NEWSLINKS
US EDITION
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTION 99
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

New temples, new India

Let me confess at the outset that I believe in the ICE Age. It has been my conviction from the very beginning that if India is to progress and fulfil its true destiny, it must learn to build on its own traditional strengths and not borrow ideas about progress and development from the West.

We are no longer a colony of the British. We need to therefore re-examine with a free mind the models of economic growth that we learnt from them. The Industrial Revolution, if you look back on it now, was a disaster in human terms and the vision of an industrial society that it propounded is not exactly seen as socially desirable any more. It is, in fact, a burden we can well do without.

To progress, we need to recognise our own traditional skills. We must realise where our talents and our genius lie. Once we figure these out, we can build on them. The India of tomorrow will be stronger, richer, more self-fulfilled if we do this instead of trying to ape the West. In fact, if you notice, you will see that the West is today looking at us to show them a way out of the complex maze they have built for themselves in the name of modernity and laissez faire, where they have already lost their way.

That is why suddenly the whole world is coming to believe in what India has always believed in. That progress and development lie in ideas, information and communication. Not in building huge, world scale factories that produce assembly line commodities no one gives a damn for. With tariff barriers dropping and India becoming a part of the larger global economy, we can import most of these things at a price much cheaper than the price we make them at. What is much more important is that by doing this we protect India from the large scale environmental degradation that traditional models of industrialisation invariably bring in their wake. We also save ourselves from becoming a nation of poorly paid industrial labour, forever complaining, forever restless.

Self-reliance has unfortunately meant, over the past five decades, investing in more and more hard assets (buildings, factories, machines, assembly lines) and allowing our brains to rot, our skills to die. One of the world's bravest media has got virtually no global recognition. It remains hugely undervalued, terribly underpaid. One of the most successful entertainment industries anywhere had to depend, during its most crucial growth years, on mafia money and underworld support. While any Tom, Dick and Harry could pick up huge amounts of cash from our nationalised banks and financial institutions to fund any number of useless steel factories and cement plants. No wonder the NPAs of our banks and FIs have grown so astonishingly. The system was created specifically with the idea of being looted.

That is why in India you see so many businessmen who live lavishly while their companies go sick with unfailing regularity. That is the natural outcome of a foolish and corrupt economic order that insisted on valuing assembly lines as more important than people, real estate as more important than ideas, products as more important than talent. We are lucky that the ingenuity of our people did not die under such stress. In fact, it flourished.

Our newspapers grew. Our cinema halls attracted larger and larger crowds. Television channels swiftly multiplied. Then came information technology and before we could even begin to understand the way Infosys had transformed our stock markets, the dot com revolution hit us. It hit us so hard that we are still reeling under its impact and are refusing to believe that a rediff.com, which is yet to make profit, could be valued at $ 800 million!

This kind of huge and sudden growth brings in its own carpetbaggers, true. But, at the same time, it attracts a large number of young and talented people who can use their skill, intellect and ideas to metamorphose India from a third rate industrial nation into a first rate IT superpower. From a wannabe chasing outdated historical models of growth and development that left us gasping, we suddenly find ourselves spearheading the future on our own terms.

What is happening today is a natural corollary of this growth. Hundreds of millions of dollars are coming to India today, attracted not by our petrochemical complexes, however huge and impressive they may be. There are bigger and more impressive complexes elsewhere on the globe. They are not coming to India, attracted by our consumer goods factories. There are thousands of such factories in other parts of the world and the fact that our markets are huge and our labour is cheap are no longer the great draw they once were.

Investors in India are also not attracted by our steel plants and cement factories, most of which are teetering on the edge of technological obsolescence and financial bankruptcy despite the huge amount of institutional funds that have gone into them. The hundreds of millions of dollars that are coming to India are coming for businesses that rely on our intellect and our ideas, on our unmatched talent to inform and entertain.

By 2008, the Indian IT industry is expected to mop up over $ 100 billion in revenues as against an estimated 8 billion last year. By 2002, Internet subscribers will rise from the current one million to at least 5 million and this stunning growth rate is unlikely to yield way for a while. In fact, some say it may actually increase.

In five to six years, according the recently released report by Arthur Andersen for FICCI, the turnover from the entertainment industry is expected to surpass $ 15 billion. What was ridiculed as a naachna-gaana business till recently, a business in which no serious investor found it respectable to invest time or money, is now one of the three fastest growing sectors in Indian industry. The other two being IT and the media.

It is interesting to note that the maximum growth has been achieved in precisely those areas of enterprise that our political system and the bureaucracy ignored the most. Possibly that is why these industries thrived while the pampered ones ended up as T Rex. The success story of these new industries are built on ingenuity and enterprise, not manipulation and bribery. That is why they have led to the democratisation of wealth and have opened up the Indian business scene to a whole new generation of fresh-faced, young people.

From a nation of cheap labour we have almost magically transformed ourselves into a nation of bright entrepreneurs driven by the challenge of an open economy, a global marketplace and a government that is finding it more and more difficult to intervene in the mechanics of change. The clutch of corrupt, well-entrenched coteries that ran the Indian political system for decades, manipulated the bureaucrats and subverted the banking system is on its way out. They are being replaced by a vast number of driven and talented young people, backed by international venture capital and a variety of stock option plans.

We also owe a great deal to the growing diaspora. It is the NRIs at Silicon Valley who were the first to draw the world's attention to what we have. Who showed the way, in that sense. Then came the management talent who seized upon some of the best and biggest jobs in corporate America. Now Shekhar Kapur and Night Shyamalan have made their entries on Oscar night.

If we pursue this route, the wannabe industrial power that India has always been since the days of Pandit Nehru, when our factories were described as the temples of modern India, will transform itself into an information superpower that can lead the world towards its future. As it is, the very nations that spearheaded the information revolution in the West are the ones that have been the first to realise the importance of Indian talent and, for a change, have welcomed it.

The top IT companies are already here. The top entertainment companies are quietly moving in. They all realise that the talent to drive the future of these businesses is here. And even though our infrastructure is weak and our technology needs to catch up with the rest of the world, our talent and our skills are enough to make it worth their while.

That is why, whether the stock market booms or flops, the ICE age is here to stay.

Pritish Nandy

Tell us what you think of this column