India has been my home for five months now, the longest I’ve ever lived here. I thought I should write a summary of my observations to date, especially with regard to economic growth. This is important if you are to understand the forces at work on this huge sub continent.
Being a fourth generation South African and having being raised and educated there and in other parts of the western world, I am a bit of a fish out of water here in India. Having been cut off from our Indian roots more than 150 years ago, we Indian South Africans have developed at a tangent to the mainstream. Though recognisable as an Indian element in the South African context, here in Mother India, we are alien in more ways than one to our local, erstwhile cousins.
A fruit vendor in Bangalore city asks which part of the world I come from and I am curious how he knew I was a foreigner even before I spoke to him. “Because you walk different from us”, he says.
The fact is that I am here and I am living simply while I write, however difficult it might be in terms of loneliness or of being a fish out of water. My present lifestyle has tremendous advantages over my usual life pattern back home. There are no social demands on my time, I can come and go anonymously in whatever mode of transport takes my fancy, I can dress as I feel and keep to my own time. The plus point of my voluntary –and hopefully temporary – exile is that I am able to observe the incredible business opportunities in a society becoming more affluent by the day.
There is an inexorably growing middle class in India with all the painful pretensions of the nouveau riche everywhere. I do not find that as irksome as I find it intriguing. It occurs to me that a clever businessman could exploit that silly snobbery and turn it to his profit.
Catering for Yuppies
Let me illustrate what I am thinking in terms of the business opportunities. Having lived all my life in the west, I am not caught up in Indian paradigms; I think differently and I see things differently merely because of my background. Because of that difference in background, I can see the most amazing business opportunities where the locals have not even dreamt of them, simply because many of these ideas emanate from western concepts that have not yet reached India on a broad base.
What is happening is that thousands of Indians are constantly going abroad to study or work temporarily or to emigrate. They come back permanently or for holidays after having acquired a taste for western conveniences and comforts. There is a growing demand among the returnees for goods that are not traditionally available in India. Ever so slowly, businessmen are cottoning on to the fact that this applies not only to clothing but to other commodities as well, from potato crisps and fried chicken to furniture.
In the better class areas, one can sometimes find some of these commodities if one looks, but they are not common. With my western upbringing, I can see immediately what would sell to this class as well as to that section of Indian society that finds social leverage in its overseas-made possessions. These have tremendous snob value.
You are familiar with the Boardmans shops in all over South Africa; there’s one at most larger shopping malls. I first saw this type of shop in England more than 25 years ago, in the Habitat chain. Boardmans operate on the same principles; they could quite possibly be one and the same company. They stock attractive, tasteful household bits and pieces that would appeal to young, sophisticated homemakers. Most of the goods in those shops emanate from the east, from India and China, Malayasia, Thailand, Taiwan and other parts of South East Asia. The genius behind the marketing lies with Boardmans’ buyers, in locating the goods and displaying them tastefully under one roof.
Anybody who does that sort of thing in Bangalore, with its hordes of young, newly rich professionals, will make a killing. Boardmans appeals overwhelmingly to yuppies in South Africa; it will do no less to the young snobs here.
There are many South African products that will sell very well to the nouveau riche- and the more established moneyed class- here. Wines and KWV brandy. Water filters and plumbing fixtures. Canned foods, especially preserves. Snob products: the old Cape peaches in brandy. Liquers. Sherrys. Leisure products, garden tools and camping equipment. Accessories for four-wheel drives (SUVs).
Booming Economy
Amazing things have happened since I last came to India only four years ago. Most cities have grown larger and busier, naturally because of the burgeoning population as well as the economic growth of the country. As a visitor, one tends to be subjective: one sees only the comparative poverty. When one lives here, however, the picture changes.
In technological advancement, developments are mind-boggling. Recently, Intel invested 47 million dollars in this country for the manufacture of microchips. They are building a campus with all laboratory facilities for 3000 scientists. Bill Gates is investing 43 million dollars. Meanwhile, some of the biggest computer and IT names including Dell, Philips, Sony, Toshiba and Mitsubishi are established in the Whitefield Technical Park some four or five kilometres from where I live.
Thanks to the economic slow-down in Japan and in the west, India is growing economically in leaps and bounds. It is estimated that at some 320 million, India has the world’s biggest middle class and it shows. In Bangalore and other cities in the south, new housing developments are mushrooming everywhere and consequently, the service industries grow. There are now suburbs around Bangalore where there were open fields when I visited here just four years ago.
Automobile Industry
When I came here in 1993 and again in 1999, I was amazed at the number of women riding motor scooters. In South Africa, one almost never sees an Indian woman on a scooter or motor bike. Here it was common. Now one still sees them, but not nearly as many as before. I was puzzled until I saw the number of women now driving cars. They’re graduating.
Talking of cars: since the Rajiv Gandhi government eased, among other things, the restrictions on automobile manufacture and import/export, business is booming. The traditional, aged Ambassador is rapidly fading away into the sunset with a dieseline clatter and new models, mostly Japanese and Korean makes, are rolling out of Indian plants in ever increasing numbers. A new, entirely Indian-made car, the Indica, is being exported to the UK in modified form where Landrover markets it as the City Rover.
The automobile industry is fast growing into one of the largest in the world. Indian manufacturers are now making components for some of the most famous makes in the world, including Ford, DiamlerChrysler, Audi, Isuzu, Nissan, Mercedes Benz and General Motors. According to the July 21 issue of the news magazine “Outlook”, foreign car makers have set up outsourcing offices in India with a combined budget worth $1.5 billion.
Largest FOREX Reserves
The middle classes are growing in wealth. The large amounts of money being remitted to India by expatriate scientists, technologists, academics and doctors, coupled with other factors, have helped swell India’s foreign currency reserves to the largest in the world. According to the financial report in today’s “Times of India”, it has just crossed the $84 billion barrier.
In Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai, Indian technologists are being paid scales that were totally unheard of only three or four years ago. Foreign IT manufacturers value Indian software expertise so highly that they are prepared to bring their operations to the source of the labour AND pay dollar rates. A lot of people here are rolling in new-found wealth.
New Vitality
A week ago I bought the latest copy of “Businessworld”. The cover story was about a Chennai manufacturer who is turning his concern, the RPG Group, into a retailing powerhouse. They are starting operations on the lines of RSA’s Game and Hyperama, for this all-under-one-roof concept is unknown in India. One of the ways he is doing this is to recruit the best Indian retailing men from around the world. One of these is my old friend and relative, Kruben Moodliar, formerly a top executive of Game Discount World in Cape Town.
Kruben’s presence here in the Indian corporate world speaks volumes of the new wave sweeping through India. With his London School of Economics and South African corporate background, Kruben is indicative of the kind of transformation that is now taking place in Indian commerce and industry.
The seeming lassitude of an old culture is fast giving way to a new, youthful vitality. A youthful, new India is striding out from the dust and shadows of an ancient civilization.
I can understand now why, in the minds of men everywhere, India has always seemed eternal.
Best wishes,
VivekAnanda
