Recasting India

by Hindol Sengupta

  RECASTING INDIA

  HOW ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS REVOLUTIONIZING THE WORLD’S LARGEST DEMOCRACY

  HINDOL SENGUPTA

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  To my parents, who always said, “We middle class people must always stand by the poor and take their side—and not the side of the rich.”

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The Businessman Called Tagore

  Chapter 2 Business Models in the World’s Most Dangerous Place

  Chapter 3 The Socialist Moneylender

  Chapter 4 Gujarat, Riots and Economics

  Chapter 5 In the Company of Maids

  Chapter 6 Models in Villages

  Chapter 7 The Not Untouchables

  Chapter 8 The “Pervert” Pad Maker

  Chapter 9 Facebook for the Poor and the Village Call Center

  Chapter 10 From Dung to Detergent

  Conclusion: Was the Mahatma a Socialist?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  In the months before starting this book, I was writing and talking about the concept that I called Per Capita Hope.

  In my short lifetime, it seemed as if the world’s largest democracy would alter beyond recognition and finally take that lumbering leap into modernity promised when its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke of its “tryst with destiny” in his midnight speech at independence in 1947.

  While economists and politicians were content to debate infinitely the rise of gross domestic product (GDP) that, since India’s economic liberalization began in 1991, has pulled the nation out of everlasting penury, it seemed to me that this narrow focus on GDP hid a more powerful phenomenon: the newfound freedom from anxiety and a constant sense of being held back, the paranoia of failure and the humiliation of class that millions of Indians have been freed from. No longer was success the exclusive privilege of the wealthy or the pedigreed, I argued. Liberalization had had an equalizing, democratizing role; it had allowed all of us to dream and then try to become. It had given us Per Capita Hope.

  Then I had a breakfast-table conversation with my parents.

  The occasion was that, at the sprightly age of 32, I had told my parents that it might be difficult for me to continue to stay with them since, you know, I might sort of move out and, you know, live with someone. Get married or something.

  “Unlike your mother,” said my father, carefully lowering his newspaper so that it didn’t get wet on the table, as if he were saving it to read again tomorrow, “I see things practically, not emotionally. The point is—is it practical economically to run two households?

  To this, my mother snapped, “Who is the girl and why does she not want you to live with us?”

  I was not sure about marriage, nor was I dating anyone, but it seemed like a good time to give it some thought. The concept of marriage stressed me out, but I realized that was probably because I lived in the city of seven-day weddings that yawned on like a happy, drunken blitzkrieg until they collapsed into hangover hell.

  I knew that my mother, with whom I had spent years arguing about why I needed privacy and why I wanted to lock my room, would have lots to say about this getting married and living away from home thing, but I had hoped that my father, an uncommonly peaceable man, would be, well, peaceable.

  But here he was taking potshots. Like many poor government employees, my father had never had the money to get private health insurance for himself and my mother. By the time the fruits of my English-language education kicked in and I made some money as a television reporter, they were too old to qualify at most insurance companies. I had been lackadaisical about this, thinking my steadily increasing income would easily cover any health emergencies we might have.

  My father, now in his mid-60s, was a more prudent man. He had recently done his calculations—even as he searched for a lawyer to make a will—and realized that his best bet was the railway medical card.

  This was a card given to railway employees, for them and their spouses, that was valid for life in any of the 125 railway hospitals across India. “And if the doctors there refer us to any private hospital, the card covers treatment there too—all for free,” he told me happily. “You have nothing to worry about.” All these years, he had never bothered to get a hospital card partly because of that odd belief the lifelong fit have in their ability to be eternally healthy, and because conditions in government hospitals vary wildly in India and the quality of care can often be a case of luck more than anything else.

  What he was not saying, but what I knew, was that my father dreaded becoming a “burden” to his only child. He had seen how disease can wipe out livelihood. Both his parents had died of cancer, draining his life savings.

  In the peak of his elderly life, having refused to retire after retirement, my father continued working at least ten hours a day as a civil engineer with the Delhi Metro Rail (the city’s subway system) and was pleased that he had already made provisions to ensure that I would barely have to pay anything if he or my mother ever fell ill.

  But the process had left him skeptical.

  “What per capita hope? Look at the prices! The builders cheat you, the private doctors cheat you, and the politicians are looting the country!” he said.

  I tried to explain that it wasn’t all bad, but he wouldn’t listen. “I have been to various hospitals in Delhi and the ones that cheat you the least are government hospitals, and the best is AIIMS [All India Institute of Medical Sciences]. Instead of building more AIIMS, we are hell-bent on building hospitals that are like fivestar hotels! Who can afford these?” he argued.

  “And I counted—they must have paved the same pavement outside Khan Market at least three times before the Commonwealth Games [in 2010]. They think we are gaadhas! Donkeys! No one understands anything. The crooks!”

