somebody decided that it would be a good idea to create a single-lane flyover along—not beside, not across, but along—one of New Delhi’s arterial roads. Unsurprisingly, there was an almighty pile-up on the day it opened, and things haven’t got better since.
To make it an even more apt metaphor for India’s problems, the only solution other than the demolition of the flyover is the widening of the road; but that’s being blocked by a powerful coalition of local residents. The flyover was going to be obsolescent from the day it was inaugurated. Even when built, everyone knew it would not be enough.
And there, gaping at the waste and the stupidity, you remember.
It’s the Indian way, our first commandment, our sole moral imperative: if you have created excess capacity in anything—if you have overbuilt, or in any way allowed for a crowd—then you have wantonly wasted money. Indians have learnt to live with shortages and delays. Not the shortages of socialism, in which everything nice was rationed; but the shortages of overpopulation, in which every institution, every piece of infrastructure, every square mile is shared by far more people than it was designed for. There are queues for everything, just like in socialist countries; except here, of course, queues usually descend in seconds into disorderly elbow-wrestling matches.
This was not always the creaking country it is today. India was always crowded; but, as old photographs and films of its cities testify, there were times when trams were not always packed, when pavements were wide enough to accommodate pedestrians, and when railway stations were large enough to handle the traffic. When Kolkata’s Howrah Station was built in 1905, it had 15 platforms. Today, with 10 times as many trains and 100 times as many passengers, it has 23. India was much poorer in 1905 than it is now. Yet the shortages have been allowed to persist, and grow. London has 13 ‘A’-category national hub stations; Delhi, with a few million more people to serve, has 5, one of which has only just opened.
It is thus not because India is poor, or has a large number of people, that it suffers a crippling shortage of infrastructure. The people of Bombay are not so poor that they would not pay for slightly better local trains, with a smaller chance of spending one’s commute in unwilling communion with their neighbour’s armpit. The reasons for India’s infrastructure deficit are deeper than that— born of an enduring belief that anything beyond the basic, any hint of comfort, is sinful and unacceptably expensive. This is a belief with many antecedents: Mahatma Gandhi’s tendency to insist on taking third-class train carriages, for one; our deep-rooted socialist ethos, for another.
There are signs that Indians are finally beginning to revolt against this mindset. They may not demand ‘world-class’ facilities, a ridiculous and imaginary standard that nevertheless much exercises the mind of New Delhi’s elite; but they certainly are tired of dealing with non-existent infrastructure. Bihar was once the toughest Indian state to get around—a deeply ironic fact, that, given that it was also the flattest in the country. For fifteen years between 1990 and 2005, it was ruled by Lalu Prasad Yadav, who famously said that his voters walked, they didn’t take cars, and so the quality of a road was irrelevant to them. In the years since his successor, Nitish Kumar, took over, the quality of Bihar’s roads has improved startlingly—and the voters rewarded him for it. Now, even Lalu talks about roads and bridges.
If there’s one thing that unites Indians, it’s an impatience with the subpar facilities that they have to deal with daily. Anything that breaks out of it—the Delhi metro, for example—is regarded with near-superstitious reverence. One of the few places where you can see rambunctious and self-centred north Indians queue up is in the Delhi metro. There is a deep and useful bit of human psychology at work here: something as simple as a shared confidence that there will be place for everyone in the next train leads to civilised behaviour instead of a mad scramble.
It is this bedrock of impatience with the old, the smelly and the crowded that India’s politicians have begun to pick up on. Across north India before the last general elections, anecdotes were told about the superb roads of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, about its first-rate infrastructure, about its buses and its electricity. Modi assiduously fed this narrative. In rally after rally in small towns across India, he promised to build infrastructure like China’s. For Modi’s voters, India’s literal incapacity is a national shame. It is not just an inconvenience; it is psychologically troubling, a constant reminder of the country’s poverty, and of its weakness. Naturally, this national inability to build hurts more than just our ego and our pride. In a country with choked highways, strained railways and bottlenecks for ports, it is trade that suffers first. India’s long coastline is not a benefit if our vast northern plains can’t access it.
Across the Hindi-speaking belt to the north, the biggest problem for manufacturers isn’t power supply, or bribery: it’s how to get the stuff they’ve made to the customer who’s expecting it. On one occasion, at a conference for exporters in Gurgaon, a man stood up from the floor to say his government had turned him into a liar. The rest of us assumed he was talking about taxes, or regulations, or something of that sort. But no. ‘I have to lie to my clients in Europe,’ he said. ‘Always I have to lie. Because they simply do not believe that their consignment could have left my factory a week ago, but still has not reached Mumbai’s port. So I tell them it hasn’t left yet.’ A murmur of agreement spread through the gathering.
