by Vanessa Able
The nature of the unrest and the reasons for it were unclear to me. Even after time spent quizzing R. and scouring the front page of The Hindu (a businessman had been beaten to death by a mob, a teenager had suffered rubber bullet injuries, more than two dozen people had been hit by stones), I was still at a loss as to why it was all happening. And when it would end.
R. remained taciturn but chipper, waving off my anxious queries and trying to change the subject. Keen that age-old inter-religious rivalries should not diminish my enjoyment of his city, he suggested I take a trip out of town to visit Ramoji Film City, Hyderabad’s own Bollywood. Having been underwhelmed by a Wild West show there a decade earlier, I politely skipped over the proposition, asking R. what he thought instead of Hi-Tech City, the suburban home of the ISB and a place whose name inspired in me Bladerunner visions of interlocking monorail flyovers and airborne jet skis. R. was less enthused, shrugging off its appeal as if my intention to go there was a personal snub, though our exchange did eventually finish with his blessing by way of a room upgrade.
As I divined the route to Reuben’s office through the corridors of the ISB – after a five-minute face-off with security that was precipitated by Abhilasha’s lack of discernable trunk – I was growing nervous at the prospect of meeting the man who, according to my research, was a stalwart of his field. Executive Director of the Centre for Emerging Market Solutions, he had a host of accolades under his belt, including the position of Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, board member of the Soros Economic Development Fund, a TED Global Fellow and a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. What, apart from a short chat about the Nano, would I have to talk about with this superbrain economist?
Instead of the nerdy professor I’d been expecting, Reuben was a sprightly man of my own age with a penchant for parties and electronic music. He shot up from his desk to shake my hand eagerly and introduced me to anyone who’d listen as the girl who was driving around India in a Nano, before whisking me around the college to ascertain the veracity of his conviction that the ISB was a blueprint for education in tomorrow’s India. He took me through the building, which looked like a modern desert fortress with a huge inner atrium and a library that spiralled up like New York’s Guggenheim Museum. He showed me a system of natural air conditioning that harnessed the cooling power of the wind to blow around the bridges and walkways, and introduced me to a girl who had started her own fresh juice business within the college. Pricey artworks adorned the corridor walls while outside, the manicured grounds stretched for acres of green lawns, and the waft of frangipani trees floated among the campus housing as far as the on-site hotel. Reuben left the final cherry for the last part of our tour: the swimming pool, surrounded by sunbeds where weary, overworked students could take a break and catch some rays.
It was clear that Reuben was proud of the campus and he had reason to be; it was a stimulating training ground for the businesspeople of a future global superpower that made my list of attended academic institutions look like dingy 1960s throwbacks, and not just because of its arresting architecture. In 2010, the Financial Times ranked the ISB’s MBA programme as the twelfth best in the world, way above the likes of Yale and Cambridge. Graduates from the school came ninth in the world in terms of average starter salaries, which range from £20,000 to over £100,000.
I had by chance met a recent alumnus the day before who told me how painful leaving the college had been. Students were furnished with top-notch serviced spaces and enjoyed such high standards of living that post-college life was invariably a bit of a let-down. ‘It was tough having to go back to cleaning my own apartment,’ complained the graduate, who was now working at a microfinance agency.
An enthused speaker on the subject of free markets, Reuben could whip even the most clueless and under-informed subject (i.e. me) into a raging debate within minutes. Some of his assertions instinctively set my teeth on edge, like his conviction that India needed to be more urbanized and that village life was something to be abandoned and not subsidized by the state.
‘But… but… villages are… nice,’ I protested weakly. ‘Aren’t they?’
‘That’s urban bourgeois romanticism!’ he exclaimed, smacking my comment clean out of the ring. ‘Would you want to live in an Indian village? With no running water or electricity or phone connection?’
I shook my head.
‘With an active and discriminating caste system?’
I kept on shaking.
‘The single greatest remover of poverty in the world has been the economic growth of China and, to a lesser extent, India,’ Reuben continued. ‘In the last 30 years, over 700 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty, and this is almost entirely due to the functioning of free markets and liberal economic policies.’
My knowledge of Indian economics was shaky to say the least, but I did have some facts knocking about in the recesses of my noggin that helped me put some of what Reuben was saying into perspective. It seemed that as far as the country’s financial system was concerned, there were two landmark years in the last century: 1947 and 1991.
The former was when the British packed their bags and retreated to Blighty, taking with them the Raj and all its exploitive failings. India declared itself an independent republic and, with Jawaharlal Nehru at its helm, went on to construct an economic infrastructure that was primarily socialist with some traces of capitalism. The idea was that it would invigorate its economy independently, that its land would provide everything its people needed – from agriculture to manufacturing and industry – without any interference from the international market, and with no need for imports or exports. The drive to self-sufficiency was an understandable sentiment, given the two centuries of colonial manipulation the country had suffered, but the system itself turned out to be slow, unproductive and above all a fertile breeding ground for misbehaviour and corruption; thoughts of reform only started to bubble in the 1970s and nothing really changed for the Indian economy until the fateful summer of 1991.
