India imposes itself on the consciousness, like no other place. On the flight home after every visit, I am left reflecting on things I saw, people I met, what I heard or read about and how much or how little things have changed since my last visit. My most recent trip was easily the most disturbing and depressing by a long margin. It is good to see the economy boom and prosperity flow to the people, I am however getting concerned at the rapid slide towards India becoming a Ten Percent Nation.
I do not mean Ten Percent in the sense of the growth rate India aspires to. Neither to the bribes that increasingly need to be paid to get anything done nor to the incessant clamor to reserve everything for every community and thereby elude the merit trap. Rather a peculiar phenomenon you witness everywhere you look is that of a small minority of people, organizations or systems that are world class amidst a vast ocean mired in abject mediocrity.
Why the contentment with mediocrity? I can think of three drivers: Lack of opportunities starting from education or infrastructure for a significant chunk of the population. Second is force of habit. It is easy to live in India and drop your aspirations for rewards and settle into a cocooned existence of your family’s heritage. Last and increasingly significant is the opportunity to latch on to someone in power, leech like and live off ill-gotten gains. One consequence of this situation is that for every statement about India, the converse point of view can be argued with equal passion.
Take politics. It is progressively becoming a family enterprise and the arguments that got rid of the aristocracy & feudalism have long since been jettisoned. A recent study showed that as many as two thirds of elected representatives under forty and an astonishing 100% of those under thirty owed their success to their family’s political presence. Every politician sees his/her role as holding fort and accumulating wealth for the succeeding generation, almost to a rule. No place for upstarts here. The successors in turn are brought up in an entitlement culture. Not being offered their parent’s seat or ministership is a personal affront that gets them terribly riled. They split parties, organize street protests, and make their disgruntlement known by burning down buses and shutting down whole towns. There is no ideology here except self-perpetuation. Another interesting phenomenon is that Indian politicians defy Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At no point do they seem to migrate from making money to thinking about their legacy. The expectations are pretty inconsequential. Having a street here or an unexceptional educational institution there named after them and of course a profusion of statues is all they aspire for. Shelley’s admonition is sadly forgotten:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away”
A few well-meaning politicos plow a lonely furrow in this morass.
Turn your attention towards business. The Economist recently published an analysis that in the past decade a growing share of business growth has been captured by existing business houses or by entrepreneurs connected to those with political power. Infosys was seen as the last start up with global aspirations that was purely entrepreneurial and was being run as a professional and ethical entity. And when did Infosys get started? That was thirty years ago. So Big Business and crony capitalism are crowding out entrepreneurs. As the economy opens up and new opportunities become available, why are entrepreneurs unable to jump in? Why are they unable to scale? Why do they not have aspirations to global excellence? Here is a typical example. I have arrived at the Mumbai International Airport. After a tiring flight, I and several others like me are not looking forward to the four hour drive to the nearby town of Pune. We have lined up to take a taxi. Over the years I have watched this taxi company’s business prosper from the booming traffic. There have now nearly a hundred taxis plying this route. A nice story of an entrepreneurial venture prospering, you might say. From the team doing the job day in and day out, you would expect the performance of a well-oiled machine. And you would be wrong – by a wide margin. The chaos as drivers and the folks managing the station try to figure out the optimal way to seat the incoming passengers would be appalling if seen in a bunch of newbies. Baggage is loaded and promptly unloaded. Passengers seated and asked to disembark in a comic charade. If there is any system or process that is being followed, I would have great difficulty telling what it is. On the way the driver mentions business is booming. On some days he does two trips to cope with the demand. His boss has just bought a swank German automobile with all the money sloshing around. So what is he planning to do next, I ask. Invest in Real Estate, is the instant response. Real Estate? So no aspirations to growing one’s business into world class operations. I have often been puzzled at the keenness of businessmen to dabble in several sectors. Reality is at heart few are in any business for the passion. Rather they see it as an opportunity to make money. That is as it should be. But making money as the end and not a byproduct of the act of creation means the focus is never on striving to excel in the field you are in.
Education is in a similar state of decay. For all the talk about the excellence of the IIT’s and the IIM’s, fifty years on, there is scarcely an institution that aspires to out IIT the IIT’s or the IIM’s. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Engineering and Management institutions have been started during these years. Is it not an astonishing spectacle that these are mostly run as printing presses giving their students little more than a piece of paper the receiver hopes will be their passport to the good life? And of course as ATM’s throwing out cash for the founders!
I have always wondered why it is so difficult for Indians to aspire for excellence in their fields. Why don’t the performances of the 10% motivate the rest? Why must mediocrity be the norm? In the closed economy of the past, one could argue that awareness or funding was a barrier. But these days every field is global and access to funds is not an issue anymore. If anything there is way more money chasing top talent. Financial rewards in India are disproportionately skewed towards the high performers in every field. For example, a study at Wharton analyzed Indian Cricket and concluded that the top players corner way higher share of the total pool in Cricket than in the NBA or NFL. So the financial incentives are in place. If so, is it the hard work that is required to raise and sustain one’s game the barrier - especially when short cuts are available? Exhortation by poets like Tagore for a land where ‘tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection’ have fallen on conveniently deaf ears.
Actually it does not take a vast majority to lift a nation to greatness. What is needed is that the actions of a few inspire emulation from only a few more. In the answer to this conundrum lies the path for the country to achieve a modicum of its boundless potential.