Recasting India (5 page)

Virani, who started out as a canteen boy at a local film theater in Dhundoraji, about 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) from Rajkot, says “part of the demand comes from a giant sociological leap.” He argues that villagers earlier thought of packaged foods as stale. “Now the idea of bacteria is understood by everyone, even by BPL customers. Something sealed in a packet is considered safe,” he says, adding, “Anyone can open a Rs 10 pack of chips from any international company and one of our Rs 5 packs, and see if there is any difference in quality.” (According to a Nielsen study, in 2011 more than 58 percent of Indian demand for salty snacks came from rural India.) Then, as an aside Virani says that for the past year, Pepsi (makers of Frito Lay) has been aggressively trying to buy a 25 percent stake in his company, but he has not yet agreed.

Adi Godrej, chairman and managing director of Godrej Industries, is a strong supporter of the MNREGA. He thinks it is good because it is creating millions of new potential customers, and he believes that companies should focus on having products ready for them. “Only in three things there is full penetration—toilet soap, detergent and matchsticks. In everything else, there is a long way to go to even get awareness going,” says Godrej. Thirty-five percent of his sales already come from rural India.

Biraj Patanaik, principal advisor to the Supreme Court Commissioners on Food, says industry must realize that it is rural demand that saved India during the 2008 crisis. “A lot of it was helped by the MNREGA.” He echoes Godrej when he adds that the government is helping India Inc. by creating millions of empowered future customers for them through rights governance.

However, the rights-based economy still has a long way to go. Yamini Aiyar, whose Accountability Initiative is India's only organization that tracks grassroots government spending, says this kind of demand has barely scratched the surface because of the lack of delivery mechanisms. “The trouble is that we don't have the district-level, or block-level people to enforce government schemes, including cash transfers.” She rues the fact that we keep talking about technology, but on the ground people can barely use pen and paper correctly. Rights governance, coupled with rural economic growth, is waiting to fuel an explosion of demand. But industry needs to push for administrative reforms and provide better training to tap it. “What they would be doing is securing a very large future market,” says Aiyar.

In such an environment, many
aam
entrepreneurs are targeting some of the most protracted problems of the Indian nation-state. For one, they are moving India from a reactive to a responsive democracy. To understand this simply, think of the old Bollywood Hindi film where the cops would always arrive late. That was the usual pace of the Indian state—if they arrived at all.

But the expansion of India's grassroots enterprise means that an unprecedented tide of daily pressure is being brought to bear on the delivery mechanisms of the state. An empowered, entrepreneurial citizenry is ready to exert pressure not merely in one riotous burst, but in a relentless daily campaign to chip away at the malevolent resistance of feudal politics and fetid bureaucracy.

International conglomerates have always smiled happily at the thought of India's millions of new consumers, especially in the middle class, and the late author and management guru C. K. Prahalad spoke about the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. But to see Indian society today merely as a mass of consumers is perhaps fundamentally flawed.

India is fast becoming a nation of creators as well as consumers. Indeed, it's in this mushrooming of latent creativity that India's redemption likely lies. Looking for the next “Arab Spring” is the new pastime of the West, but it might find a different season in India, where the high noon of dissent cleanses the ills of democracy not with a sudden war but rather with an incessant, intelligent wearing down.

As I started writing this book, I met Chandra Bhan Prasad, a prominent intellectual in India who writes on his community, the Dalits, long considered untouchables in orthodox Hinduism, and the impact of capitalism on the community. He laughed when I asked him what his answer was to those who ask when the revolution would come to India.

“It has already come. It has happened. Only we are a very large country and you might not see it everywhere yet but the revolution has happened and all the upper-caste intellectuals and Brahmins have never bothered to notice,” Prasad guffawed. “But how will they? Many of the so-called great Marxists of India were upper-caste land owners and then they became Marxists and started declaring what the poor and the oppressed need. They had no clue.”

Enterprise and consumer demand at the grassroots level are completely transforming centuries-old social barriers, says Prasad. He is from Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh, notorious, sometimes unfairly, for seeding Islamic terror. These are the areas of north India that foreign journalists sometimes describe as the “badlands” of the country. In such areas, the battle between the Dalits and other low castes and the upper-caste Bhumihars, Thakurs and Brahmins has gone on for generations, and always with blood-soaked attacks and reprisals.

Prasad tells me a tale of change. The first is from a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh on the Jaunpur-Azamgarh road. The number of bullocks in the village dropped from 1,200 to 4 between 1995 and 2005. You might think this is a natural transition from animal plowing to machine plowing. But Prasad found a deeper reason. There was no one to plow with the animals any more. “This was a task done traditionally by the lower castes, the upper castes would not do this because it involved taking care of the animals, working with dung, all of which the upper-caste landlord wouldn't do,” said Prasad. “Landlord after landlord complained to me that the Dalits have left the village and moved to the city with better jobs. Once they taste the city life, no one wants to return to this kind of work in the village. No matter how much money they are given. There had been no choice but to get machines. The entire working relationship between the Thakurs and Bhumihars and the Dalits has broken down. What do you think this mobility, this migration represents to the Dalits? Is it not enterprise?”

This tale of dramatic social change brought about by commerce and enterprise is best captured in a Prasad phrase: “Pizza delivery
ka koi jaath nahin hota
” (Pizza delivery has no caste).