That was the year of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, shortly after which the economy went into a crushing nosedive. It was a calamity of huge proportions: India was on the verge of bankruptcy and needed a bailout plan, fast. The newly elected PM called on his minister of finance, Manmohan Singh,27 to figure out a master stratagem. What Singh came up with, within a matter of days, turned upside down a great deal of what Nehru had implemented and the Congress party had upheld for the past half-century. His idea was that the government free up the market, both for domestic businesses and for international ones. The reforms were pushed through quickly, and suddenly India was a much freer, much less regulated place. Indians wanting to start their own businesses no longer had to jump through dozens of hoops before ringing up their first transactions,28 and international companies were now at liberty to deal in India, by importing or exporting their goods and by investing in Indian companies.
The fruits of the reforms succeeded in bailing the country out of its short-term crisis, and before long the enriching effects of the reforms became apparent. India’s GDP began to rise steadily, along with household incomes. The percentage of people living under the poverty line has fallen from a staggering 90% in 1985 to under 29% today, so it’s difficult to argue that India’s economic liberalization efforts have not been largely responsible for lifting millions out of deprivation.
I asked Reuben if the Nano was a direct product of the country’s economic growth.
‘Absolutely. It’s a sign of industrial power to the extent that you’ve got a large corporation that has money to put into research and development,’ he explained. ‘If you have money to put into R&D, then you’ve crossed a hump.’
Coincidentally, Reuben was working on a similar project from within the Centre for Emerging Market Solutions: the Nano principle transferred to housing. His team was in the midst of a scheme to build low-cost, high-quality housing for low-income industrial workers in small towns who might otherwise be
living in slums. The houses they were building were set to cost between $6,000 and $10,000, but were by no means a form of charity; this mission was also very much focused on profit. Capitalism, Reuben argued, could be reshaped to include and even benefit the poor, as long as business models were well thought out. The key was frugal innovation or, as he put it, the principle of more for less for more.
Whereas the Nano encapsulated this within engineering, other entrepreneurs around the country were exercising the same principle in different arenas. He cited the example of Dr Devi Shetty, who was performing open-heart surgery in Bengaluru for less than $2,000. ‘That’s a classic case of the you-do-not-have-an-option principle,’ Reuben said. ‘You can price it at $100,000, but there aren’t going to be any patients. You have to price it at something that people can afford. So you are forced to innovate.’
Frugal engineering is currently quite a buzzword in India. It seemed to make sense, the way the country’s economy was developing, that industries would be focusing on bringing down the costs of manufacturing and services in order to target the millions of households who were emerging into the arena of expendable incomes and aspirations. Most of the hype surrounding the Nano in the run-up to its launch wasn’t centred on the fact that it was set to be the cheapest car in the world, but rather that its price had been fixed impossibly cheap. How could a car be sold for £1,000 and still leave its producers in profit?
The story goes that the price itself was a bit of an accident. It emerged at a press conference with Ratan Tata back in 2002 when he announced plans for a new low-cost car. Journalists pressed the CEO for a figure, which he declined to disclose, given that the project had hardly entered the first phase. Determined to fix a price, one journalist asked whether one lakh rupees would be a viable target, to which Mr Tata responded guardedly that yes, it might be possible. The story that hit the headlines the next day was that Tata was set to launch the one-lakh car, a fact that hadn’t been confirmed. But instead of calling the papers to correct the error, Ratan Tata decided to go with it and set one lakh rupees as the price target for his new car.
All around India, those headlines must have been read with gasps of incredulity. How could it be possible to manufacture a car for so little? The Maruti 800, at the time India’s most affordable car, was priced at more than double that. Would this new car be half a Maruti? And what would that look like?
At Tata HQ, the team that had been assembled to realize this seemingly impossible task started off by thinking quite laterally. They referred to the auto-rickshaw. A brand new Bajaj three-wheeler cost about three-quarters of a lakh; it seemed that with the remaining budget they might just be able to tack on an extra wheel and carve out a bit more storage space. In fact, the first drafts of the Nano did indeed resemble a four-wheel tuk-tuk. The golf-cart concept slowly evolved into a more glorified version, which eventually developed into something that looked like a car, pushed at every step by Ratan Tata, who had a very personal stake in creating the vehicle. His vision was that the Nano be a bona fide car with competitive specs that met national safety requirements, not some comedy buggy to be ridiculed on the roads.
The Nano’s exterior came to resemble a car. Its architects – a group of engineers that eventually swelled to 500 in number, led by promising young engineer Girish Wagh – dispensed with the original roll-down plastic curtains and rickshaw-style tarpaulin roofing, and instead gave it a steel finish and glass windows. All through the process, the Maruti 800 was used as the benchmark for the minimum standards of performance that the Nano had to live up to, and preferably exceed. Size was one aspect in which the team excelled: the Nano turned out to be a few centimetres shorter than its competitor, but with 21% more space on the inside.29 The story goes that the drive for increased interior space was largely fuelled by Ratan Tata’s own considerable size: the six-foot chairman was keen that tall people should not feel cramped inside the small car and that he himself would be able to emerge nimbly from the vehicle at the time of its launch.30 The fact that the team had decided to place the engine at the back also proved a big saver – when an engine is located at the rear, the drive shafts do not need as many joints and so are much simpler and cheaper to produce – while the tubeless tyres made the car lighter and perkier on the roads.31
However, the engine still left a lot to be desired. Designers had been experimenting with low-cost motors sourced externally, but since not one engine fitted the stringently tight bill, it was concluded that Tata would make its own one using only a few third-party components. This brought the price down considerably, and along with various other alterations to individual parts, the car was finally able to go on the market for the promised one lakh. The gamble had paid off hugely for Ratan Tata, who marked his own massive boldness at the car’s launch with the tagline ‘A promise is a promise’.