Others complained of the same problem; and they all agreed that it took longer to get something made near Delhi on to a ship in Mumbai than it did for it to then sail halfway around the world to Amsterdam, and thence by rail or Rhine to its destination in Europe. Indeed, the Financial Times reported in November 2014 that one French company finds that the cheapest and easiest way to send parts from Bangalore to Hyderabad, a few hundred kilometres apart, is to send them first from Bangalore to Europe, and then back from Europe to Hyderabad. It isn’t as if there isn’t a decent highway between the two cities; but the moment that a truck hit a state border, it has to stop and wait. According to the World Bank, Indian truck drivers spend a fourth of their time on the road waiting at the tax checkpoints that mark state borders. Factor in the time they spend in queues to pay highway tolls, and they spend less than 40 per cent of their time on the road actually driving. And that’s when the roads are good. Moving stuff around India costs this country’s manufacturers more than they spend paying their workers, the FT reports. Even India’s lower-than-low wages can’t make up for the dent logistics costs make in our competitiveness.
Yes, India has a passion for under-capacity as enduring and inexplicable as its love for cricket. But it is not just the absence of roads that testifies to this. When the manufacturers’ trucks arrive at the port in Mumbai, it isn’t just that the warehouses there are too crowded, it is that there aren’t enough officials to oversee the docks’ smooth operations. Sometimes, it takes four or five days just to assign a truck a spot to unload—not because there aren’t any spots, but because the port authorities are busy doing other stuff.
Other stuff that may be as important, mind you. The simple ‘reduce paperwork’ prescription hardly works here. Central coordination of where a truck sets down its load, and whether it’s close to the place where its container will be loaded on, is pretty essential. It isn’t a red-tape problem; it’s a capacity-constraint problem. Things are so bad that in 2013 India’s largest port was—Colombo. Yes, that’s right; that year, the Sri Lankan capital sent more Indian exports abroad than Mumbai did.
As with ports, so with roads and even passport offices: the Indian state consistently fails at creating public facilities to support private individuals.
PART TWO: THE TOWN
Padrauna is the furthest you can go and still be in Uttar Pradesh. Like all the towns of the region, close to the Himalayan foothills, it is infested with mosquitoes the size of bumblebees— mosquitoes that are as dangerous as they look, for they spread a strain of encephalitis that kills 350 children a year in the district, and which nobody has gotten around to synthesising a vaccine for. Padrauna is a tiny town, electricity-starved and full of quiet desperation. In the middle of the town stand relics of the past. There’s a small palace, for example, a perfect representative of the stained-glass-and-cupola style preferred by the less tasteful sort of pre–Independence industrialist. The stained glass has fallen in, mainly; though a few rooms are kept up, and used as a primary school. (One class, in early 2014, had just done a project on Paris. I am not sure there is anything you are less prepared for on the wall of a battered primary school in a tiny eastern UP town than a caricature of a Frenchman on a bicycle wearing a beret and carrying—I am not making this up—a baguette.) Just outside this decayed splendour, there is a tiny amount of space, and so the good people of Padrauna, being Indian to the core, have arranged for this to become a tea shop.
And here is where we come to the final consequence of India’s de-industrialisation. Sitting in a tea shop of Padrauna, you can see cause and consequence all at once, history and present and future jumbled depressingly together. Right in front of you is the rambling haveli that, you are excitedly told, belonged—perhaps belongs, the case is in court—to a branch of the Khaitan family. Industrialists, the elderly tea-shop owner told me, one spring morning. ‘In business,’ a young man with a motorbike agreed.
First, the old man’s story: there was a time, he explained, when we had industry here. You will not credit it, but it is true. Look at this mansion!
It turned out that the most shining moment in Padrauna’s history was when it was confirmed as being an industrial town, by the arrival, with an entourage, of the Singhanias of Kanpur. They were to marry into the Khaitans, and surely that put Padrauna on the map? The Khaitans, after all, had three sugar mills, a textile mill, a jute mill, and 9000 acres of land on which they grew sugar cane. But sugar was the first industry to go, a casualty of government policy and confusion. It stands at the border of agriculture and manufacturing, and suffered doubly, therefore, from policies designed to help each. Prices of sugar cane were set by bureaucrats, impossibly high or foolishly low; sugar itself was priced in a similarly confused manner; and the government went from control to decontrol in a manner that must have given everyone whiplash, as well as causing them to lose large amounts of money. The journalist and policy analyst Sanjaya Baru, who wrote his doctoral dissertation in the 1970s on why sugar needed real price decontrol (it hasn’t yet happened), traced the problem to the fact that there are so very many competing, politically powerful interests at hand: the cane-growers, sugar consumers, the landowners who dominate the big cooperatives, and the mill-owners. Everyone was using someone to defraud anyone.
