Off topic: Future Trends
Great story Kemble: Here is another story which might be of interest to you and thread, besides it might make good Sunday reading.
Source: Financial Times-London
Future trends: New heroes and a new mindset for year 2000
FRIDAY AUGUST 1 1997
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Gurcharan Das discovers on his travels around India that a nation of a million millionaires is on the way
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Raju's 14-year-old face breaks into a broad grin as he briskly serves south Indian coffee at a roadside shop between Madras and Pondicherry. 'This, sir, is my summer job,' he says.
'I earn Rs400 a month and I spend it all on computer classes in the neighbouring village. Our stupid village doesn't offer private computer lessons. So I cycle 3 km to the next village, where I learn computers two evenings a week. Our school does have two computers, but there is always a rush, and the older boys push me out. That's why I am taking summer classes.
Next summer, I am hoping for a summer job in a computer firm in Madras.' 'What will you so when you grow up?' I ask. 'I am going to run a computer company.' 'How did you decide that?' 'I saw it on TV, where this man, Bilgay, has a computer software company in America and he is the richest man in the world.' Five years after the economic reforms of 1991 I travelled 10,000km across India, taking both the high road and the low. The biggest change I found was a radical new mindset among the people. Raju is a symbol of this brave new world view.
A week after meeting Raju I was in Bombay, where I saw two young men in their early twenties walking at Nariman Point. They stopped to look at a tall building in awe. 'So, this is it!' said one. 'This is it,' replied his colleague, looking up with reverence at the office of Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of the Reliance industrial group.
"He came from nowhere and went up and up. They expected him to fall, but he refused and he built instead the largest company in India'.
The two young men had come from Pune and they were paying homage to their hero.
Forty years ago, when I was growing up our heroes were Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. Today it is Ambani and Bill Gates.
Indians have traditionally not accorded a high place to making money. It is for this reason that the merchant or baniya is placed third in the four-caste hierarchy, behind the brahmin, the priest, and the kshatriys, (variously landholder, warrior, ruler), but ahead of the shudra or labourer.
With the recent ascent of business after the economic reforms this order is now threatened. The sons of brahmins and kshatriyas want to be entrepreneurs. the high priest at the Tanjore temple, a leading Hindu temple in south India, says this mixing of caste occupations is 'deplorable...the beginning of the end'.
Even traditional baniyas are upset. Kirshan Lal Gupta a merchant from Baroda, said: 'It is money, not power, which motivates young people today, and everyone wants to be a baniya in this country. It wouldn't be so bad if they were trained in the norms of business. I mind it when others muscle in on our territory... (and) then give our business community a bad name when they get into trouble. Do they think making money is easy? It is a skill inherited over generations.' Mr Rakesh Mohan, an economist, calls it the 'banianisation of Indian society'. The new mindset says that it is no longer dishonourable to make money.
This phenomenon is to be found in abundance across the nation.
A government schoolmaster laments that 'everyone has become money- minded'.
He says: 'I am losing all my students to the new private school that opened in our village six months ago. they have to pay Rs30 a month compared to the Rs1 a month in my government school yet - can you believe it - the poorest Chamars of the untouchable caste are paying good money to send their daughters and sons to the new school?' Why are they leaving his school? 'Because they watch TV. They want to learn English. They want to be rich.' Mr Fateh Singh, a Chamar who stands shyly outside the door and who will not sit with us because we are in a Rajput's house, says: 'There is no loyalty left - everyone wants to get rich fast.' But his grown son, Vikas, says he wants to set up a factory to make trunks rather than become a conductor in the state-owned bus company.
Fateh Singh is annoyed because he thinks his son is a fool to let go of a secure job which he has obtained for him through influence.
The 200 families of Babnam village in the Hooghly district of West Bengal have learnt to rely on themselves. Each family earns Rs8,000 a month from making fine chikon embroidery.
'The last place I will go for help is to the government,' says Golam Mandal.
