Through some random web surfing, I came across an interesting article by Jayant Bhandari comparing / contrasting his experiences doing business in the Desh shortly after 1991’s economic reforms vs. now. Although we frequently talk about how much the Indian economy has changed in the past 15 yrs, Jayant’s article had some solid anecdotes of just how grinding day to day life really was back in the day –
..I moved to Delhi [in 1993]. To my dismay, no one wanted to rent me a decent place to live in. The landlords mostly refused to talk to me, and had blatantly advertised their property as for foreigners only.
..having a phone was not enough. It usually did not work, and when it did, I usually could not use my fax machine because of the “noise” that infested the communications network. For the next three years, I spent, on average, one day a month to keep my phone in operation by making personal visits to the telecommunication department.
..One of the several laws I broke in those days was the law restricting the fax machine itself. I should have sought a license to use it; but getting it would have meant tens of visits to the telephone office, more hefty bribes, and the certainty that if I was refused a license, I would not have been able to communicate. This meant that the government employee responsible for keeping track of my telephone connection got a particularly heavy bribe…I spent the equivalent of one day a month depositing my telephone, electricity, and water payments.
..Getting money from the UK was another bureaucratic nightmare. The money came to the foreign currency department of a public sector bank. Once the bank got the money it would take about two months to give it to me — the check just traveled around and around inside their office.
It’s important to note that every single one of the issues he encounters were premised on good intentions at first. Why did landlords treat foreign vs. native rent money so differently? Because the latter couldn’t be evicted if they were late in their payments. Why the flimsy phone network? Because the telecoms saw their duty to provide jobs first, service a whole bunch of socio-political mandates second, and provide actual phone service perhaps 3rd. Currency controls? The goal was to prevent the twin scourges of capital flight and foreign takeovers. etc. etc. etc.
Of course, much turns around in a scant 5 years…
…In 1998 I moved to a self-sufficient gated community with its own electrical generating plant, water supply system, and private security — probably among the first such communities in India. Telephones had just started becoming private all over the country. A guy wearing a suit in the sweltering heat of Delhi came to install my new telephone. He made no pretensions of looking important and called me “sir” more often than he should have. Efficient private banks had opened everywhere. I could talk to them on the telephone, and they even delivered money to my place without charge.
While upper-middle class folk like Jayant had enormous gains, even at current growth rates, the poor have a LONG way to go –
an average Indian lives on about $1.70 a day. And how does India’s glamorous growth appear from this perspective? Australia’s growth in GDP (which is around 2%) will add about $600 to its per capita GDP, almost as much as India’s total GDP per capita. Its 6.9% growth will give the average Indian about 11 cents extra for use each day, a year from now.
… [Nevertheless] For the average Indian living on $1.70 per day, an extra 11 cents next year will be a windfall.
Helps keep things in perspective, eh?
I think the answer is yes. Contracts are not worth the paper they are printed on (Indian legal system sucks, maybe only marginally better than Nigeria/Russia)so the old economy businesses are conducted within insular communities. The only thing that might serve as an incentive to behave is loss of social standing. Living together helps create this cohesion. That’s just my theory as someone with no background in “social science”. This is no longer a big complaint for the MNC or tech employeed people, they tend to live in brand new professionally managed digs in suburbs, it’s all about the $$$ there.
I think most coops in Mumbai are non veg but the vegetarian gujjus, jains and marwaris have been in Mumbai for a long time and occupy the best real estate. For example most of the flats that face the ocean and have ocean views are occupied by jains mainly because jain families bought them decades ago and are staying put.
Even though they are limited to vegetarians many of these coopsa re selling briskly at very high prices. I doubt the vegetarians are getting special deals, they may be paying a premium to be into a vegetarian building.
As a guju meat eater ABD, I can attest that the sight of and the cooking of meat can visibly make lifelong, hardcore vegetarians sick, at least the sheltered types who have never really been around meat. I’ve seen this happen with the sight of chicken tikka masala which made my aunt gag. Also eating meat in India is really different than here in the states in the sense that the animal is sometimes slaughtered on premises which in many cases does mean the first floor parking/grassy area of flats. It aint like going to your respective super market and buying some boneless, skinless chicken breasts (though this is quickly changing). If this is offensive to people who live in a restrictive NYC coop type environment where tenants are regularly rejected on whims (which bombay is comparable to), what is so wrong in rejecting people?