Anyway, here is the consequence of this crazed sugar policy: the Khaitan mill is now defunct, and has been sold to real-estate developers. But it wasn’t the only mill in the area. The only house in Padrauna larger than the Khaitans’ was the one belonging to the family that had once ruled the princedom. Right next to it is their gift to the town, the largest sugar mill in that part of the world— now a dark cavernous space where the rustle of your feet and the soft cooing of pigeons nesting somewhere high above echo eerily off long, tall banks of metal.
Outside sits a contingent of the men who once worked the mill. On a twisted-rope bed, with a single light-bulb above them, they sit and sip tea; there has been a watch, they say, kept on the mill day and night. It is not hope, or not entirely hope. It is fear: will the machinery, expensive and relatively new, be stolen? The fear that the company’s majority owner will strip it bare of its assets runs deep in the Indian worker, and is often justified. They took their fear to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, they said—the local ex-royal is a politician, and so they could get in to see the former prime minister. They fell at his feet, they say, and told him of their mill. But Vajpayee said nothing. Perhaps Vajpayee had learnt; in Kanpur they still speak, with derision, of a speech in 1996 when he had come to that town and said that, if he became prime minister, smoke would once again billow from its chimneys.
The men who met Vajpayee haven’t been paid for years, but they come every day; that day may be the one the machines are resurrected. Those machines are new; they are quite unlike those in the one sugar mill that remains in Khaitan hands in far-off Bengal, which are driven by steam engines from the 1930s.
This mill has not been handed over to the real-estate strippers and the scrap merchants yet. But perhaps it will be, soon. After absurd government pricing rendered it unprofitable, it was taken over by the state and further ruined. And then, one day, the state announced it would be revived, by a rich man from outside. That man would pump in money, get it working again, smoke would once again spiral from its chimney. For some reason that didn’t work, and now the workers, unsleeping, guard its gates.
TEA-SHOP TRUTHS
As you sit at the tea shop by the Khaitans’ brokedown palace, you can see right into the tube-lit dingy room, with two pitted desks, that is the Padrauna office of the UP Sugar Co-operative Limited, trusted with the task of restoring unprofitable mills to rude capitalist health. Through the window, you see towers of dusty files darkly framing the slight old man as he tells you about Padrauna’s industrial past; they provide a touch of realism, of context, to his hopes.
Behind you, however, is the tea shop’s final gift, its window to the future: a more sardonic voice, a voice less experienced but more angry. The young man with an Enfield Bullet who asked for extra cardamom in his tea couldn’t be poor, surely. But it is he who brings this story full circle. ‘Without power, there will be no factories,’ he says, cutting off the old man. And it is true; at night Padrauna is plunged into the dark of hours-long power cuts, with no fans to keep away the water-buffalo-sized mosquitoes.
And without factories, he does not need to say, there will be no jobs. He does say: ‘Only jobs matter.’ Travel across any part of north India, and you will hear the same thing. People are anxious to have alternatives to the farm. After all, the work is back-breaking— who would work on an unmechanized farm if you didn’t have to? The service sector—small retail, odd jobs of this or that kind—is picking up the slack. But they know it’s chancy, and not the kind of thing that gives you security, a steady income. True, what you really want is a government job. That, after all, is the perfect sort of employment: you are un-fire-able. Stable and secure. But even the most populist of politicians in the most backward of states now realises that, awe-inspiring though the Indian state’s capabilities may be, even it may struggle to find public-sector jobs for 13 million more people a year.
But I do wonder: When these brash young men want jobs, do they know exactly what jobs they want? Which factory job could satisfy a guy who already drives a Bullet and wears a Manchester United T-shirt?
Yes, you need a manufacturing sector. No country has risen to prosperity, and comfort, and even to a shared public civility and trust, without one. But you can’t wish away the young people you have, either.
It is too easy to say that a demand for jobs means also that they approve of the policies that would deliver jobs. Politicians understand this better than policymakers. When people say ‘give us jobs’, they do not mean ‘give us job-creating policy’, they mean ‘give me a job’. Nor does it mean that they are willing and eager to take any job that’s offered.