  Ridden with theft that finally sent the politician in charge of the games to prison, the official budget of the Commonwealth Games1 hosted by India in its capital, New Delhi, in 2010 was $1.9 billion—up from the $270 million estimated when the country won the bid in 2003. The politician is now out on bail.

  “This is not per capita hope,” said my father. “This is per capita joke!”

  I had never thought that my parents would be this worried about my going to live away from them when I was in my 30s with a career thankfully going smoothly. Certainly in 2005 when I left for Bombay’s TV studios, they seemed almost relieved, though tearful.

  What had changed? What made them so unsure, jittery even, this time?

  I’ve noticed, in the last year or so, that a generation of Indians who seemed so confident only a few years ago—people like me, people I met, people who earned more, less, or the same—seemed less certain about the future.

  Some of it was, of course, the economy; those hairline cracks first noticed amid the tail-wagging whoops of 2007 and early 2008 had become gaping, gangrenous holes. After 20 years of ostensible reforms, we had pulled out millions of people from extreme poverty—138 million made just enough extra money to push them above extreme hunger between 2004 and 2012. But that achievement has been dwarfed, especially in the last five years, by our staggering income inequality.2 Data from the National Sample Survey Organisation shows that between 2000 and 2012, the gap
between spending and consumption by the richest and the poorest Indians had grown starkly. In 2000, the richest urban Indian was spending around 12 times as much as the poorest—this became 15 times by 2012. In villages, the difference grew from 7 times in 2000 to 9 times by 2012.

  One day, faced with a full front-page ad for the iPhone 5 in my morning newspaper, I calculated that the average cost of an iPhone 5 in India would feed 1,654 people in the villages and 1,351 people in the cities.

  (The average price of iPhone 5 is Rs 45,000.* India’s latest poverty line, according to the government committee headed by the economist Suresh Tendulkar in 2011, is at Rs 33.3 per day in urban areas and Rs 27.2 in rural areas; people who earn less than this are considered the poorest in the country and in dire need of government help. So, 45,000 / 33.3 = 1,351.35; and 45,000 / 27.2 = 1,654.41.)

  In the first quarter of 2013, Apple scored a 400 percent rise in sales in India.

  It wasn’t that the poorest Indians were not slowly making more money, but that the difference between rich and poor was growing much, much faster.

  It’s what I call the Antilia Syndrome. Antilia is a 27-floor home in Bombay built for, some estimates suggest, $1 billion, making it the costliest home in the world. There has been a debate about whether the purchase of the land it stands on—once owned by a charity that had orphanages for Muslim children—was kosher. But that debate died down after some initial flurry.

  Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and the owner of Reliance Industries, which has interests in everything from petroleum refining to large retail shops, should technically be free to build any home he likes as long as he pays market value for the land and the construction. After all, it is his money.

  Standing before it, though, is surreally disempowering. I am not against capitalism. Capitalism, like America for Amerigo Bonasera in The Godfather, has been good to me. Capitalism made my fortune, or at least let me dream of one. If it had not been for capitalism, I would not have become an author in the English language in India, for everyone knows there was a time when you could only get published if your grandfather played golf with someone, or your father played tennis with someone else.

  Capitalism had kicked down the exclusive clubs of India. But standing in front of Antilia one summer day, I could see why the writer Arundhati Roy3 wondered whether it was a “temple to the new India or the warehouse of its ghosts.”

  Antilia reminded us—the very poor, the slightly less so, and even those of us in the middle class—of the difference that we so wanted to forget: that unbridgeable chasm we thought we had left behind in the new India. It reminded us how far we have not come; that when and where it counts, there are always the rulers and the ruled. Perhaps it was pertinent that Ambani, whose father rose from working as a petrol station attendant to shatter the hierarchies of the Bombay Club of mercantile families, would choose to build a home like this. After all, his father had built a 14-story home called Sea Wind, so he probably felt the need to demonstrate his own superiority.

  But unlike Roy, I did not hold that against Ambani; I was simply saddened and frightened by the reappearance in my memory of what I thought I had forgotten.

  What is a nation, or indeed, a people, but a group who share a collective memory?

  In his book The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918,4 Professor Alon Confino talks about looking at German nationhood through the perspective of collective memory, “as a product of collective negotiation and exchange between the many memories that existed in the nation.” It is an approach, he says, that “explores nationhood through the metaphor of whole and parts, taking cognizance of German identity and German society as a global entity where peculiar component parts interacted.”

  My collective memory of India had undergone a change, a “gush-up” in Roy’s words, of Per Capita Hope. But Antilia pushed it right back down. That was the problem with Antilia. Not that it was said to have a domestic staff of 600 people, not that there were said to be three helicopter landing spots on it, not that some whispered it had cost perhaps not one but two billion dollars—the problem with Antilia was that it made most of us feel static, no matter how far we had actually climbed.

