Georgia O' Keeffe
Book Review: INDIA Land of a billion entrepreneurs
Published by: Pearson. 2011.
258 pages. Rs. 399/-
Land of Hope
Mr. Kachru’s new book makes for a stimulating, free-flowing read, and since its tone and thrust is both optimistic and grounded, it is also inspirational. A management thinker that waves the Indian flag with logic and pride is refreshing, particularly when he not only recognises how far we have come since liberalisation of our economy began in 1991, but has a fair estimate of how far we are going. There is therefore much to recommend, by way of educational input and original analysis in Mr. Kachru’s latest offering to the lexicon of management theory.
One exciting idea is the highlighting of 55% of our population, rural and urban, being self-employed. To a cynic this may seem like a euphemism for “unemployed” or “under-employed”, but common sense dictates that survival from the grass-roots upwards proves, and to be a valid statistic, it has to do that much, that these people are necessarily entrepreneurial, albeit to a lesser or greater extent, and with varying degrees of success.
Of course, in counter-point, we can see that the modestly-paid over-employment in Government departments, and the resulting inefficiency and corruption therein, does not exactly recommend employment as a panacea in itself. But the moot point is that today there are many opportunities that were not there in our Socialist and Public sector emphasising years, and this book gently urges us to see the possibilities in this.
This percentage figure of the self-employed, when applied to a population cresting towards 1.25 billion people, is indeed gargantuan, and possibly holds the key towards the ultimate, if somewhat utopian goal of full employment.
Another compelling proposition, has the author suggesting that India has deployed its educated middle class into the breach of the global knowledge economy, particularly in the IT realm, very successfully at that, because it was the right thing to do while it plays catch-up on infrastructure, technology induction etc.
While it is doubtful if it was as prescient and deliberate as all that, it certainly seems like a brilliant idea in hindsight, given the numbers of high quality graduates from our IITs and IIMs, thanks to the originally Nehruvian policy of putting substantial resources into higher education.
Besides, our current Home Minister and formerly several terms Finance Minister, Mr. P.Chidambaram, likes pointing out that the private sector cannot do very much on its own without Government backing. Since Information Technology (IT), is more or less a private sector phenomenon, it is arguable that Government support by way of tax breaks and patronage may very well have played its part in its success.
However, on the global stage, we have remained largely body-shoppers obsessed with H1B Visas to the US, even after two decades of emergence, rather than people who have climbed up the value chain with branded and copyrighted complete software solutions.
Still since one must do what one can, it is good to remember that this has not stopped the Chinese from reaching a very influential position in global commerce, with dominance in the manufacturing of all manner of low-end products from dolls and surgical steel ear-ring hooks and eyes, to the world’s one stop-shop for computer hardware, largely for export.
Simultaneously, China manufactures high-end defence equipment including missiles, aircraft, nuclear submarines, even aircraft-carriers, and the Chinese have state-of-the-art infrastructure for dams, bridges, tunnels, high-speed trains, highways, and pipeline building capabilities for domestic use. So doing what we do in IT should not hinder India either. After all, there is little percentage in challenging your buyer’s survival on his own home turf!
IT does contribute nicely to our relatively new-found “service economy”, which now accounts for nearly 60% of our GDP, risen from well under a half billion in US dollars at the end of the Madame Indira Gandhi era, to nearly $2 trillion now.
Meanwhile, as Mr. Kachru says, other areas of public and private endeavour, such as manufacturing, agriculture, processes, systems and technology upgradation, are gradually addressing the demands of the second decade of the 21st century.
That this is not going as well as it might is fair indictment of our governance and innate timidity of policy-making. A Socialist era hangover in the form of left-liberal economics still holds considerable sway in India and so gradualism is the best we can hope for, despite consequent huge cost overruns and scandalously slow project implementation. Not for us, possibly ever, the Chinese pace of getting things done!
However, this book prefers to look at the glass as half full rather than half empty, as it rightly should.
The avoidance of jargon and a minimum of graphs and charts to bolster arguments and an engaging anecdotal style, is also appealing in this book. Particularly because so many management theorists affect the use of a rather dry and stastistics/reference heavy approach, that tends to obscure more than it reveals, except perhaps to the most in-the-know of academicians. But for the general reader, this book is both clear and interesting.
The author illustrates his points on the many facets of entrepreneurship with many first-hand interviews and studies of well-known and successful Indian companies in diverse fields, including Rahejas in construction and real-estate, data-storage success Moser-Baer, and the home and abroad luggage maker, VIP Industries.
And being a professor himself, after being a company executive too, Mr. Kachru stresses the importance of skill upgradation. This is what turns a small business into a bigger one, fuelled by the confidence that the newly acquired knowledge can bring.
(929 words)
12th July 2011
Gautam Mukherjee
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