IMAGINING India is the best book I have read about the future of India. Its author, Nandan Nilekani co-founder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine for 2009 and “Businessman of the Year” for Asia in 2007 by Forbes. He also inspired Thomas L. Friedman to write, “The World is Flat,” and in return, Friedman provided Nilekani a brilliant foreword.
Nilekani’s genius, according to Friedman, lies in his unique ability not only to program software but also to explain how such a program responds to the new trends in computing, how such trends will change the computing business, how this transformation will shape global economics and ultimately, how all these operations will affect India.
“Imagining India” is an eye-opener written by someone who understands the heart and soul of his native country, India.
Nilekani knows more than anyone that India stands at a crossroads and his book is a plea for the government to be as innovative and successful as the Indian people who are behind their country’s economic revolution. Despite India’s six percent annual growth since the early 1990s, “the absence of critical reforms means that for a majority of Indians daily life continues to be a struggle — for the millions of marginal farmers unable to find alternatives to bare, hard livelihoods; for people living in slums for want of cheaper housing; for families cobbling together their savings to send their children to private schools because the government schools are a mess,” says Nilekani.
Reading “Imagining India” requires us to think; this is not a light book about its film stars or its super-rich. The author attempts to understand India through the evolution of its ideas.
The book is divided into four parts.
Part One — the most interesting — shows how Indians have changed and how these shifts are at the core of India’s extraordinary vitality.
Part Two studies issues that have still not been tackled successfully such as full literacy, the need for cities and infrastructure.
In the third part, Nilekani brings up the endless and sterile debates concerning higher education (which, he says, is creating ‘educated illiterates’ whose degrees are not worth the paper they are printed on) and labor regulations.
The fourth and final part draws our attention to issues such as health, energy and the environment, which require more innovative ideas than the existing ones that have been so far ineffective around the world.
During the last 20 years, Indian voters have been shifting back and forth, voting out politicians who failed to provide them with a chance to better their lives. For Nilekani this shift is due to the strength of new ideas that are creating hope for an open access to opportunity and resources. However, interest groups and elites do not wish to relinquish power.
They have good reasons to prefer the status quo: Labor reforms, for example, will threaten businesses employing cheap labor. Yet “when it comes to our development goals, I strongly believe that our greatest advances come not in our discoveries, but in how we apply them to reduce inequality and create access. Ignoring this is not just bad policy; it carries high political risks,” writes Nilekani.
For most of the 20th century, people viewed India as doomed to remain poor and overcrowded.
The human capital which is calculated to last until 2050 has been the stepping stone for the formidable growth of India’s IT sector. India has the second largest reservoir of skilled labor in the world but, more interestingly, it has turned into a growing consumer market for the world economy, with a middle class already larger than the population of the United States and two-thirds the size of the European Union.
We are reminded that for much of its history, India was one of the most globalized countries in the world. Until the late 18th century, India together with China accounted for 40 percent of the global market. The subcontinent was at the heart of the trade for spices, textiles, hardwood and precious stones. Information technology played the role of the Trojan Horse through which globalization re-entered the Indian economy. While Nilekani hails the external circumstances which are so fortunate for India, he highlights the urgent need for resolving India’s internal conflicts, including the challenges concerning education, urbanization and infrastructure.
Many public services in cities have worsened, forcing India’s urban rich and middle class to live in gated communities, invest in private guards for security, pumps for water, and generators for electricity and also to put their children in private schools. City slums are also looking for solutions by providing utility services for a fee that includes sewage facilities, water and electricity.
“It will take courageous reforms to heal our urban landscape. But with the growing realization of how much economic growth depends on cities and how much we stand to lose from broken city structures, some progress is being made” says Nilekani.
Agriculture also suffers from an acute lack of consensus on reforms because the left and the right in India have opposite views. Left economists blame inflation on the rises in commodity prices and the reformers argue that efficiency that is better roads and cold chains allows the producer to get higher prices and the consumer to buy at lower costs.
Nilekani believes that subsidies which amount to more than ten trillion rupees should be stopped and replaced by a direct and transparent benefit system such as cash payments or vouchers.
In the last chapters, the author tackles environmental issues which have to be addressed if India is to reap the benefits of a sustainable economy. India is not burdened by old, polluting factories and it has the unique opportunity to create innovative solutions.
If India is to continue its growth, says Thomas L. Friedman, it should have “a government as aspiring as its people, politicians as optimistic as its youth, bureaucrats as innovative as its entrepreneurs, and state, local, and national leaders as impatient, creative, and energetic as their kids, and in my view, as Nandan Nilekani.”
Nandan Nilekani has written a brilliant book. He has the knack of explaining difficult issues in a clear and easy language. “Imagining India” should be read by anyone interested in the country.