  And the last two decades had been all about climbing up—the sort of dramatic burst of social mobility that changes the course of a nation. We had begun to believe in an India where you might not go to the Doon School or St. Stephen’s College or Oxford or Cambridge but could still do something and be someone that everyone loved and looked up to. It was a heady time that let people fantasize about escaping their pasts.

  Antilia would not let us forget or escape.

  When the Commonwealth Games came in 2010 and a powerful politician showed us yet again that he could steal anything he liked at will, circumvent any law with no consequences, and laugh in our faces, it brought that ancient feeling of helplessness right back. All those years when we could do nothing, change nothing.

  When the comptroller and auditor general of India announced that illicitly regulated auctions for the 2G mobile telephony spectrum had cost the exchequer Rs 1.76 lakh crores (around $39 billion at 2011 exchange rates), it was not the enormity of the sum that stupefied us, but the audacity of our rulers who, two decades after reforms, didn’t bat an eye.5

  Our anxiety was exaggerated because somewhere in the flight of our hope, we had also left our old support structures behind; now when we fell, we fell uncushioned. This, I realized, was at the root of my parents’ anxiety.

  My parents had been convinced that they were going to return to Calcutta, where I grew up and where we still have a home, once I was settled. But as Bengal and Calcutta grew more and more violent—first with the warring Trinamool Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), and then with the escalation of bloodshed and hooliganism after Trinamool swept to power in 2011—they gave up hope of ever returning.

  As they grew older, my parents began to worry about the onset of helplessness and dependence. They had no real friends in Delhi; their extended family was all in Calcutta, as were old friends and neighbors. We were not alone in this. We were part of the C5 segment, what Indicus Analytics describes as the “eighth largest among 33 urban consumer segments, with nearly 250,000 households of around three to four members.”6

  We were what was called twice removed—immigrant and nuclear. “Nuclear families” is a curious phrase used for families consisting of only a couple and their children, in which the grandparents and/or other relatives do not live with the family. Such households in India have swelled as the traditional joint family system has crumbled. Indicus calculated that 88 percent of such households have only three or four members and no “senior members” like a grandparent in the home. Just 11 percent have more than two children—something my parents never forgot, since I am their only child. They worried about slipping and falling when I was out, about crippling disease with no one else nearby to help.

  My vision of a world with a tremblingly exciting rise per capita seemed to be dying out, crashing like the rupee in tailspin. In their book An Uncertain Glory, the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze described the income inequalities in modern-day economically growing India as creating islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.7 Boats that had been set afloat with much difficulty after liberalization seemed to be under the threat of sinking with a slowing economy and rising income disparity.

  The cracks that we thought were getting filled seemed larger than ever. Fifty percent of Indians still defecated in the open, while newspaper headlines focused on government efforts to build a low-cost tablet called Aakash that seemed endlessly mired in controversy and ultimately found few takers.

  In 2013, the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) said 18 percent of parliamentary and assembly candidates had had criminal cases filed against them, and 8 percent had been accused of serious crimes like rape or murder. People who were under criminal indictment and were re-contestin
g elections increased their wealth. More than 75 percent of them raised their assets by an average of Rs 2.34 crores, from Rs 1.74 crores to Rs 4.08 crores.

  Just when the Indian capital seemed to be slowly becoming more civilized, a gang rape and murder, in which iron rods were driven into the vagina of the victim and used to tear her intestines, revealed that rapes had gone up by more than 800 percent in 40 years.

  So I set out to discover this anxious India, this India the world saw when millions protested against corruption with the septuagenarian social reformer Anna Hazare, and thousands more fought pitched battles with police after that gruesome gang rape in Delhi in December 2012.

  I found islands, yes, but they didn’t always reek of Californication. I found pockets of incredible enterprise and dexterity that very few people ever talk about. This is a book about the extraordinary enterprise of ordinary people. People just like you and me, as annoyed, as excited, as helpless—and about how they are tackling the myriad contradictions of an aspiring country—a fascinating spectrum of journeys. These are their stories.

  There are two kinds of democracies—measured democracy and experienced democracy. India is a measured democracy, which means that once every five years we can measure the number of votes cast, the vote swings and all that paraphernalia. The other is a democracy that you can feel every day, in which you feel that your elected representative actually speaks for you.

  The original title of this book was The Mango People. It comes from an irritated statement posted on Facebook by Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress Party, India’s longest-ruling political party, and present head of the Nehru-Gandhi family, the first family of Indian politics.

  In 2012, his assets and business interests were part of an exposé ostensibly showing questionable ties between Vadra and a real estate giant. The source was the Aam Aadmi Party, a reform party launched in the wake of Anna Hazare’s anticorruption campaign. The revelations made headlines, but nothing really came of it because once again nothing could be proved. But Vadra was driven to the edge by the flurry of headlines and posted the line “Mango people in a banana republic” on his Facebook wall. This he later deleted, along with the Facebook account.