By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in 2006
In October of 2006, under TIE-Pittsburgh’s banner, Vijay Manya, the flamboyant tycoon of the alcoholic beverage industry in India, addressed a gathering of desi entrepreneurs and mainstream VCs at the Rivers Club downtown. In addition to his entrepreneurial skills, he is into racecars, horse breeding, and is a member of India’s Parliament. The TIE brochure, keeping in tune with the upwardly mobile Indians’ assessment of themselves, described him as the king of Good Times—he is the chairman of $2.5 billion conglomerate United Breweries Group, maker of Kingfisher beer and McDowell rums. Mallya is also into petrochemicals and fertilizers, and recently into the airline industry.
He has made his Indian shareholders happy, but his ventures in the US have only brought grief to investors, reported Len Boselovic in the Post-Gazette (Sunday, October 9, 06).
In his hour-long address to his adoring audience, his two points drew my attention.
- Mallya said the role of government is to provide infrastructure – transportation, communication, water, and electricity, demanded by foreign investors and the Indian middle class. We would argue that it should also include quality primary and secondary education and basic health care for ALL citizens. Then the private investors can use the infrastructure to provide goods and services in open competition. However, the Indian government, after 58 years of independence and squandering billions of taxpayer money, is now asking foreign investors to invest in India’s infrastructure development. This, he said, is a misplaced policy. There is merit to this argument.
- The other point Mallya made, when seen from the opposite end, highlighted the crux of India’s dilemma. While the GDP grew at 8% per year for the whole of India, Mallya told his audience, in Metro India the growth rate was around 12-14% annually, with software growing at 30%.
What is “dragging India down,” as Mallya described it, is the low under-three% growth rate in rural and small-town India dominated by traditional farming and technology-lean manufacturing.
This huge gap in the growth rates between Metro and Rural India is obvious to visitors spending time in both Indias. Even within Metro India, the English-educated and the regional language-educated live in two vastly different worlds. Making matters worse, Metro India, with all its sophistication, has become incapable of understanding Rural India.
Metro India’s educated class has the attitude of European colonial rulers — patronizing and condescending — towards people educated in regional languages, calling them “vernacular” languages using the same derisive term of their European masters.
Vernacular, according to Webster, means a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language, and “relating to a nonstandard or substandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country.”
Take Tamil. Tamil has 2000-year-old history we see in its oldest literary work, with a large compendium of literature on ethics, economics, governance, romantic love, valor, and devotion. Besides, its performing/ visual arts in music, dance, iconography, and temple architecture are world famous. Yet, for the European colonialists, and now the anglicized desis, Tamil and all other Indian languages, are “vernaculars”!!!
In the wake of globalization, the educated class in every country is seamlessly integrated with the educated class in every other country while it is increasingly disengaged from its own hinterlands.
But what makes it worse in India is that the anglicized India is also disengaged from India’s history, languages, and its literary and philosophical ethos. Remember, India has given birth to four major religions-Hinduisms, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism; has over fifteen languages with rich collections of refined, even radical and iconoclastic thoughts in their literature, and has vibrant performing arts and traditional architecture having older than 4000 years of history.
This Metro-Rural divide has social and political consequences. Already, if you’re educated in regional languages, your lot is pitiful:
- You do not know the language of the legal and healthcare systems. No prescription/dosage instructions are given in the regional languages.
- When you buy a camera, cell phone, or a DVD player in India, you get the receipt, warranty card, and the instruction manual only in English that you can’t read.
- You go to the temple/mosque. You don’t understand Sanskrit (or Arabic for Muslims) the language in which the priest conducts the service. Often, the pandits and the maulvis themselves do not know either the literal meaning or the import of what they recite.
With nearly 2/3 of people living in smaller cities and villages, the divide between those with resources and those without is becoming wider and deeper by the day. In cities, most modern medical treatments are available, but are not affordable to low-income families. If you’re poor, you’re out of luck.
This widening gulf is a cause of great concern in public forums in India. Where India will be as a society in the next fifty years depends on whether India’s ruling elite and its ambitious middle class listen to India’s conscience keepers and bridge — at least narrow — this widening gulf. It is unrealistic, even cruel, to expect the non-anglicized India to catch up. A bicycle can never catch up with a motorbike.
After nearly twenty-five years of runaway growth, Chinese leaders have recognized that wide disparities between its affluent and its rural poor threaten its social stability, and may thwart its goal as a superpower.
The Metro India today, oozing with confidence, believes that it is the smartest in the world. So, can we hope Indians will learn from China? Don’t bet on it. END.