Must be. Took a degree in Biology and Behavior, and one in Design, can’t understand anything.
Yogi, I’m thinking it could be one without the wafting scent of mutton biryani, makhani chicken, kofta and fish mollee.
at least the sheltered types who have never really been around meat.
muslims have similar attitudes toward pork. e.g., there are some muslims who won’t eat in restaurants where they think the silverware might have touched pork. there are hare krishnas in the united states who have similar issues, i once was going to a house that was populated by krishnas with an acquaintance and bought a burrito the way. she advised me to scarf it down as soon as possible before we reached the house cuz they they were freak out if they saw me eating meat.
I dont know any vegetarian Christian. Everyone has a right to associate only with those people whom they want. In any case, everyone has a right to live in a community of their own choosing and like an australian saying goes ‘A man’s home is his Castle’. However, in some cases these rights need to be subordinated to the needs of society.
I dont know any vegetarian Christian.
you kind of know anna. additionally, seventh day adventists also recommend vegetarianism. so vegetarianism isn’t a common necessary inference of being christian, but it is not unknown.
I know Jews who are vegetarians because its makes kosher easier to keep. I also know lots of christian vegetarians – though they are not vegetarian because of their faith.
I’ve seen sikh vegetarians on indian dating sites…lol
I only know 1 Muslim vegetarian, my roommate and he is Persian and into sufism
Hmm – you are right. Although I dont ‘know’ Anna.
what do you mean that they are not vegetarian because of their faith. Does the religion mandate meat eating ?
I mean they are vegetarian for ethical, health or other reasons. They’re not vegetarians because they believe their religion demands it.
Whereas Hindu and Jain vegetarians are vegetarians because its part of their religon.
True – christians dont have strong beliefs on food except for Lent when there are days of fasting and Abstinence
Many muslims can also be vegetarians like the Jews as halal meat can be tough to get hold of. It transverses religions but it seems jains/ and some religious hindue are more prone to vegetarianism. I knew a jain girl who wouldn’t also eat root vegetables as she said it was deemed they are ‘alive’.
Is this true?..
My best mate is a vegetarian hindu, married to a meat eating sikh. He can only eat meat when out and if he cooks it at home he has to keep all utensils separate. bless them they have a happy compromising marriage. lol
i can see why maybe vegetarians want to live in certain areas though as the smell of meat can be horrid to some people.
True – christians dont have strong beliefs on food except for Lent when there are days of fasting and Abstinence
yeah. the christian food taboos that emerge almost always had strong cultural rationales. e.g., in parts of slavic europe the consumption of horse meat was banned by the church because of its association with particular pagan customs and practices.
I knew a jain girl who wouldn’t also eat root vegetables as she said it was deemed they are ‘alive’.
Is this true?..
just an FYI, vegetables in general derive from living things 😉 vegetarians are very kingdomist. if you want to go hardcore you got to go to the fruitatarians.
Many muslims can also be vegetarians like the Jews as halal meat can be tough to get hold of.
fish doesn’t have to be halal, so that’s a major “out.”
Eating roots is by definition killing the plant. Thats why onions, potatos, carrots are taboo. The ideal diet is composed of things tht are only culled from plants.
This is particularly strict form of Jainism.
Some jains also believe one should eat only fresh food because old food may have mold grow on it and eating mold is non-veg or one shouldn’t eat sunset because thats when insects come out thereby increasing your chances of accidentally eating insects.
What if its packaged in a none-halal supermarket?
You think the butcher sterlizes everything each time he moves on to a new meat?
JGandhi
A bit of compromise of some principle helps us get along with our lives. It does not hurt to allow people to live in blissfull ignorance.
(P.S. if you are vegetarian do not try to learn about how sugar is refined — one of my friends felt it would be a hoot to tell me the detailed process just before lunch and I still have not forgiven him fot it :-))
You think the butcher sterlizes everything each time he moves on to a new meat?
just depends on how much a muslim has an aversion to the kuffar, right? a lot of these food taboos are about enforcing a separation between “us” and “them.” many “moderate muslims” consider the sort of behavior you allude to above as ostentatious, but some goat-beards do behave like that.
