And so does poor old India. For 50 years the national identity has depended on isolation from perceived enemies - from plotting neocolonialists in the West, from greedy multinational companies, even from those intrepid Indians who resisted the official creed of self-sufficiency. But now satellite TV has come to Bihar, and Coca-Cola, too. Health and education will one day follow. The leaders in New Delhi have a new national ideal - rapid growth - and, at least in spirit, they have thrown open the doors to multinationals everywhere. More important, they are forging a national identity more suited to modern times. India, at last, has begun to see itself as another Asian nation dedicated to the accumulation of wealth and the spread of prosperity. In the next century that vision will hold infinitely more power than the old asceticism. ““Perhaps our industrialization is not complete,’’ says Srini Rajam, head of the Texas Instruments branch in booming Bangalore, ““but we can leapfrog into the Information Age.''
India has always had pride. Now it has ambition. In the early years of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru’s government rejoiced in standing apart, the epitome of the ““nonaligned’’ nation. As a conglomeration of peoples with seven major religions and 18 official languages, India made its own rules: a democracy on a continent ruled by despots, a planned economy whose bureaucratic stewards were satisfied to creep along at a 3 or 4 percent ““Hindu rate of growth.’’ Only when the New Delhi elite squarely acknowledged that its hubris had put the nation on the sidelines of the global economy - while India’s great rival China was getting rich - did real reforms begin. Now, six years into India’s opening to the world, the economy is growing by nearly 7 percent a year, a rate that by 2020 will transform its economy into the world’s fourth largest (after China, the United States and Japan). ““There is a lot of politi- cal cacophony,’’ says Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, who has served under two coalition governments in the last 14 months. ““But we are on course.''
There is no lilt to his optimism. A visitor to urban China (which is churning along at a growth rate of 9.5 percent a year) can almost hear the hum of enterprise in a nation that is fairly bursting to build a better life. The reformers of India, by contrast, tend to bow under the weight of their nation’s great poverty. Even now, 52 percent of their people still live on incomes of less than $1 a day, according to World Bank figures. Nearly two thirds of Indian children younger than 5 are malnourished, and those who reach school age can count on an average of only 3.5 years of education if they are boys, 1.5 if they are girls. By the time they reach adulthood, half are still illiterate. Think of it: India is trying to accelerate onto the Information Superhighway with nearly 300 million adults who cannot read road signs.
Comparisons between India and the economic tigers of East Asia are equally dismal. Pacific Rim economies that once ranked far below India and its South Asian neighbors now enjoy per capita incomes 27 times greater, according to the Human Development Centre, a Pakistani think tank that studies regional economic trends. The blunt reality of India’s failures is now driving its reforms, and most Indians agree on what must be done. From the Marxists running Calcutta to the Hindu nationals running Bombay (they call it Mumbai), the bywords of the new India are growth, foreign investment and, most hallowed of all, exports.
The strategy, formed in 1991 by the then prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, was ruthlessly simple: to dismantle the stifling bureaucracy that once ruled India as intrusively as Moscow’s planners once ran the Soviet Union. Rao and Singh cut much of the bureaucracy’s ““license raj’’ of red tape, then went on to simplify taxes, reduce the scope of the state sector (which provided everything from power to motor scooters), liberalize foreign investment and cut tariffs. From the earliest days, says Singh, ““our goal has been to show the world that India can compete with any country in Southeast Asia in our hospitality to investment and our spirit of enterprise.''
India’s culture has also been a force for reaching out to the world. The film industry turns out both masterpieces and tawdry B movies in astonishing profusion. Using the imported English language in their own unique way, novelists like Arundhati Roy, 37, a former actress and screenwriter, have become international best sellers. The literary tradition has deep roots; Hindu poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature as long ago as 1913.
Neither culture nor industry has done anything yet for the dregs of Indian society, the 200 million or so people at the very bottom of the ladder. But for the first time in history, economic growth and the spread of communications are working a revolution among many millions of India’s other poor. New Delhi’s program of teaming with foreign investors to string out copper wire for telephones is proceeding in fits and starts. Even in the capital, the wait for a new phone can still stretch to three years. Nonetheless, the government’s decision to let in foreign satellite television has led to an explosion of more than 20 million cable-TV connections within the last two years. That alone has helped to spur demand among low-income consumers to unprecedented levels. A manufacturer of $1.20 bottles of shampoo for middle-class Indians found a huge new market for two-cent packets of the brand in poor areas. The race is on to produce cheap television sets and appliances. One entrepreneur found a way to convert devices for making lassi (a yogurt drink) into cheap washing machines. And the first developer of a good $50 refrigerator, suggests economist S. L. Rao, would now find a huge new market in rural India.
More important, India’s poor are beginning to find their political voice. Indian democracy has always been hobbled by the primitive state of its grass-roots politics. Too many local leaders bubbled up to national power on their ability to buy votes and deliver favors - and subsequently used their national platforms mainly to enrich themselves. But the rural awakening that came with reform also has revived state and local politics. State competition for the spoils of reform is now common. Tamil Nadu attracted a Ford plant by waiving state sales taxes and offering land at a concessionary price. Uttar Pradesh won the battle to lure an electronics project set up by the Korean giant Daewoo.
The southern city of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, stands as the glittering tiara of the new India. Indians themselves own only 1.8 million installed personal computers - about a third the number in New York City. But what the info-tech companies stand for is vitally important. The homegrown firms and those allied with all the big names, from IBM to Intel, have exuberantly cut through red tape and protectionism, welcoming competition while becoming successful software exporters themselves. ““If we can’t compete with international brands in our own country, we can’t hope to ever compete in other countries,’’ says software-industry spokesman Dewang Mehta.
As India streamlines its bureaucracy and unclogs its courts, New Delhi and Mumbai may become more attractive to multinational corporations than the regulatory wilds of Beijing and Shanghai. If India can mobilize its hundreds of millions of young, cheap workers at a time when the work force of the developed world is aging, a boom of Chinese magnitude might not be out of the question. ““Just think of the economic output we can generate from this population when our per capita income of $330 doubles early in the next century,’’ says Mukesh Ambani, vice chairman of Mumbai’s Reliance Industries. ““That will clearly boost us into range of becoming an economic superpower.''
Somehow the mantle of ““superpower’’ does not quite fit the personality of a huge, poor country that will continue to regard itself, culturally and politically, as the world’s great exception. Nor will India likely become a classic Asian tiger. As a vibrant democracy that must always tend to its own first, the nation will never pro- duce a Deng Xiaoping to dictate its strat- egy from on high. The new Indian dynamo will muddle along, sure of its direction but never of its strategy, obsessed always with the myriad demands from within. ““We will take one sector at a time, show that it works and build confidence,’’ says Man- mohan Singh. ““There can be no big-bang theory of growth.''
An outsider can gauge India’s progress by measuring the market’s success at shifting resources to the government’s neediest constituents - something the centralized bureaucracy never could accomplish. How will life change in the most desolate regions of Bihar? At the absolute end of the line, in the village of Devnagra, a foreign donor recently gave $7,000 for a new well, the kind of gesture that short-circuits India’s inefficiencies (to put it politely) rather than validating reform. Nonetheless, once fresh water comes to the village, it will be less hard to imagine a school, a clinic, even a road - and along that road, a thin copper wire connecting the darkest corner of India to the riches of the world.
