How India can be great again

Book review of Making India Great Again: Learning from our History

A title such as Making India Great Again… leads one to instinctively conclude that this book is likely to be another exclusionary war-cry like Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” or the Brexit crowd wanting to “Make England Great Again”. Far from it.

Take, for example, the authors’ critical analysis of one of the things stopping India from becoming “Great Again”: “A key component of any ecosystem favourable to business is the availability of low-priced real estate, whether on sale or for rent. India is one of the few countries where the real estate sector has seen an almost continuous rise in prices for nearly a century. Much of the rise has to do with urbanisation and to that extent it is positive. But much of the rise also has to do with a lack of transparency in the land market, with opaque and outdated government procedures and a high level of black money. All these elements have led to the emergence of a massive land mafia.”

And their recommendation: “Land mapping through satellite imagery, drones, all the technology that is needed for such a task is available; what we need is the will to execute it.” Their view is that if all land in India is mapped like this with a unique ID and clear title, the land mafia will be eliminated and land will be easily available at a reasonable price to build profitable factories and affordable homes.

This combination of insightful, grounded analysis and recommendations based on the use of state-of-the-art technology is the hallmark of this book.

A second dimension to this probably flows from the fact that the first author, Meeta, is a serving IAS officer who, therefore, casts a realistic eye on issues facing India and the second author, M Rajivlochan, is a professor of History and this shows in the way they look for current and historical explanations for some of India’s challenges. Consider a mystery that has puzzled practically all Indians: How did a British trading company, the East India Company, conquer a large and powerful country such as India? The authors provide a thorough analysis of this mystery complete with facts that even I, an avid reader of history, have not read before.

The authors also put some of India’s apparent “successes” in proper perspective. Through the past decade several Indian companies (Micromax and Karbonn to name just two) have been adulated in the media and honoured with chambers of commerce awards for being leaders in the domestic mobile phone market. But the moment Chinese phone manufacturers turned their eyes on the Indian domestic market, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo have virtually eliminated them. Unlike other analysts of this trend who attributed the Indian companies’ failure to everything but the real cause, the authors point out that these Indian companies were mere traders who imported mobile phones made in China and rebranded and marketed them. They made no attempt to master the innovation needed to design and manufacture mobile phones.

Making India Great Again: Learning from our History

Author:  Meeta Rajivlochan & M Rajivlochan

Publisher: Manohar

Pages: 229; Price: Rs 1,497

Even India’s so-called “IT-enabled services” success does not miss the authors’ analytical eyes. The media consistently parades the owners of such companies as heroes. But as the authors correctly point out, “The majority of the Indian IT industry continues to provide services of a lower order to international markets. Data entry, call centers, medical transcription, writing basic code; all these account for the bulk of the business processes outsourced to India.”

I felt like standing up and clapping when I read that, “future-oriented skills like data science, cyber security, machine learning need to be melded into the courses taught to students in the basic Arts, Science and Commerce programs”. I also know how hard it is to convince policy makers of the need for this. As the chairman of the subcommittee on employment and entrepreneurship for crafting the National Education Policy last year, my key recommendation was to introduce Machine Learning courses across all undergraduate curricula, even for commerce, literature, and economics, let alone all forms of engineering. But I cannot explain how difficult it was to ensure that this specific recommendation was not edited out in the final report.

Perhaps the part of the book that made me tear up was the authors’ analysis of why/how the British overcame the Marathas. Quoting William Henry Tone, an English East India Company official who served in the army of one of the Maratha rulers towards the end of the 18th century, they say the Maratha cavalry was only paid a daily ration of flour; the cash salary came occasionally and to recover arrears of pay, the troops had to sit on dharnas. Again, the authors don’t merely recount this sad story, but attempt to unravel the real reason behind this: “The Marathas had one of the most powerful armies in the world. What counted more was the Company’s ability to manage money, to manage taxation much better so that they could depend on revenues to pay their soldiers….The Indian soldier in a local army had to organise his own horse, his own gear and even his own arms.”

This book has many more such stories from history but, most importantly, the authors, in their final chapter, draw lessons from these stories and make a list of to-dos, mainly techno-commercial, for India to become great again.