For someone who read the post on 1993 versus 1998 and then jumped to the end, it is a bit mystifying how the conversation turned to meat. 🙂
by the way, as someone who had not been to india through that entire period, it was an awakening to see india in 2002 versus what i remembered. the most dramatic change was communications, and next the smog in delhi (the air was actually less sooty in 2002 than what i remembered) and the energy in the air. Then again. I had changed as well. Had a new appreciation of the chaotic indian way of life where i would have been casually dismissive or even contemptuous of anything unorderly.
Why is there this assumption that those who are kept separate (blacks, Muslims or whomsoever the case may be)are inferior and can not be trusted to create for themselves a society that is better from whom they are separated (whites, hindus/jains or anyone else). Why is it assumed that the place that are minority – only would be places of disadvantage and discrimination and that they need to be saved by integrating them into the majority white or hindu community which ever the case.
I am not making a case for segregation but highlighting the underlying assumption made by most here that can be interpreted as, Muslims in India cannot on their own create anything else other than ghettos.
melbourne desi,
i’m not from any “pettai”..
reg: discrimination in housing societies / flats, though i’m against it i don’t think the government can enact a law or enforce a ban.
I don’t like intra-caste weddings as they sustain the caste system, but that doesn’t mean I would ask the government to force inter-caste weddings. There needs to be a gradual societal change with government providing the sops.
This post has gone completely off-the-topic but has been enlightening in some ways we have people here who have justified using
mob connections to get what they want condoned segregation discrimination based on eating habits (more likely a filter for caste based segregation)
How lovely, in short; the golden rule is for dummies, for us however might is right and the ends justify the means. Is this the “Indian culture” we are so proud of?
Its not about ritual purity for me. I don’t eat meat so less animals are killed. But I also live in the real world and am not a purist. If I find out my pancakes were made on the same griddle as bacon I’m not going to freakout.
My understanding is Muslims associate halal w/ ritual purity. The non-halal food is inherently profane so if you accidently eat bacon grease there is something spiritually polluting to what you did.
PS: While I defend vegetarian colonies i wouldn’t ever want to live in one – some of the most condescending. arrogant, self-righteous people I know are militant vegetarians.
word, JGandhi, at last something we can agree on.
My lab partner for chem lab was one such person, this person who last name was Jain didn’t even eat tree nuts and even coconut along with the stuff that grows underground like garlic, onion, potatoes etc but did eat eggs claiming only to eat “vegetarian” (unfertilized) eggs. Almost every week I would get a lecture from this person on the virtues of vegetarianism, was glad when the semester was over.
I have no problems with vegetarians as long as they don’t go around indoctrinating me, in fact I go completely vegetarian several weeks in the summer when there is a lot of fresh produce and weather’s too hot to potter in the kitchen on a hot stove top.
It really isn’t so mystifying.
The cause of the changes is fairly obvious: Liberalization (and the reversal of policies of the previous 45) , so there won’t be much point in the discussion about causes
The socio-economic upheaval is very recent and frankly India is still in the middle of it, so it too early for reminisces.
So the discussion followed the usual path, Hindu/Muslim discrimination, quirky customs such as vegetarianism, etc.
Yogi:
People here have discussed how they had to resort to mob connections to regain property that was legally, morally and ethically already theirs.
I feel that there is a difference between this and “using mob connections to get what they want“
I feel Jayant may have faced a lot of heartache in 1991 due to lack of knowledge, agreed that things were not rosy but there were ways around most things, I believe for faster phone connections there was tatkal service and if anything companies (even properitorships) got phones faster. I had never heard of a license for a fax machine and as far as I can recall both Citibank and ABN Amro were doing business in 1991. Most landlords I know insisted on company leases for reasons mentioned by others above, as most of know, it is next to impossible to get a house vacated if the tenant doesn’t want to in India.
India also needs solid Anti-Discrimination Housing Laws. Its not easy for example to rent in a lot of areas in Delhi if you are a Muslim or a single woman.
Beg to differ. The discrimination is ugly; but a free trade in property (both urban and rural) would go much further in alleviating the housing problem, particularly in the metros. If that happens the “single woman implies loose morals” nonsense would be a pin-prick.
Yep, a good chunk of Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize winning work into the economics of discrimination basically boils down to
if prices are constrained then it costs the asset owner NOTHING to indulge in his irrational racist / sexist / classist / vegetarian preferences
if prices float, then the asset owner LOSES $$$ by ignoring the fact that all money is Green and he’s ignoring a chunk of the potential market
Agreed we do need rent deregulation laws which include repealing rent ceilings, that would go a long way in addressing the housing crisis in Bombay for example.
