Defining India’s future

HASNAIN ZAHEER reviews a book that offers a new template to pen the future of India’s growth and development, with steps in the right direction

For a country of India’s proportions with its one billion plus population, a trillion dollar economy and the promise of becoming an economic powerhouse that is just commencing to be real, there is a plethora of books analysing its economy and politics, opportunities and potential, hurdles and failures.

Imagining India: Ideas for the new century by Nandan Nilekani is not just a book. The author has written almost a blueprint to re-build India as an economic power that can bring prosperity, empowerment and happiness to its more than a billion citizens.

Australian-Indians who have already decided to live and work in India should be interested in this book for three reasons. The first is that in the global village of today, they can take advantage of their cultural, linguistic, business knowledge and contacts in India for growth by participating in bilateral trade and business. As bilateral trade skyrockets, they will gain from all this growth and contribute to betterment of both countries. Secondly, they can leverage their education and knowledge of advanced systems, processes and management, and perhaps financial inputs to bring solutions to India that can help it reach its goals quicker. And finally, as they frequently represent the face of India in social gatherings, Australian-Indians must know the ideas, issues and challenges to respond in a clear, knowledgeable and informed manner, not as gut-feel and hunches.

In software parlance, this book reveals the code to build a new operating system for India – one which is fast, flexible and scalable. It shows a direction in building governance structures, infrastructure and institutions that are growth oriented, inclusive, uplifting for the poor and disadvantaged, and are practical, yet steeped in the realities of India.

There is only one problem: the book demands a lot from politicians and lawmakers. Their dismal record in achieving results for the people they represent makes it unlikely they will fulfill these expectations.

It helps that the author is a business visionary who, as co-founder of Infosys Technologies helped establish the immensely successful software outsourcing industry in India. Infosys is one of the largest software services companies in India. But it helps even more that Nilekani had his brief brush with license-permit raj and experienced the labyrinthine corridors of Indian bureaucracy, as he spent the 1980s establishing his fledgling company. It is said that the software industry in India succeeded not because of, but in spite of the government. This book not only gains from Nilekani’s perspective as a successful co-chairman of Infosys in the 2000s, but also from his earlier experiences as a struggling entrepreneur fighting western (customer) perceptions of India’s delivery capabilities on one hand, and bureaucratic hurdles on the other.

Nilekani’s book outlines the state of many even marginally fundamentalist groups: his description of the Egyptian based Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, reads like only a slightly misogynist neighbourhood committee.

While still on the subject of Pakistan, two very different books recount the experience of growing up in Britain in Pakistani households. Ed Husain’s book The Islamist, describes his teenage years as a Hizb-ut-Tahrir jihadi operative in Britain, rubbing shoulders with well known terrorists, and his way out of it. This is an extraordinarily honest personal story, which examines the dislocation experienced by many second generation Muslim young men and their drift towards radical Muslim youth organisations like the Hizb. Husain also admits that sexual frustration is intertwined with the idea of terrorist glory. A quite different account of growing up a Muslim in Britain is Imran Ahmad’s book An Unimagined Life. Whereas Ed Husain came from a poor family, this is a story of a middle class boy who went to grammar school, University, and ends up as an auditor. The trajectory of his religious awakening quite different: coming from a liberal household, he discovers Islam only in the University, and is overwhelmed by the brotherhood of the global umma governmental and public sector affairs since the 1960s and is adamant that India has to go much further in its reform agenda to translate the tremendous potential that it has discovered in the past 5 to 8 years, into sustainable growth. Economically. India seems to have found the confidence to meet its ‘tryst with destiny’ after a few missed decades, but the game can still go either way. As a saying goes, ‘India has potential and it will always have potential’. The risk of failure is ever-present. Not unless we heed to Nilekani.

Nilekani has divided this book in four parts namely, Ideas that have arrived, Issues that Indians are currently engaged with, India’s deepest challenges and a riveting section Solutions and innovations, which makes it a work of superlative order. The author blends a compelling understanding of India’s economic, political, cultural and social issues to suggest solutions that can help it move forward. There is a comprehensive discussion of solutions relating to health, aged care and social security, but the focus is on declining environment and an emerging energy crisis.

The author’s solutions are balanced to avoid the ills of ultra-capitalism that may lead to rising inequity and rebellions as well as bureaucratic solutions to allocating resources that have proved a failure. He has utilized the insights from the problems that the developed world encountered in its growth phase to find solutions that can help India avoid duplicating those issues in its own quest for growth.

This book provides the knowledge and insights that you need to understand the key opportunities, issues, challenges and solutions for India.