India unbound review pdf

See and discover other items: There are no discussion topics on this book yet. In between he got distracted and wasted his energy to keep Pepsi out of India. ComiXology Thousands ungound Digital Comics. Return to Book Page. In this regard, I think the book stands as unique. In the face of the monumental challenges that it ujbound, that it remained a stable and secular democracy was some sorts of achievement in itself. The Difficulty of Being Good. LitFlash The eBooks you want at the lowest prices.

But he says that they did it out of compulsion and not because they had vision. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. He looked down at the private sector. The Asian tigers took the latter route. India was the only non-communist where manufacturing good beyond the licensed limit was a crime. Despite repeated warnings from the USA, India decided not to focus on agriculture since it was believed that it is a western conspiracy to keep India backward and eventually suffered a food crisis.

Finally, when Lerma Rojo was imported, which lead to the green revolution, it was criticized as being sold to America. Slowly the businesses learned the tricks like exhausting all the licenses of a product to prevent any future competition and this reduced their capability to work in the competitive economy.

Several state-owned enterprises emerged during this era which was not profitable and sometimes did not produce any goods eg. Scooters India Ltd. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies.

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Privacy Overview. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Ranting in English, Chanting in Sanskrit 2.

Smells of the Bazaar 3. The Train to Nowhere 4. Blind Then, Blind Now 5. The Paper Route 7. Bazaar Power 9. Lerma Rojo and Taichung Native No. Caste Multiplying by Zero Merchants of Marwar Dreams in Kabutarkhana The Golden Summer of A Million Reformers New Money Old Money The Rise and Rise of a Middle Class Modern vs.

Western Democracy First, Capitalism Afterwards He is the author of the novel A Fine Family. His other literary works include a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three English Plays, consisting of Larins Sahib, a prize- winning play about the British in India, which was presented at the Edinburgh Festival; Mira, which was produced off-Broadway to critical acclaim; and 9 Jakhoo Hill, which has been performed in major Indian cities.

First published in , the best-selling India Unbound has been translated into several languages worldwide, and was also made into a film by the BBC. There are layman-friendly discussions of economic theories of poverty, and his arguments are leavened with a close reading of economic texts, both classic and contemporary. He weaves a series of unconnected actions into a pattern with some sort of theme.

Gurcharan Das provides a fascinating interpretation of the possible reasons in India Unbound … Not often does one come across a former CEO of a major organization … who is also well-read in a wide range of subjects, ranging from economics to philosophy to poetry. On a recent visit—after several years—I found a book which gave a vivid and persuasive explanation of the transformation all around me.

India Unbound … is a mixture of memoir and social and economic inquiry, written with great energy, personal knowledge and clarity. It talks of an India where teenage tea-shop assistants work to save money for computer lessons …[and] says that if the poor get rich and a few people get filthy rich, that is better than worrying about the distribution of wealth and no one getting rich.

Never before in recorded history have so many people been in a position to rise so quickly. India has recently emerged as a vibrant free-market democracy after the economic reforms in , and it has begun to flex its muscles in the global information economy. The old centralized bureaucratic state, which killed our industrial revolution at birth, has begun a subtle but definite decline. With the rule of democracy the lower castes have gradually risen.

This economic and social transformation is one of the themes of this book. The struggle of one-sixth of humanity for dignity and prosperity seems to me a drama of the highest order and of great consequence for the future of the world. It has meaning for all of humanity and sheds new light on the future of liberalism in the world. The story I will be telling is soft drama. It is taking place quietly and profoundly in the heart of Indian society.

It unfolds every day, in small increments barely visible to the naked eye, and is more difficult to grasp than hard drama, which is more dramatic and captures the headlines. Most people instinctively grasp the spirituality and poverty of India. But the significance of this quiet social and economic revolution eludes them. The change is partially based on the rise of social democracy, but more importantly on the sustained 5 to 7 percent annual economic growth that India has experienced for the past two decades, which has tripled the size of the middle class.

However, this is not autobiography. I did not, besides, wish this account of national competitiveness to be dry and didactic; I wished to breathe life into the clash of economic and social ideas. Having set out to create socialism, we found that we had instead created statism.

As a practicing manager in the s I found myself caught in the thick jungle of Kafkaesque bureaucratic controls. Our sense of disillusionment reached its peak during Mrs. It was not until July that our mood of despair finally lifted, with the announcement of sweeping liberalization by the minority government of P. Narasimha Rao. It opened the economy to foreign investment and trade; it dismantled import controls, lowered customs duties, and devalued the currency; it virtually abolished licensing controls on private investment, dropped tax rates, and broke public sector monopolies.

As a result, growth picked up to 7. Although the reforms after have been slow, hesitant, and incomplete, they have set in motion a process of profound change in Indian society. A half century of the ballot box has also empowered the lower castes, and this means that the fruits of the reforms are likely to be better distributed. The irony is that most Indians, especially in the political class, have not yet realized it. If they had, they would invest more in education and implement the reforms much faster.

