Move over Bunty and Babli. It’s time now for The Rising. Middle-class aspirations and never-ending dreams never had it so good before. Because third-world India is rapidly growing at a first-world pace.
And it’s not only about call centre jobs that we are talking about. India is now home to homegrown billion-dollar companies run by million-dollar wage earners. And our reference is not only to shining corporate nameplates and laminated calling cards.
India boasts the world’s fourth-largest economy in purchasing power terms; the number of high-income households is expected to hit 44 million in four years from now. A 300-million-strong middle class flaunts purchasing power that’s at par with the best in the world.
Every month India adds more than 1.5 million cell phone users with the total number of subscribers expected to touch 100 million in two years; PC sales are up at 3.63 million units and passenger car sales top one million a year.
All this makes India the world’s second fastest growing economy; its forex reserves bulging at $140 billion-plus and far exceeding the country’s foreign debt.
The stock markets are booming. Trading at the National Stock Exchange is the third largest in the world. India’s IT heavyweights flaunt global nameplates even as new technology start-ups are attracting venture funding like never before. In the April-June quarter of this calendar, 36 Indian companies raised $395 million according to VC and private equity tracker TSJ Media. Late last year, Bessemer Venture Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest VC firms, announced plans to set up shop in India with Dinesh Vaswani joining as entrepreneur-in-residence to evaluate investment opportunities in US-India cross-border firms.
Says Greg Gestch, MD, Sigma Partners, a Silicon Valley and Boston-based venture fund: “This is a distinct trend from the Valley VC funds flowing to India. Entrepreneurs with past successes in the Valley have a significant leg-up on raising capital here.”
Fuelling the technology boom has been India’s vast pool of scientific and engineering manpower resources. Some 3.5 lakh engineers graduate from Indian schools every year. Says Thomas Magnanti, dean, of the School of Engineering at MIT, “Today, there are three times as many engineering graduates out of India and China as the US.”
What’s true of engineers is also true of other professionals. Each year, India churns out among the world’s largest number of chartered accountants and doctors. So, more and more accountancy work is flowing into India as is clinical research and medical treatments. Says Gary Boomer, who runs an accounting firm in Kansas (US), “The workflow that has been developed in India is changing the way US accountants work. And it is not the large firms, small and medium firms that are working with the BPO setups in India are streamlining their work to suit Indian accountants.”
Booming business is good news for business managers. More and more Indian CEOs are taking home million-dollar plus equivalent pay cheques. Against 7 corporate head honchos who took million dollars plus equivalent salaries in FY04, some 15 Indian CEOs earned million dollars plus equivalent salaries in FY05. The Ambani brothers, Mukesh and Anil, each grossed $5.03 million and Brijmohan Lall Munjal, headman at the world’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer, Hero Honda, took home $3.08 million in pre-tax wages.
India is becoming more and more assertive.
As one of the biggest oil-consuming nations in the world, India is now insisting that the seller-led global oil cartel give way to a buyer-dictated price mechanism and big Asian consuming countries such as India, China and Japan move over to an Asian Price Index for crude oil. Meanwhile, the overseas arm of the state-owned ONGC Ltd, the country’s biggest corporation by market cap has invested in oil equity in 14 countries worldwide across Asia, Africa and the Pacific.
On the technology front too, India has been insisting alongside China and Brazil that the US dominance over internet governance give way to an independent authority that is inter-governmental, multilateral and multi-stakeholder in character, instead of the present US government-affiliated Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
It can only get better from here. Because the country’s median age, 22 years right now, will settle at 31 by 2025, with most young men educated, harvesting the wonderful opportunities for growth and revelling in the bounties of a seamless global market. Twenty years ago, the world condemned their parents as a drag on India’s economy, a population bomb waiting to explode. Today, the world says India is set to reap its demographic dividend 15 years from now when a quarter of its population or about 325 million youngsters in the 20-35 age group will be making multiple choices.
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