India: Going Nowhere Fast

A story about India’s booming auto industry leads today’s New York Times business section. “Ask a billion people, and 99 percent of them are going to say they want a car,” explains Jagdish Khattar, managing director of Maruti Suzuki India, the country’s largest car manufacturer. “The problem,” he continues, “is: How many can afford it?”

And so Maruti Suzuki, and the other Indian automakers are cranking out inexpensive cars by the lakhs. Car sales within India will reach nearly two million units this year, and are estimated to climb to nearly four million by 2013.

Most tout this kind of industrial muscle and burgeoning consumer acquisitiveness as signs of a brilliantly expansive, vital economy. I see it as further evidence – as if more was needed – that India is a second-rate country with first-rate promise, limited by third-rate imagination and fourth-rate fidelity to the values and traditions of its proud past.

Put another way: India is squandering its Twenty First Century economic opportunity with its mid-Twentieth Century mindset.

The Auntie-Factor and the Myth of Indian Entrepreneurism

Everyone sees that India’s economy is doing well – if we measure success by international competitiveness rather than, say, the successful distribution of wealth within the country – and the prognosis for the immediate future is good. This buoyancy, coupled with the gaudy success of the Indian technology sector, leads many people to hail Indian entreprenuerism.

I see creative enterprise in India very differently.