This returns us to the cardinal error of Indian policy. It tried to protect workers instead of work; and it failed. It tries to protect farmers, instead of farming; and it fails.
PART THREE: THE CHALLENGE
We need to take five big strides forward. There are five things that we have shied away from, five things we have feared to do—partly because they seem like a betrayal of our past, partly because we have claimed that we have a special ‘gradualist’ approach to reform, and partly because we have, till now, just not cared enough.
First, we must make sure that every single market is more flexible, less constrained than it is today. In particular, the markets for all the things that go into manufacturing—land, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship.
Second, we have to get more money to government. This means— and I hate to say it, because this is one of those phrases that just get thrown about a lot, like just invoking it will make a difference, as if it’s some sort of mantra—‘black money’ needs to come down.
Third, we have to make sure the money that’s coming in gets spent on the right things, and doesn’t go leaking away in grandiose government programmes that don’t work the way they’re supposed to.
Fourth, we have to fix agriculture—the one sector of the economy that remains completely untouched by the reforms of 1991. The time has come for its special exemption to end.
And fifth, we have to completely change our attitude to towns— from grudging their very existence and wishing they would just go away and stop bothering us, to actively encouraging more of them to spring up.
The first thing we have to do, and perhaps the most important, is to complete the agenda of 1991, when the government, with Manmohan Singh as its finance minister, began an attempt to open up the economy. The reforms that began that year were about relaxing controls on product markets. We stopped telling companies what they could produce, and how much of it; we stopped forcing consumers to buy certain goods and not others. But the markets for products are only half the story. Equally important are the markets for what goes into making them—labour, land, capital, and entrepreneurship, the factors of production.
The wrinkle is that each of these is not just a commodity—each is a livelihood, a way of life, as well. Reforming these requires changing how millions of people live, and what their plans are for their lives. This isn’t easy, and it is particularly hard if you’re trying to reform an economy while claiming that you aren’t—which is India’s preferred way of going about it.
But we cannot put it off any longer, either. The lack of reform in these markets has meant that we simply aren’t productive enough. And also, we simply aren’t competitive enough—nobody in the world wants to buy things made in India. Changing that needs more than pretty slogans; it needs more than carving out a piece of land and calling it a Special Economic Zone. Changing that is about ensuring that the right ingredients for vibrant companies and factories come together—and the government can’t force that, it has to create the conditions in which ordinary people can make it happen.
The most incredible product of our restrictions, surely, is exactly how much they stifle innovation and growth. The World Bank looked at firms in the US and India, decades apart. In the US, they found that 35-year-old companies had, on average, grown 10 times on two crucial indicators—they sold 10 times as much and employed 10 times as many. But “in India, the productivity of a 35-year-old firm merely doubles, while its headcount actually falls by a fourth”.
Larger firms are better, most of the time. They provide more benefits and higher wages for their employees; they are capable of more innovation, according to that study from the World Bank, and compete better in global markets. That’s for firms with over 100 people; but remember, in India, between 80 and 90 per cent of manufacturing companies employ fewer than 50 people. Most employ less than 10.
We need larger firms and bigger factories, or we won’t compete in the world’s markets. And until we embed ourselves in global markets, we have no way of employing everyone we need to. There are simply too many people joining the Indian workforce for them to only make stuff for other Indians. They have to get to work on creating and exporting goods to the rest of the world, too.
Everyone understands, it seems to me sometimes, that manufacturing is good. Everyone understands that exports are good. But I don’t think they understand exactly how important it is that we insert ourselves into global supply chains. Getting people in India jobs is not about easy import substitution. You can’t con people into making stuff in India through SEZs, or tax holidays, or whatever. It would be a mistake to obsess about the fact that we, for example, are importing mobile phones, and try and force people to manufacture them here. Instead, look at how mobile phones are made: the screen in one place, the battery in another, the core chip in a third. You need to be one of the places that make a part; you cannot start by trying to force yourself to be the place that makes it all. This is not the 1970s; you can’t try the same strategies that people tried then.
Especially because they failed in the 1970s.
You see, here’s the central problem with not being open to imports: competition with the best in the world is the only thing that keeps producers trying hard. Exports won’t grow if imports aren’t a threat. We only started exporting cars to the rest of the world when we started importing them too—because only once we started importing them did our carmakers have to start making cars that people actually wanted to buy.