Suspicion of the government is part of the new mindset, in sharp contrast with just 20 years ago when the people considered the government to be 'mother and father'.
Even the judiciary and the trade unions have been affected by the changing attitudes. 'Justice Sawant of the Bombay High Court now delivers five out of 10 judgements in favour of business. Earlier, 10 out of 10 judgements were in labour's favour,' says Zia Mody, a young high-powered lawyer.
Even the street urchins have been infected by the new commercial energy. Kum Kum at the Janpath traffic lights is Delhi says her gajras (bands of perfumed flowers) are fresher because she puts them is a refrigerator to keep them cool. As a result, more of her gajras adorn the hair of young socialites in Connaught Place than those of her competitors.
Three thousand miles away, Sushila has started working in the Presidency Kid Leather factory. She earns Rs1,400 a month in Gudvencheri village in Tamil Nadu, making shoes for Florsheim, Clarks and Marks and Spencer. She is proud of the shoes she makes, but prouder of the dowry she is saving for herself.
All these people represent a new attitude which is increasingly determining India's identity.
The spirit of the age is reflected in the vast number of rags-to- riches stories. This is not due only to reforms, but is the result of the prosperity of the 1980s, when hesitant efforts with liberalisation lifted the Indian economy's growth rate from 3.5 per cent to 5 per cent. As a consequence, the middle class started to grow rapidly. Rural demand for everything from washing powders to black and white televisions exploded.
The reforms of 1991 then unleashed pent-up energies and created a new confidence among young people. Becoming rich has become fashionable. A government job was the rout to success in the previous generation, now the smart thing to do is to go into business. Money has replaced power and privilege.
Mr Pradip Kar, a Kashmiri brahmin in his late thirties, has built a Rs1.2bn company from scratch in Bangalore. His goal is to rich annual turnover of Rs10bn by 2000. Success has come since the liberalisation of the computer sector because he has focused single- mindedly on networking - getting computers to talk to each other.
His employees include 65 MBAs and 250 engineers, many of whom have been trained at the Indian institutes of technology (IITs) and the regional engineering colleges.
Mr Narayana Murthy won a place at IIT Kharagpur in 1962, but could not take it up because his father could not afford Rs150 a month for the hostel. His father earned a paltry Rs500 a month as an assistant education officer of the Karnataka government, and with that he supported eight children.
Today, Mr Murthy is 43 and worth Rs600m, based on the market capitalisation of his stock in Infosys, a software exporter based in Bangalore.
It is an impressive company, with about 1,000 professional employees, all of whom have an option to acquire shares in the company after three years service. Their success lies in teamwork, which is in great part due to Mr Murthy.
Seema and Sham Ramanna, both in their thirties, have built the country's biggest computer-generated visuals and graphics company for the advertising and film industries. Kiran Mazumdar, a woman in her early forties, has built a Rs250m biotechnology business from the export of enzymes. She is now moving into the drug discovery side of biotechnology with a group of international investors.
These are just some of India's new entrepreneurs. If China, which started reforms in the late 1970s, boasts 1m millionaires and 18m entrepreneurs, I wonder how many we have in India. India's reforms may be only six years old, but the country has always had entrepreneurs. In spite of the government's best efforts, it did not wipe out enterprise in the past 40 years. A walk to the bazaar is all one needs to see that the spirit of enterprise is alive.
Under the socialist 'licence permit raj' industrialists may have got into bad habits spawned by protection, but their behaviour reflected just as much entrepreneurship in the way they won and lost market share in the bureaucrat's office. They merely played by the rules of the old game. The difference between the old industrial houses and people like Mr Murthy, Mr Kar and the Ramannas is that they are creatures of the competitive economy.
Without the shackles of licensing and controls, of closed borders and of high taxes, the country will release new energies and India will also have 1m millionaires.
The writer, formerly chief executive of Procter Gamble India, is chairman of the board of Citibank India and a member of the Government's Foreign Investment Promotion Council.
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