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Years ago in India, when my dad and I had gone to pick up our new car, I pointed out to him that, among many other things, one of the car's headlights was not working. He ridiculed me for my fastidiousness. And why should he not have done so? Until the 1980s, it took several years of waiting before you could buy a car from one of the two companies that manufactured them: Ambassador and Premier Padmini. Both offered the highest level of engineering excellence that most Indians had ever seen.
Information-starved India had almost no TV until the mid-1980s. When the country became host to the Asian Games, the political needs of the day forced the government to install TV stations across the country, and subse-quently we all got televisions. The ingenuity of the device was such that we watched hours of programming on how to improve agriculture. The TV gave us a rare glimpse of the developed world, which started to change our expectations about how we could live our lives.
Around the same time, Suzuki was allowed to begin manufacturing cars in India. Its car was the talk of the town for years. People viewed the small 800cc car, the only model the company manufactured at the time, with an amazement you would expect to be saved for a UFO. We could not stop talking about the polish on the cars, and the smoothness and the quietness of their engines. For the first time we realized that it was possible to close a car's door without having to hammer on it. We no longer needed to travel with a mini-garage of parts and tools in the trunk.
Given the respect my dad enjoyed at the bank, it used to take me only about 45 minutes to withdraw money from our bank accounts. Telephones, a rarity, did not work most of the time. It took anything up to 25 years to get a connection; reduced to a couple if you paid a hefty bribe. To buy a scooter, the waiting time was 15 years.
A decade earlier, the US was sending non-stop shipload of grains to the starving population. The only jobs the educated craved were in the government.
In 1990, when after hours of bureaucratic process I exchanged Indian currency for US$32 to get a GMAT guide from the United States, I was sent a notice of a non-bailable warrant if I did not go to the bank to show the proof of purchase.
This was non-globalized India where the majority of the population went to sleep hungry. Strife was rife. So was illiteracy. Most people suffered under the caste system. The country was, however, proclaiming its achievements: we were tinkering with space exploration, and nuclear bomb technology made from, of course, copied technology. To increase our faith in ourselves, we had re-invented the TV, as we had many other things; reinvention is what a lot of government-funded research institutes did.
In 1991 when I left India for the first time for the UK for post-graduate training, I knew that there were some mystical brands like Pepsi, Coke, and Marks & Spencer, though I had no clue what these brands actually were. A few days into my business classes when we were discussing McDonald's, I asked the person sitting next to me what McDonald's was.
When I went to the bank to open an account, it took me about 5 minutes to complete the whole procedure. I lingered around for a while, as I could not believe that that was possible. When I got a plastic card, I did not know what it was. I asked an Indian friend from Bangalore about it, and he suggested that I keep quiet to avoid embarrassment.
A lot of people I met in the UK imagined India to be a country of snake charmers and elephants. In a way, they were right.
India had been free of British rule for more than half a century, but we were conditioned to blame the British for our poverty. When any disease struck, as it often did, we blamed the US for air-dropping laboratory-developed bacteria on us. India was a close ally of the socialist superpower, the USSR. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that for all intents and purposes, free-market, multinational corporations (MNCs) and the US were almost non-existent in India, and so were definitely not the reason why India was so pathetically backward.
When I returned to India in 1993, its first McDonald's was about to open. It opened next to a Nirula's restaurant, India's only fast-food chain. In those days, Nirula's served soggy burgers at a price that was soon to drop. Nirula's service was shabby, but youngsters, and whoever had claims on being cool, flocked to them.
When McDonald's opened, it had to install barriers to control the crowd. McDonald's burgers were priced lower than Nirula's. The shiny kitchen and friendly staff was a novelty. India experienced what hygienically-prepared food and quality could be about. I was given a sales receipt without asking for it--something I otherwise got only if I paid a bit extra.
India has its own kind of apartheid, still dominant outside the very big cities. I was accustomed to seeing the "lowerclass" sitting on the floor, living with a lot of limitations. People in that class were not allowed into malls, or served food in restaurants, or allowed entry into many places. The first companies to change this were the MNCs. McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Domino's served their food, with a smile, to whoever walked in.
There are still only a very few McDonald's restaurants in India. But those few have challenged a thousand times more restaurants to improve their quality. Even today only a very few Indians can travel abroad, but what they bring back is a challenge to improve. MNCs employ only a minuscule number of Indians, but the stories that emerge from their experiences have struck a major blow to the abysmal employment conditions that Indians were accustomed to.
The so-called "sweatshops" are not great places to work, but for those who do work there, they are better and safer--a marked improvement on the dingy, underground, windowless rooms with no toilets that local businesses used to be able to get away with. In fact, westernactivists now talk less about the sweatshops than they did. Call centres and back offices, run from hi-tech, air-conditioned facilities, are now seen as the loci of exploitation.
In the late 1990s when I moved to a new accommodation in India, and called for a telephone connection, a technician wearing a suit (!) came over within a couple of hours to install it. I did not have to pay a bribe and he was friendly. I also found that usually I did not have to go to the bank any longer--my money was delivered to my home. ATMs had sprung up everywhere; people were learning to provide friendly service. Youngsters aspired to work in productive environments, not for the govern-ment. They took life less seriously, and as a consequence were all happier and less frustrated.
The foreign direct investment (FDI) that India gets today is about US$4 per Indian per year. The direct influence of globalization has not been what is typically believed to be the case in the West: that MNCs are taking over the poor countries. But what this $4 brings is a spark that is catapulting India into a country that most Indians two decades ago would have called a fantasy world. MNCs control a tiny fraction of the economy, but they have set new benchmarks for excellence, not only in terms of technical advancement, but more importantly, in terms of challenging the social mindsets and work ethics of the population.
Indeed, "globalization" is probably the wrong word. Globalization is only the tip of the iceberg, a catalyst for a closed economy beginning to open up. The real issue--the rest of the iceberg--is "liberalization"--letting people get on with their lives economically. Liberalization unleashes creativity and entrepreneurship. This is what India is experiencing, as it slowly liberalizes.
The image of today's India is not so much that of a country of snake charmers, but that of a software giant. The latter may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it does express the change of scene that the openness in the economy, and the challenges to the working ethics that its interaction with the world, has brought.
Jayant Bhandari is an entrepreneur, presently developing an east Indian catering, frozen food, and restaurant business, Relishtrove Foods Inc., in Vancouver.
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