Oh, and we keep banging on about the size of the Indian market—but let’s get over it. We have more hungry producers than we have potential consumers. This means we, humbly instead of arrogantly, try to look at what people would want to buy from us that we could make. Instead of arrogantly proclaiming the strength and depth of the Indian market, humbly ask what our weak industry can make for you. What can we do for you, not what can you do for us. In our arrogance and self-delusion, in this national machismo that compensates for decades of being ignored, we think our job is to sell ‘the India story’. No. It is not. It is to sell Indian goods.
And for that to happen, we can’t be arrogant, and we can’t think small.
The fear is that we will settle for just the tinkering. India’s government, I believe, also has a righteous anger about India’s horrific red tape. prime minister Modi has talked about the ‘Inspector raj’; he’s said that he would be happy if we repealed one bad law a day. But action is harder. Consider this: of all those labour laws that hold back manufacturing, the government has repealed practically none. What it has said is that it will ensure the nice, kindly man, the labour-law inspector, will harass you less. Because there’s a website on which he’ll have to submit his report. I think we can agree this is classic tinkering.
Small-picture solutions are not big enough. To sell Indian goods to the world, we need to understand our labour markets are simply not dynamic enough. To create the jobs that 13 million new workers a year demand, you have to ensure those jobs are not millstones around an entrepreneur’s neck. Make generous severance compulsory, sure; and expand social services, too. But don’t have employment laws that make employers think twice about opening a new wing to their factory.
PART FOUR: A DREAM FOR INDIA
India is unique.
This is something on which a lot of people agree. The less they know about any other place or any other time, the more strongly they agree.
I don’t think India is unique. I do think it is large enough to contain a multitude of contradictions. Joan Robinson, the formidable economist who was Manmohan Singh’s mentor at Cambridge, famously used to say that ‘whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true’.
Above all, governing India is about managing these contradictions.
It is about finding a path through our multitude of differences.
Sometimes that path is a winding one indeed. So it has been for most of our history. We have been faced with countless dead ends.
We have taken innumerable wrong turns—towards state control, towards services–led growth’, towards ‘private–public partnership’, and so on.
The path ahead is clear. It will be difficult, and it will be steep. But it is straight,
not winding.
For once, there is a popular consensus that some sort of radical reform is necessary. There is a clear agenda, too, one on which agreement has been hammered out for decades, in a manner reminiscent of Narasimha Rao’s claim as prime minister in 1991 that ‘the papers were ready’. All that is needed is to implement it.
If there is one way in which that agenda can be summarised, it is in this advice to the government: Do different things. Get out of manufacturers’ faces, and stop tormenting them with Lime Registers and incredible tax demands and hundreds of incomprehensible and mutually contradictory regulations. Instead, transfer that energy to providing basic services: law and order, health care, skill education.
Think different things: trust prices, don’t manipulate them. Prices are the voice of the people; a democratic government should listen to them, not overrule them. Remember we are not as poor as we were, so stop trying to ‘protect’ people like farmers, and instead, allow them to be something else.
Be more democratic, by being more responsive. Respond to anger about corruption by increasing accountability. Respond to economic crisis by listening to what prices are telling you. We have taken growth for granted and it has failed us. Do not ever take democracy for granted.
And yes, in some ways we are unique. We are the grandest experiment in human history, and one that is halfway to succeeding. A country with deep and bitter divisions, too many divisions to count—in fact, a country whose most pervasive cultural characteristic is a fondness for division—is struggling towards some form of solidarity, and doing it democratically.
We are dealing with decades of building—of bridges, of power plants, of roads, of cities—in just a few years. We are dealing with a people in transformation, as they judge their parents’ attitudes and find their own. And we are dealing with 13 million young people joining the workforce every year. A new Kolkata joins the workforce every year. A new Greece.
Each individual problem is not unique, but it is possible that its scale is.
When problems are this vast, we have to trust the signals that democracy sends us. Democracy is not just a pressure valve for discontent. It is a crucial policymaking tool. Even when it comes to building infrastructure, as it happens. Yes, in India people would not accept the government taking away their savings, as happens in China. This has hurt growth. But much of China’s savings went into investment that may prove to be unproductive. If India’s leaders truly trust democracy, and trust prices, then we will not repeat that mistake. We will find a more wholesome path to growth.
We are a young country.
I remember returning to India, full of young people, and discovering that not only were they irritating, but also that the very word ‘youth’ was irritating. As I noticed then, it isn’t just grossly overused—nobody is sure if they’re using it correctly. Is it a collective noun? (‘The youth vote for change.’) A singular noun? (‘This youth wants change.’) An adjective? (‘The youth vote is for change.’)
