A passage to India

I visited India after 6 long years, much has changed. Here are the broad strokes.

Almost everyone who I know personally has prospered materially. Everyone seems to have nicer houses and fancier cars. The exceptions are rare. Nothing makes me happier than to see family and friends prosper.

This is a result of individual efforts as well as the overall rising tide in India. The India story is real and it is safe to say that India is largely where China was 10–15 years back. Be prepared for the greatest cycle of wealth creation in the history of mankind.

The road and overall infrastructure situation is a study in contrasts. Internal roads, within cities which are more commonly used on a day to day basis have become an absolute disaster. Highways have improved by leaps and bounds.

This seems likely the result of the governments focus on inter city road infrastructure. Within cities there are flyovers and metros everywhere. There are taller buildings rising up wherever the eye goes, a number of cities and towns seem to be in a perpetual construction zone.

The result is a thick layer of dust and smoke everywhere. I made a remark about how hazy it was to someone and they responded without batting an eyelid that it was actually much clearer that day than normal.

Again this is likely to be an interim thing for a few years before the construction activity settles down. For instance in Ahmedabad, a lot of flyover work is largely complete now, the cities smoke and dust layer is relatively lesser.

The fancy new metros are barely used, this is largely down to them not being built where people want to travel.

The tall buildings springing up everywhere? the occupancy is quite low. You can get a steal on the rents and get world class living quarters. I wonder if there is a real estate bubble simmering below the surface similar to China.

Very hard to find domestic and manual help these days, a side effect of various government schemes and the spread of urbanisation means a number of labourers now are sitting on cash (after land sales or government handouts). The manual labour pool in Maharashtra and Gujarat seems to be exclusively from Bihar and UP. This was true even in the smallest villages.

A strange observation was the absolute proliferation of personal/political billboards all across Maharashtra and almost none across Gujarat. This seems to be a reflection of the fact that power and mind share is still up for grabs in Maharashtra and the matter has been largely settled in Gujarat. While every rando with a few rupees seemed to have his face plastered on a poster in Maha, in Gujarat only Modi/Shah seemed to be present.

News, especially non English news can be generously only called fictional entertainment/propoganda. Its shocking to see what passes for news. Often there is stuff which would make Goebells roll in his grave.

While large portions of the economy are now getting digitized and recorded, the country has a parallel economy of favors. This economy is far larger. Goodwill or who you know and who knows you gets you far, much further than money alone would. While this is true everywhere, in India this operates at a different scale.

Stock markets are on fire and from what I can tell this will continue over the next decade. This is where the action is and the whole country is now starting to tune into it.

The ongoing Adani episode however is a blackmark on the countries governance and regulatory/judicial independence. The countries leadership seems to be betting that internal investment and its size will eventually force FIIs to look past this and other bad behaviour on the international stage.

I think this is the real question on which the countries future hinges, whether the overall momentum is enough to cover up for the clear governance failures.

Past history from countries like China etc indicates that it will be. Even todays free democracies like S Korea, Taiwan were dictatorships when they were in the take off phase.

Past performance is however not always a guarantee of future results.

Till next time India, hope it is not as long this time around.