One of the intriguing questions of history is why we failed to create an industrial revolution in India. Marx predicted that the railways would transform India and usher in an industrial revolution. Indeed, by the First World War, some thought that we were ready to take off.

It also had a merchant class hungry to become industrialists. After the war, industrialization did, in fact, pick up. Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, and other businessmen made huge trading profits during the First World War and reinvested them in setting up industries. Between and , our manufacturing output grew 5. But it was not enough to broadly transform our agricultural society.

Modern industry employed only 2. The chief problem was our agriculture, which remained stagnant, and you cannot have an industrial revolution without an agricultural surplus or the means to feed a rapidly growing urban population. After we won freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru and his planners attempted an industrial revolution through the agency of the state. They did not trust private entrepreneurs, so they made the state the entrepreneur.

Not surprisingly, they failed, and India is still paying a huge price for their follies. Instead, we experienced an agricultural revolution. Ironically, we now had an important precondition in place—an agricultural surplus—but the industrial revolution continues to elude us. When I was in college, we talked about India as though it were an airplane and we wondered when it would take off into self-generating growth.

One, it adopted an inward-looking, import-substituting path, rather than an outward-looking, export- promoting route, thus denying itself a share in world trade and the prosperity that trade brought in the postwar era.

Two, it set up a massive, inefficient, and monopolistic public sector to which it denied autonomy of working; hence our investments were not productive and we had a poor capital—output ratio.

Four, it discouraged foreign capital and denied itself the benefits of technology and world-class competition. Five, it pampered organized labor to the point where we have extremely low productivity.

Six, and perhaps most important, it ignored the education of half its children, especially of girls. In stubbornly persisting with the wrong model of development especially after , when there was clear evidence that this path was doomed , they suppressed growth and jobs and denied their people an opportunity to rise above poverty. It is ironic that men and women of goodwill created this order and were widely admired.

After all, they did succeed in institutionalizing democracy. The second irony is that in the name of the poor they refused to change course. The worst indictment of Indian socialism is that in the end it did very little for the poor. All the countries of East Asia did far better. Even China, with all its convulsions over the past fifty years, has done a better job at improving the lives of its people.

Our failure came less from ideology and more from poor management. As many as sixty-five out of a thousand infants die, and that is too high; two-thirds of the children suffer from malnutrition and are underweight. Seventy-one percent cannot access sanitation. Four out of ten Indians are illiterate.

Other similarly placed countries have done better. They feel no humiliation that India has lagged behind in a Third Worldish twilight while its neighbors in East and Southeast Asia have gone ahead. They have used the recent troubles of East Asia to justify our incomplete and frustratingly slow reforms.

When individuals blunder, it is unfortunate and their families go down. Indians have not traditionally accorded a high place to the making of money. The Vaishya or bania merchant is placed third in the four-caste hierarchy, behind the Brahmin and the Kshatriya warrior, landowner , and only a step ahead of the laboring Shudra.

Since the economic reforms, making money has become increasingly respectable and the sons of Brahmins and Kshatriyas are getting M.

The commercial spirit is not limited to the cities. The smallest village has found it. On a visit to Pondicherry from Madras a few years ago, I stopped at a roadside village cafe where fourteen-year- old Raju was hustling between the tables.

He served us good south Indian coffee and vadas. Raju told us that this was his summer job and it paid Rs a month—enough to pay for computer lessons in the evenings in the neighboring village. For the next summer, his aunt in Madras had arranged a job for him in a computer company. Can you believe it—they are willing to spend Rs 35 a month when it costs one rupee a month in my school! No one wants to work on the land. He complained that his grown-up nephew, Vikas, wanted to set up a factory to make steel trunks in nearby Khurja rather than become a conductor in the state- run bus company like his father.

Indians are slowly realizing that economic reforms are not only about tariff levels, deregulation, and structural adjustment. They are about a revolution in ideas which is changing the mind-set of the people and leading to the commercialization of Indian society. Rich countries were supposed to specialize in the knowledge industries of tomorrow and poor countries in low-wage, low-skill industries of yesterday. There are software companies in Bangalore.

Most of them have customers in America, who e- mail their needs before they leave their offices. While they sleep, Indian engineers work on their problems. By the next morning, as they bring their coffee mugs to their desks, Americans have their answers as they log on.

It plans to become the world leader in computer education. Over the last decade, it has created 1, entrepreneurs and fifteen thousand jobs.

The spirit of the age is reflected in hundreds of entrepreneurial successes in the knowledge economy. Ranbaxy, Dr. Crest Communications in Bombay is one of only two studios outside North America with the expertise to make 3D animation films and it has recently won a contract from one of the Hollywood studios to make an animated feature film.