Empowered by urban anonymity and commerce, Dalits across India are tearing down centuries of bizarre and bloody repression. In 2010, Prasad was part of a four-member team, including Devesh Kapur, the director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania; Lant Prichett, from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; and D. Shyam Babu, of the Rajeev Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, that studied all Dalit households (19,087) in two districts of Uttar Pradesh (Bilaria Ganj in the Azamgarh district from the east and Khurja from the Bulandshahar district from the west) to compare their lives before and after Indian economic liberalization, from 1990 to 2008.

What they found startled them. There had been a sea change in the number of Dalits owning consumer items, like bicycles, fans, TVs and mobile phones, and living in concrete houses.

On average, in both areas, roughly 50 percent more people started living in concrete homes in this period of economic growth; the number of TV set owners grew by 33 percent; 45 percent more households had fans; and of course mobile phone ownership had jumped, from near zero to almost 35 percent of the households. Just to get a sense of how impoverished the situation used to be—for the first time, a quarter of households in both areas had chairs.

There was an even more intimate transformation. Few people here had ever used toothpaste. This number jumped a combined average of more than 65 percent. Shampoo use, another unheard-of luxury, jumped nearly 70 percent.

What impact did this have on centuries of discrimination during which it was forbidden to drink water from a glass touched by a Dalit or eat from a plate used by a Dalit?

The instances of upper castes eating and drinking at Dalit homes, once nearly unthinkable, rose more than 70 percent in the east and nearly 45 percent in the west. The practice that only Dalits would pick up dead animals almost disappeared.

“The migrating Dalit worker picked up more money than ever at jobs at the nearest town or city and changed their habits and society forever,” said Prasad. He says that to understand what changed, it is not the Dalit who should be asked, but the upper castes.

“I remember this Bhumihar landlord in eastern Uttar Pradesh telling me that, ‘
Aaj kal uhi log lal murgi haath mein pakar ke motorbike mein pharphareke jaate hain
‘ [These days these people buy plump red chicken and pass by our houses holding the fluttering birds and zipping by on their motorbikes]! His resentment and disappointment was utterly complete, and the whole thing was very funny for me,” laughs Prasad. “Earlier social rank was by birth alone, but now status could be bought by enterprise—that is a priceless change.”

And this change was not restricted to Uttar Pradesh. In Sangli, in the western state of Maharashtra, he asked an upper-caste Patil woman why she was working on the large farm of a successful Dalit food manufacturer.

She told him that earlier the
tulsi
plant (considered sacred and to be found only in the front yards of the upper caste) defined who you were. Now it's whether you have a TV or not. “I don't think of this as a farm,” she said. “This is so big, and all the rules are like a factory. A factory has no caste.”

This is the revolution, Prasad told me—don't look for Tahrir Square or the guillotine. It is happening every single day.

When I told my mother all this, as always she had something to add. “See, all this enterprise-shenterprise, na, this is why I taught you to make bread and butter and omelet when you were only ten years old,” she said. “You must be free. Not like your father. Totally not free. Who is going to cook and feed you? All that is gone. Mother is the last woman doing that. No wife these days. If you can't even feed yourself every day, what freedom?”

Even my mother seemed to understand that our regular, everyday rebellion—enterprise—is what sets us free.

 

“If we delay you,” says the English and Urdu sign on the gate, “for more than two hours, we will pay you Rs 2 per minute for every extra minute.”

This is one of the first things that a driver carrying a truckload of apples—anywhere between 50 apples and a ton of apples—sees when he arrives at the gate of the cold storage and fruit processing factory of Harshna Naturals in Lassipura district. The factory is about an hour and a half's drive north from Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir.

The man who put up the sign, 31-year-old agriculture entrepreneur Khurram Mir, says the sign works like a talisman, telling the farmers who come to sell and store fruits at his plant, his workers and even himself that things are getting better in a valley in which, depending on who you are reading, between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been killed in a two-decade insurgency that started in 1989.

“We are saying yes, things are so normal that we can pay for delays in a state used to shutting down for days with violence and anxiety.” Once described (by former US president Bill Clinton) as the world's most dangerous place, this is the new sign of peace in Jammu and Kashmir, the Himalayan state over which India and Pakistan have fought three wars.

Long used to peace brokers in the shape of politicians, diplomats, aid workers, even ex-militants, the valley is getting used to a new kind of agent of calm: the entrepreneur.

And why not? More small and medium enterprises have been set up in Kashmir in the last two years than in the previous decade, says the Jammu and Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI).
¹
Its two flagship projects have produced more than 1,700 new entrepreneurs in the last two years, says Zamir Qadri, head of the JKEDI. One project provides unemployed high school graduates with 35 percent of the cost of their dream project or Rs 3 lakhs, whichever sum is lower, with the remaining amount financed as a loan by the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, the biggest bank in the region. The amount for postgraduates is 35 percent of the project cost or Rs 5 lakhs; and for professionals, Rs 7.5 lakhs. The other project, financed by the National Minorities Development Finance Corporation, gives out loans of an average of Rs 2.5 lakhs to jobless young Kashmiris.

It's a small number, 1,700 entrepreneurs, in a state of 12 million with more than 600,000 registered unemployed people, but Qadri says the numbers are like Mir's signboard—a small step in the right direction that has many people excited. “One of our big problems is that people feel lost—we have lost a generation to the violence. This is one way to tell people that all is not lost and they can start afresh.”