RECASTING INDIA
Hindol Sengupta
Palgrave Macmillan,
2014; 239 pages
A man who has walked around for months wearing a "uterus" filled with goat's blood to test his sanitary napkin prototype on himself...
A phone-in news service which is transforming how news is communicated across remote rural areas...
A group of students from an elite Delhi University college, who are helping Delhi's manual scavengers earn an alternate livelihood by manufacturing and selling detergent…
Recasting India, the new book from Hindol Sengupta - an "editor-at-large" with Fortune magazine - tells the stories of 10 such people. It builds the thesis that crazy individuals and unconventional business plans are slowly but surely transforming remote parts of India by providing reasons for hope, in a way that socialism has failed to do in all these years. Based on his concept of "Per Capita Hope", which he believes often gets obscured by a "narrow focus on GDP" - Mr Sengupta makes the interesting assertion that the transformation of India is taking place not in the steel and glass citadels of business in Mumbai and Delhi but in urban slums and village courtyards.
It is, Mr Sengupta writes, free enterprise at the micro level which is gradually levelling social inequalities by raising livelihoods. This is also India's largest growing market segment - often of first-time users. But it is one that invariably fails to connect with swanky air-conditioned offices and opulent packaging. Quoting the example of the best-selling Shakti massage oil, intentionally sold in shabby packaging to its market of young women who don't want to appear too spendthrift to their in-laws, Sengupta suggests that products aimed at this newly emergent market must cater to their unique socio-economic needs to succeed. He brings home this point by visiting the austere offices of Shriram Capital (India's largest and most diversified non-banking financial corporation, with $2.5 billion in revenues in 2012) in Chennai's broken-down Sorrento building. Fancy interiors and air-conditioning, they believe, would take the bank away from its lower-middle-class customers.
Using a series of case studies, Mr Sengupta unveils the invisible entrepreneurial drive of small town India. Often, he says, this is stifled by government policies, which can best enable small business to succeed by getting out of its way. His subjects are varied: for example, a housekeeping service that is trying to change the perception of housework to a 'professional service'; and also the indefatigable Jammu and Kashmir Bank which, by providing loans to small-scale entrepreneurs, isn't just fuelling the beleaguered state's economy but also ushering peace in to the Valley.
One of the most interesting stories he tells is of Hiware Bazaar, in Maharashtra's suicide-prone Vidharba district, reputed to be the cleanest village in India. All it took was the visionary leadership of a young sarpanch, effective water management strategies, and collective cooperation to transform the village. At times, it does seem as if Mr Sengupta falls prey to hype - like, for instance, when he writes that the people of Hiware Bazaar once declared a Rs 500 prize for anyone who spotted a mosquito!
Nowhere is this hype more prominent than in Gujarat, Riots and Economics, a chapter that he devotes to the oft-cloying glorification of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mr Sengupta quotes multiple studies and reports to posit that for small-scale entrepreneurs in Gujarat, economics has been the most critical bridge between Mr Modi and the Muslims. Economic prosperity will, and has, brought peace to the state, he argues. He writes that today, only 7.7 per cent of Muslims in Gujarat are below the poverty line compared to 40 per cent in Assam and 24 per cent in Bengal. But Gujarati Muslims were always better off compared to those on other states! To give Mr Modi credit for their prosperity is inaccurate. Further, he credits Mr Modi for being the architect of peace in the state for the last 10 years - without ascribing him responsibility for the bloody riots preceding it.
Throughout the book, the catchy corporate-type phrases ("per capita hope", "peace dividends", "respect deficit") he's coined seem superficial. But there is a more important critique of his optimistic treatise. Indian society and economy are too complex and multi-layered for entrepreneurship to be a panacea for all its problems. While the growth of the small-scale sector and innovative businesses is indeed an interesting, even significant development, it is exactly what it is - small in scale. While it will definitely be a supporting factor in the nation's economic growth, it seems an unlikely stretch to recast India on its shoulders alone.
Towards the end of the book, Mr Sengupta makes an important and oft-ignored point about the self-congratulatory hoopla surrounding the Indian spirit of jugaad (which he defines as the "spirit of can-do-ness"). Jugaad, he says, can have a negative effect - of inhibiting further enterprise in the name of frugality. "But more often than not, in practice, jugaad is an excuse for appalling incompetence, inefficiency and a complete inability to define and live by world-class standards," he writes. In many ways, jugaad is the reason why products made in India are not of international quality standards. The way forward, he writes, is for Indian entrepreneurs to blend traditional skills with the best international quality standards, an indisputable and thought-provoking notion.
The book is a quick and easy read, which is only to be expected from a business journalist of Mr Sengupta's experience. The narrative is peppered with anecdotes, references and quotes (even some of Leonard Cohen's lyrics), which adds to the seduction of his blithe hopefulness. So much so that by the time the book draws to a close, readers will want to believe that good times are going to come, or at least, hope they actually do…