These entrepreneurial miracles are part of a new social contract for postreform India. The new millionaires did not inherit wealth. They have risen on the back of their talent, hard work, and professional skills. The old business houses, on the other hand, are struggling in the competitive economy created by the reforms.

The dilemma of Rahul Bajaj is typical of the old companies. Yet he is unable to take the next step, which is to become a global player. But he exports only 3 percent of his output. Despite his awesome advantages, Bajaj does not have the confidence to take on the Hondas and Yamahas in the world market. A decade ago, no one would have even thought of criticizing Rahul Bajaj for not thinking globally. Government rules did not permit him to have a foreign operation, or buy equity of a foreign company, or import components at a reasonable tariff, or expand capacity at will, or buy new technology without a lengthy approval process.

He sold everything he produced, because demand was always ahead of supply—for a decade, there was a ten-year waiting period for his scooter. Thus, he never developed marketing or product development skills. Rahul Bajaj is a creature of Nehruvian socialism. The legacy of forty years of a closed economy has caught up with him. They do not have the skills to succeed in the global economy.

Eight years into the reforms, they are still floundering. Success in the global economy needs three things: massive investment in human resources, a passion for product improvement, and a deeply caring attitude for customers.

These companies are smart and they understand this. The answer is that it takes time to change from doing what you have been doing successfully.

But time is precisely what they do not have. The beginning of the twenty-first century is a time of ferment. One is the liberal revolution that has swept the globe in the past decade, opening economies that were isolated for fifty years and integrating them spectacularly into one global economy.

They are dismantling controls and releasing the long-suppressed energies of Indian entrepreneurs. They are changing the national mind-set, especially among the young.

Because we are endowed with commercial communities, we may be in a better position to take advantage of this global tendency. Merchants understand from birth the power of compound interest; they know how to accumulate capital. The Internet has also leveled the playing field, so that it seems sometimes that any mad, passionate Indian entrepreneur can write his own future. Meanwhile, the information economy is transforming the world—this is the second global trend.

We may not be tinkerers, but we are a conceptual people. We have traditionally had a Brahminical contempt for manual labor, which was relegated to the lowest caste, Shudras, who were also denied knowledge. A tinkerer combines knowledge with manual labor, and this produces innovation. Our entrepreneurs, who come mainly from the higher merchant caste, have also shied away from manual labor and technology.

This may be another reason why we did not produce innovation and failed to create an industrial revolution. But this is all changed now, for the industrial age is gone and the knowledge age potentially plays to our advantage. Our success in software and the Internet is the first emerging evidence.

We have wrestled with the abstract concepts of the Upanishads for three thousand years. We invented the zero. Just as spiritual space is invisible, so is cyberspace. Hence, our core competence is invisible. There is an old idea in economics, as old as Adam Smith, that if a rich and a poor country are linked by trade, their standard of living should converge in the long run.

It makes intuitive sense, because standard of living depends on productivity, and productivity, in turn, depends on technology. When a poor nation is connected, it merely adopts the technological innovations of the rich one without having to reinvent the wheel. Thereby, it grows faster and eventually catches up. Why then has the world not converged in the past fifty years? Very simply, because the rich and poor were not joined.

Between and , the thirteen open countries grew at an average 4. India was in the latter group, and not surprisingly many East Asians were in the former.

Thus, convergence did take place among the virtuous few economies, and they did substantially conquer poverty. Now the world has changed. If this is sustained and literacy keeps rising, there is a very real prospect that people below the poverty line, who live on less than a dollar a day, will decline to a more manageable 15 to 20 percent of the population from 50 percent today.

This is the experience of the East Asian countries. China will get there probably ten to fifteen years earlier. Just ten years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Today, astonishing as it may seem, we can dare to contemplate this proposition. As a result, 40 percent of Indians remain illiterate. We have now realized that primary education and primary health care are the two most powerful ways to eradicate poverty. Simultaneously, there is a growing, impatient demand for these social goods from below.

Indian literacy has already risen by ten percentage points in the past six and a half years, from 52 to 62 percent. It is primarily because of grassroots pressures from below as social democracy has created upward mobility among the lower castes. The push for liberal economic reforms combined with investment in human capabilities will ensure that millions of Indians lift themselves from poverty within a generation.

India embraced democracy first and capitalism afterwards, and this has made all the difference. India became a full-fledged democracy in , with universal suffrage and extensive human rights, but it was not until recently that it opened up to the free play of market forces.

It means that India will not grow as rapidly as the Asian tigers, nor wipe out poverty and ignorance as quickly. The Economist has been trying, with some frustration, to paint stripes on India since It is an elephant that has begun to lumber and move ahead. It will never have speed, but it will always have stamina. It will also avoid some of the harmful side effects of an unprepared capitalist society, such as Russia. Although slower, India is more likely to preserve its way of life and its civilization of diversity, tolerance, and spirituality against the onslaught of the global culture.

