Fareed Zakaria looks at the broader trend of newly flourishing civil society in India.
Amid Disaster, New Confidence
In Chennai, a private street-cleaning movement now has 17,000 chapters
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek
Updated: 11:56 a.m. ET Jan. 9, 2005
Jan. 17 issue - To understand how much and how fast India is changing, look at its response to the tsunami. I don't mean the government's reaction but that of individual Indians. In the two weeks after the tidal wave hit, the Prime Minister's Relief Fund, the main agency to which people make donations, has collected about $80 million. After the Gujarat earthquake of April 2001, it took almost one year to collect the same amount of money. And remember that the 2001 earthquake was massive (7.9 on the Richter scale), killed more Indians (30,000) than the tsunami appears to have, and also got intense media attention (Bill Clinton headed the fund-raising efforts). What has changed in these four years is the most important new reality about India: the growing wealth, strength and confidence of Indian society.
Until a few years ago, Indian newspapers were filled with the affairs of the state. Usually written in a cryptic jargon filled with abbreviations (PM TO PROPOSE UGC EXPANSION AT AICC MEETING), they reported on the workings of the government, major political parties and bureaucratic bodies. Pick up an Indian newspaper today and it is overflowing with stories about businessmen, technological fads, fashion designers, new shopping malls and, of course, Bollywood, which now makes more movies every year than Hollywood. The Times of India, once the country's most venerated newspaper, now has the look and feel of a colorful tabloid.
India's biggest story for the past month, aside from the tsunami, has been the rift between Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother, who run India's largest company, Reliance Industries. Twenty years ago, this tale would have been relegated to the (thin) business section of a paper; today it's front-page news. It makes sense—after all, Reliance has 3 million shareholders.
In New Delhi, where I was last week, people ponder prospects for further economic reforms. Some think they are going too slow; others are heartened that at least they are moving forward. This discussion has been going on for two decades. But the real story might be that 20 years of modest but persistent reforms in India have had huge effects. Over the past 15 years, India has been the second fastest-growing large economy in the world (after China), with an average growth rate of 6 percent. Per capita income in the country has almost doubled (from an admittedly tiny base), and more than 100 million Indians have moved out of poverty. The animal spirits of Indian capitalism, long suppressed, have been unleashed.
Over the past two or three years, this growth has produced a critical mass of self-confidence. And confidence yields huge dividends and is self-fulfilling. Success produces confidence, which then produces more success.
Gurcharan Das, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble in India, and one of the first chroniclers of these shifts in attitude, told me a story of a poor young teenager he encountered. The boy told Das that in order to succeed, he had three goals. He wanted to learn to use Windows, to write an invoice and to learn 400 words of English. "Why 400 words?" asked Das. The boy explained that that's what it took to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language, the base requirement for admission to an American university. "Now, this guy probably won't get into an American college, but this is the way people are thinking all over India," Das said.
Of course, all the legendary problems of Indian government remain: subsidies, regulation, red tape, bureaucracy and inefficiency are all still large obstacles to growth. And on many of the key problems—subsidies of electricity, agriculture, privatization, labor laws—a coalition government, with communist support, is not likely to be able to effect dramatic change. But even here, things look better than they ever have. The new government, with all its constraints, is in fact strongly reformist. It might go slow, but it will go steadily forward.
More important, however, there is a growing constituency for growth and good government. Businessmen in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai are joining together to demand that government shape up. Some are solving problems themselves. In Chennai, one sees the rise of private street-cleaning that last year had 17,000 chapters, covers 40 percent of the city and 75 percent of the suburbs and serves 1.7 million homes. Private education is growing rapidly in the poorest sections of India. Private health clinics are sprouting up in remote villages.
China is following the East Asian model, with a strong government promoting and regulating capitalist growth. Historically, this has been the most effective way out of poverty. But India might well be forging a new path, of necessity, with society making up for the deficiencies of the state. Actually, this is not entirely new. In some ways India's messy development resembles that of another large, energetic, chaotic country where society has tended to loom larger than the state—the United States of America. It is a parallel to keep in mind.
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