Kanika Datta: Wealth creation in 'Little India'

SWOT

Kewal is a driver with a small firm. Last month, his daughter was selected as an air-hostess with a foreign airline. Had she had a passport handy, she would have been flying to foreign shores as a professional in her own right. A few years ago, a washerman's son was employed by a leading Big Four consultancy and posted to its London office as a junior consultant.

Across India, there are thousands of such stories emerging from Little India, from people who come from small towns or from humble backgrounds and are bootstrapping their way to better lives. It is a trend that can be spotted in the call centre boom in Bangalore, Delhi, and Hyderabad.

Young men and women, who would otherwise have languished for years in universities and polytechnics, desperately over-qualifying themselves for meagre job opportunities, now earn decent salaries and have access to a hitherto unimagined range of goods and services. Or look at the glamour business; many of the girls and boys sashaying down the ramps these days are not big-town sophisticates; they have emerged from the new boom towns of liberalised India.

Across the board, young Indian adults equipped with a decent education and a working grasp of English are finding themselves within reach of opportunities and lifestyles that their parents could only dream of. Along the way, a social churning is challenging traditional mores and values like never before.

Careers are no longer an option only well-to-do westernised women consider; like Kewal's daughter, women from less exalted backgrounds now think well beyond the bounds of an arranged marriage. One only has to view the latest Fair & Lovely commercials to catch the spirit of this conservatively radical new India.

There is evidence too, albeit sparse, that youthful India is chipping away at old prejudices of caste, religion, and background that constrained the older generations. Kolkatans will recall, for instance, the recent contretemps when the high-born daughter of a leading state government minister decamped with and married an electrician's son. The two had met at a computer education course and the episode severely tested her father's Marxist credentials, much to the amusement of all concerned.

Leftists and the anti-globalisation fringe may be reluctant to admit it, but it is hard to escape the conclusion much of this change is being levered by liberalisation. Although little of this is captured in the official statistics, liberalisation-driven economic growth is creating opportunities and conditions in which background and social credentials are counting for far less than ability and merit.

How different all of this is from 20 or 30 years ago! In those days, the corporate world's sniffy boxwallah world was still dominated by the last vestiges of the British comprador class. Centred in Kolkata, access to jobs was a function of your background (upper middle class, English-speaking preferred), the school and college you attended (Doon School/St Stephen's commanded a premium) and whom you knew.

With corporate competition a rarity, ability was judged on such extraneous criteria as knowing your whisky, playing golf, working the cocktail circuit, and entertaining your boss in a series of seemingly endless lunches and dinners. It was a world that T Thomas, former chairman of Hindustan Lever, commented on rather acerbically from time to time.

Mr Thomas was in a good position to judge, since he was, in a sense, an "outsider" in terms of background""especially in a British multinational""and was witness to the thrusting ambitions of the new India that were emerging in and around Mumbai and Delhi.

But even here, the entry barriers were high if slightly less evident. Nevertheless, it was a world that could accommodate "old money" like the Tatas, Godrejs, and Birlas as much as the emerging aspirations of a former petrol pump attendant from Aden or a roadside juice vendor.

All the same, stories like those of Dhirubhai Ambani, Narayana Murthy, or Gulshan Kumar were exceptional enough to have been moulded into the stuff of Indian business legends. Partial liberalisation in the eighties saw the emergence of many more business barons with far less pretension to social sophistication""the Ruias, Goenkas, Chhabrias, Mittals, and so on.

Their needs and those of a corporate India that was subject to selective competition gradually expanded the market for corporate jobs. So much so that the cities saw a mini-boom in consultants who provided upcoming executives and their wives with tips to navigate the hazardous shoals of corporate etiquette with elan.

Today, it is this kind of evolution that is contributing to India's growth as a large, viable market by creating wealth in a durable and equitable manner. If the scattered but visible evidence of progress is any index, more enlightened reform will play a far bigger role in pulling India out of poverty than decades and decades of expensive poverty alleviation schemes ever will.

The views expressed here are personal