This is far from the truth; on the contrary, political economy produces feelings so intense for the removal of these evils, that it will not permit us to rest satisfied … but impels us to … discover the true causes of this wretchedness, and the mode by which it may be removed ….

When I was born, we were fighting to get the British out of India. By the time I went to school, we were free and we thought we would soon enter a new paradise. During my school days in the s, Nehru set about building a proud new nation based on democracy, socialism, and secularism.

When I went to work in the sixties I discovered that we had become economically enslaved and socialism was leading us to statism. By the time I got married and we had children, Indira Gandhi was creating dynastic rule and leading us into a ditch.

When she declared the Emergency in the mid-seventies, we knew that political freedom was gone, and paradise was lost. Mercifully, the Emergency lasted only twenty-two months, and we soon recovered our political freedom. Just before I took early retirement in the early nineties, Narasimha Rao delivered us our economic freedom. Thanks to the reforms, we have glimpsed paradise again and are on our way to regaining it. We have climbed to a 7 percent economic growth rate, and if we grow at this rate for a few decades and keep raising our literacy level, the nation will turn increasingly middle class and the degrading poverty of India will begin to vanish.

I was born soon after Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British by launching the Quit India movement in , which led to Independence five years later. My birth also coincided with a second event, the Great Bengal Famine, in which three million people perished.

Both these events would never be repeated, and have become remote in public memory. In a sense, the year of my birth brought down the curtain on an age. The Quit India movement was born of frustration. For twenty years, Gandhi and the leaders of the nationalist movement had tried to negotiate with the British. Twelve years earlier, on 11 March , he had informed the British that he was going to violate the salt-tax laws and collect salt from the sea.

On that day, in a single stroke, he aroused the whole of India. Fishermen began collecting salt; then the peasants were making salt; the housewives followed suit. Soon the whole country was breaking the law and the people began to court arrest. But how many could the police arrest? Thus, year in and year out, Gandhi provoked the rulers with civil disobedience and drove them to distraction.

In the end, they just gave up and left. No wonder we felt that we were a nation created by saints. I grew up in a middle-class home in Punjab in northwest India.

Most of Punjab was arid, but over three generations the vision and toil of engineers like my father created a network of canals that irrigated the land and made it a granary. The lower Chenab canal was one of the first to be built in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With it came an orderly and planned town called Lyallpur, so named after the ruling lieutenant governor of Punjab, Sir James Lyall. I was born there a generation and a half later. In the middle of Lyallpur was a brick clock tower where eight roads crossed and around which the town spread out in concentric circles.

Our house was off one of these roads, called Kacheri Bazaar, on the way to the Company Bagh, whose gardens sprawled sumptuously over forty acres. We were a professional middle-class family not particularly given to patriotic enthusiasms. Famines, of course, were too unpleasant to be the subject of polite conversation. Nevertheless, the famine in Bengal did intrude into our complacent world.

He took a train from Lahore to Calcutta, and from there he went on to the Bengal countryside, where he experienced the trauma of the riots and deaths that took place. On his return, he told us that he did not understand the insanity of the situation.

The supply of food had declined only marginally, but its distribution had failed completely. The only thing he could say for sure was that there was a human agency involved in a criminal and nasty form.

He spoke vividly of a peasant who had fallen dead on a street in Calcutta—he spoke as though he knew him intimately. When it came to explanations, Sat Pal tended to see everything in class terms, and the others would lose interest. During the Great Bengal Famine entire villages ceased to exist. It was largely a man-made event, caused not by a decline in the food available but by the inadequacy of the response. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.

Reports of famines were familiar news to my parents and their generation. Today, famines have vanished from our memory. When the monsoon failed in and again in , few people noticed. It is not only because the green revolution to be discussed in chapter 9 has increased food supply in India. It is also because democracy and a vigorous press force politicians to act for the sake of their own survival, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen reminds us.

This happened partially because of the absence of democracy and an active free press. What causes hunger is the inability of the poor to buy food. Hence, even if Wavell had succeeded in getting more food for Bengal from Churchill, he would not have saved the starving masses unless he had had a plan to create purchasing power among the poor.

The year was a watershed. Following their devastating raid on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had begun to advance on British colonies in Southeast Asia. The tired nationalist movement in India had acquired a new vigor. There was an unstoppable momentum towards independence.

The spectacular Japanese victories in the East had unnerved the British. The surrender of Singapore, in particular, had been a staggering blow to their prestige in India. It had also opened the Bay of Bengal to the Japanese navy. My family wondered if we should support the British in their war with the Japanese.

They asked who were our real enemies—the British or the Japanese? Would the British really give up India? Would the English split the country before they left?

These questions were on the minds of many Indians in those days. Although our family was apolitical, dinnertime conversation would often veer around to politics.