Whenever someone talks loftily about "Brand India", or variations thereof, I recall NDTV promoter Prannoy Roy's laconic comment about his own talent as a golfer: "Full of potential, like the Indian cricket team".
That assessment was made over a decade ago when "potential" would have been a polite way of describing the inconsistent performance of the national cricket team. But it could pass as a pretty good description of "Brand India" too.
This was evident in the comments of Soumitra Dutta, the first Indian-origin dean of the School of Management at Cornell University, in an interview with Alokananda Chakraborty and Devina Joshi in Wednesday's Business Standard. India's challenge, he said, was to "live up to its positive potential because the brand outside is bigger and brighter than the reality inside".
But what exactly does "Brand India" stand for? There's the rub. Dutta talks about the enduring soft power in successful Indian-origin professionals abroad and Bollywood films. But those are small elements and hardly compelling differentiators. Unlike, say, China (authoritarian efficiency) or Japan (ultra-high-tech professionalism) or the US (superpower), there hasn't ever been a single, coherent label to apply to India in the post-1991 world. That difficulty has partly to do with India's infinite variety - it is more diverse than any other country on the planet. But let's drill down the question to what the global business community thinks, since that was the focus of Mr Dutta's observation. As the good professor's comments suggest, global investors have no idea what to think.
It would be easy to heap the blame for this uncertainty on the current government; but Indian business, too, bears part of the responsibility. The term Brand India, which gained currency around a decade ago, acquired official sanction of sorts with the creation of the India Brand Equity Foundation by the commerce ministry to promote knowledge about Indian products and services overseas. The idea was to make "Made in India" internationally known. With the Indian economy growing at eight-plus per cent then, industry lobbies pounced on the term as a way of marketing India in all its post-licence raj energy.
This was not such a tough ask in the aftermath of Y2K and India's surging reputation as the back-office of choice. The breathlessly narrated Big Message then was that the Land of Snake Charmers and Poverty had morphed into an IT champ with its large English-speaking middle class (though no one mentioned the convenient time zone differential). And this Rising Middle Class also presented huge opportunities for global corporations struggling in plateauing western markets. Educational institutions of a certain persuasion even started holding expensive but well-attended seminars on such topics as "the Indian Way of Management".
With an eye to China's explosive expansion and global power, the received narrative was that India was the "world's fastest-growing democracy". The global messaging was very much on the form of government, as though something that vaguely represented a western political system would somehow make investors more accepting of the chaos of doing business in India. Luckily, with Indian companies and conglomerates launching M&A sprees overseas -and like the Tata group, daring to acquire signature global brands - it dawned on investors that India wasn't all about cheap IT proficiency.
Then suddenly, the story was all about jugaad, as companies like Mahindra & Mahindra and Bharat Forge showed the world that it was possible to do much more than leverage a labour cost arbitrage to manufacture products at less than half global costs. Many management consultants wrote reams on the subject, which they interpreted as "frugal innovation" when the term really means making do with what you have. But if we were to interpret "brand" as representing a competitive advantage, can jugaad really be considered a compelling one? An excellent book called Globality, written by three Boston Consulting Group consultants in 2008, shows how low-cost innovation has become a staple across the developing world, from Brazil to Bangladesh.
But that's where India has been stuck after 2008, a low-cost producer with no noticeable differentiator. Add to this the global slowdown and the United Progressive Alliance's sixties brand of policy-making and global investors now wistfully refer to "emerging" India's "unrealised potential". There is, however, one permanent label that Indians afflicted with muscular patriotism like to ascribe to their country: Emerging Superpower. Again, so full of potential, no?
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