‘Fancy a shot?’ Reuben raised an inquisitive eyebrow as he flashed me a glance of the vodka bottle he had stowed in a messenger bag. He had to shout to make himself heard over the twangy beats of the music that was wafting across the lawns in celebration of the latest wave of graduations. It turned out I had hit the college at an auspicious time, two days before the class of 2010 would get its round of diplomas and be unleashed on a country ripe for the well-trained entrepreneurial minds this institution had nurtured. The Future of Education in India was on the brink of becoming the Future of India, and it would not be long before it was India’s reality. These happy few were set to be the ones to push their country’s economy further onto the global stage to new heights, and I had little doubt they would succeed – but how would they do it? Social responsibilities like the eradication of poverty were high on their professor’s agenda, if not also their own, but at what cost would these changes take place? Would Reuben and his students really have the villages bulldozed and cities megapolized in the name of progress and economic expansion? With what degree of sensitivity would the new economic order handle the remains of centuries of tradition, undesirable as they sometimes might have been? I guess what I was really getting at was, were these guys the goodies or the baddies?
‘Hey, Reuben,’ I asked, over our third shot of Absolut Ruby Red, ‘so you like the Nano, right?’
‘Damn right, it’s pretty cool.’
‘So, would you ever think about actually buying one for yourself?’
‘No way, man!’ he cackled rakishly in a way that made it hard to know if he was serious or not. ‘I don’t own a car! I’m pretending to be carbon neutral.’
RULE OF THE ROAD #6
Stay Safe
On a dark, moonless night, the day after I had left Hyderabad, I pulled into what I hoped – but had no means of proving – was the deserted, locked-up and turned-in-for-the-night village of Nagarjuna Sagar.
An hour and a half before midnight is a relatively chipper time in India’s larger cities, with vendors, rickshaws and late-night diners still going about their business under the yellow glow of halogen streetlights. But nights in rural India are a different situation altogether. It’s hands down the darkest darkness I’ve seen: a menacing blackness; an empty, closed-down, boarded-up void. I drove up and down several roads emanating from the main square and could see nothing in the way of the hotel the guidebook assured me should be there. Was I even in the right place? I consulted Delilah, the sum of whose visual information on this area was a thick yellow line on a white background that gave no quarter to the surrounding side streets or even the name of the village. I checked my phone, but there was no signal. The only person available for directions was an inebriated lorry driver contemplating the stars from a curious position underneath his steering wheel.
My options were limited, and for the first time since setting out from Mumbai, I realized that bedding down with Abhilasha might be my only choice that night, a thought tinged a deep shade of dread. Although my direct experience so far had been entirely to the contrary, most people I encountered seemed to be of the unshakeable opinion that a single female on a sol
o road trip was a brutal assault and murder waiting to happen. It was by no means an outrageous perspective: women on India’s roads do face some very real dangers. Kidnappings and carjackings are more likely to happen to female targets, as are the risks of falling prey to police impersonators and sexual predators. General advice ran along the lines of keeping a can of pepper spray to hand and practising general good sense, like not stopping to withdraw thousands of rupees from a deserted ATM in the middle of the night.
My own attitude to safety was light prudence (I opted for hair-spray rather than pepper spray and made sure I always had at least a vague idea of where I’d be staying the following night) combined with pragmatism based on statistical likelihood. It was a stance that allowed me to breathe easy most of the time. But plans would oft go awry, journeys would take significantly longer than anticipated, and before I knew it I was a potential victim in my own Hammer Horror scenario – like this night in Nagarjuna Sagar.
Courage, Thunderbolt: if the truck driver could sleep at the wheel, then so could I (my lack of a quart of Bagpiper notwithstanding). I pulled up at the side of the road and switched off Abhilasha’s lights to test the situation. We were thrown into darkness. I forced a yawn to simulate relaxing, then pushed back the seat and wound down the backrest to see just how peaceful a position this could be. I curled up on my side and tried to extend my legs over to the passenger seat without impaling them on the gearstick. About a minute of murky discomfort passed before my imagination began to twitch. It started with an eerie feeling that someone was watching me through the window, and very quickly amplified to a roll call of the cast of every horror movie I had ever watched. Opening my eyes, I saw nothing but a profusion of shadows, one of which I was convinced belonged to that dwarf from Twin Peaks who has been a regular fixture of my more wobbly moments since I first encountered him in my early teens. I winced and turned the lights back on, full beam this time, in order to dispel the last of the demons.