When do you put ‘the’ before it? If you are a youth, or a member of the youth, do you say ‘d youth’ instead of ‘the youth’? And why must you, youth, talk like that when we now have predictive text on phones?
But there are so very many young people in India that it naturally changes how this country feels. We are mostly 25 years old—fifteen years younger than America, ten years younger than China. I actually think that’s the most important fact about India today. It tells us why India today lacks all sense of proportion. It tells us why we want change immediately, why we are quick to anger. It tells us why we want to blame anyone but ourselves. It explains why everything seems to us like the end of the world.
We are a young country, and so we have no perspective. Lessons from elsewhere or from the past, from theory and from history, are not exactly our favourite things. They happened to someone else; we are, of course, unique.
Look at the world with a sense of proportion instead of youthful self-absorption, and you realise your problems are not unique. So many of our peers have them. All of us splurged back in the good years, when the West exported cheap money everywhere; and we’re now having trouble cutting back. In the good years, all these countries could try buying off poor people with extensive welfare interventions; but, in tougher times, a newly powerful middle class has decided that all such democracies hand over too much of their money to other people. Oh, and infrastructure. What a mess everywhere. Besides China, the only place that’s managing to keep infrastructure investment high is Malaysia—the most corrupt country in the world, according to recent business surveys, but also a place where the ruling elite tightly controls the media.
India’s healthier path to growth will be one that incorporates lessons from all these places. It must allow for people to protest on the streets, and ensure our political and economic system stays flexible enough to deal with it. It must handle environmental activism and not alienate those who live closer to the land than most policymakers. It must keep in mind that redistribution and the consequent inflation is a fact of life, and isn’t going away even if you are not yet a First World country. It has to be able to incorporate those big, radical decisions we have talked about: for example, giving up on coal.
If we somehow develop the wisdom to look around and le arn; if we add a degree of respect for the signals that democracy sends us; and if we combine it with the audacity of youth, the willingness to take a leap forward into the unfamiliar; then we have a chance to stake out a path to prosperity that could be better than any we have trodden before.
When I first moved to the United States, I really couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Something was missing. I would wander the streets, trying to work out what it was. Nothing as simple as Indian faces—there are enough of those in any university town. Then, one day, three months in, I passed a construction site. And I sat down and stared at it in stupefaction. I had finally figured out what I had been missing.
Many parts of the West feel complete. Finished. There’s nothing to add. In India, we are adding things at a tremendous rate. Now that I’ve moved back, I know the price of that frenetic activity. Within sight of any window in urban India, a house is being demolished, another is being built. The noise is incredible. It keeps you up at night. It fills your ears.
When things get built in the West, they put up screens to prevent the noise from bothering you. Any marble is cut indoors, or in workshops far away. Earth is not left to block up the street and delay traffic and inconvenience walkers.
There is a lesson here, and a warning. When we account for growth, the building that was built goes in on the positive side of the ledger. But we do not account for the inconvenience caused. That inconvenience is valuable and quantifiable; in the West, I can value it in terms of what it costs to avoid it, such as the rent on a workshop elsewhere to cut marble. But here, we pretend that cost does not exist.
Economic growth is essential because it changes lives. It opens up horizons for all of us. If, that is, we do it right. If we account for it properly. Costs should not be ignored just because they’re difficult to quantify.
Nor are we ever prepared, perfectly, for high growth. We now have more cars than we know what to do with—and certainly, we haven’t become good drivers as quickly as we have become good buyers of cars. India has among the highest rate of road accidents in the world.
Even in the hinterland, in rural Uttar Pradesh, people have come up to me and asked: Are you from Delhi? And when I have admitted to living there, they have assumed—as many people in villages still do—that I must have more power over their lives than they do. Tell Delhi, they said—waving at their brand-new rural road, perfectly metalled and winding through their fields—tell them in Delhi to put in some dashed speed breakers. This road is just too good. (True story.) High growth has costs; we may not even know what they are, or be mentally prepared for them. But we know, now, that whatever they are, we will pay them. Because there are just too many of us who will live lives of desperation and anger, lives unfulfilled and truncated, if the Indian economy does not become the wonder of the world.
We are a democracy, and this anger, this anxiety, means there is a lot of noise. It, too, fills our ears. But we shouldn’t fear it. The noise that keeps us awake at night, the noise of building, is the sound of growth. It is the sound of a new path being fashioned. It is the sound of the future. It is the sound that is made when desperation becomes triumph.
Excerpted with permission from Random House India