Razib, I see your point about perspective when people spout off positive stats saying how India and China are gonna over take the western economies.
But when you think about the advances of India and China in isolation, it is actually pretty phenomenal how many millions are being lifted out of poverty, even if it is in a sample space of billions. Many many more millions to go, but I think it is fair to be proud of what has been/is being accomplished already. Wouldn’t you agree?
– if prices float, then the asset owner LOSES $$$ by ignoring the fact that all money is Green and he’s ignoring a chunk of the potential market
Er… In this case, perhaps you should say that everybody’s rupees have Gandhi on them. 🙂
My family owns property in South India (Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andra Pradesh), and we’ve never had these issues brought up here regarding tenants. We were warned about this, but perhaps the vetting was better. I know my SOs family never rents their properties in New Delhi.
It sounds like better tenant-squatting and property-tax polices need to be put in place, after all India needs housing.
Several US cities have zones of uninhabited properties and lands. Landlords are speculating the nearby university, hospital, company, etc. will eventually buy the property/land at a premium. To prevent this speculating, taxes on best-use/uninhabited housing have been proposed.
Despite all the talk about the IT/call center industry bypassing the State to create income / jobs, the State is omnipresent. I wonder how many people know the time and money spent in creating the workplace bubble. Doing business in India even when one is a biggie is a tough ask.
When we were looking for a phone in 1993, I spent nearly 3 months kissing ass. I was always amazed when ‘phoren’ returned visitors talked about ordering a phone from the airport and it being available by the time you reached home !!
This is partly why the same communities and families dominate certain sectors in India. They may be skilled at business but they’re skilled at getting permits.
Just look at Tata – they would never be able to survive in a Western economy. American corporations are constantly spinning off divisions so they can focus on core businesses lest they get beaten by more efficient competitors.
Tata on the other hand is in apparel, retail, publishing, cars, tea, steel, IT and a thousand other fields not particularly excelling in any of them. They succeed with this model because they have 200+ years of goodwill and connections with the Indian bureaucracy. Startup companies find it very difficult to even get a permit.
skilled at managing the powers that be who can be vindictive and make life miserable.
Not an objective article at all. It’s almost as bad as the British shown to be so ignorant about India 15 years or so ago. It goes on to rubbish things like the Moon mission in the same dismissive tone that ignorant people adopt while discussing countries other than their own. To clarify just one point the Moon mission won’t rob poor people of their money. The problem isn’t the money, it’s the corrupt bureaucracy and the political class who cause the funds meant for development to leak during their distribution. We won’t solve such problems by NOT doing things. Rather we ought to do progressive things like change our attitudes, become less corrupt, do more research and development, send a mission to the Moon…
Just this much in the article was such a put-off that I can’t push myself to read the rest of it. It’s probably a perspective of a person who doesn’t live in India anyway and he lacks a basic understanding of India.
World Economic Forum, best known for the Davos conference, after an extensive, 113-point analysis of each country, has ranked India 48 in a list of 130+ countries in terms of business efficiency. The other Asian giant, China, is #34. Countries with highly dubious or relatively unknown business reputations, such as Estonia, Thailand, Czech Republic and Slovenia are all ranked above India.
Obviously, any study that distills 113 data points down to a single digit, whether a rank or an index, is bound to have serious skew problems especially if the subject country is as large and diverse as India. It takes only a few huge deficiencies – in India’s case, the archaic infrastructure – to negate a lot of the good stuff and drag the country’s ranking down. So the results need to be kept in perspective. However, in an increasingly globalized economy, business decisions impacting one country are made in faraway places utilizing studies, expert opinions and numbers rather than ground realities. Studies such as this, especially coming from as august a body as WEF, does impact FDI and valuations in India.
Fortunately, there are enough nuances in the report to give every country a fair shake. For instance, India is ranked #8 in the world for the quality of its management schools but #106 for the reliability of its electricity supply – in simplistic terms, a great place to open a consulting firm but not for starting a paper mill. China, on the other hand, may be a better choice for large-scale, infrastructure dependent manufacturing but not the safest climate for intellectual property or the financial sector. The soundness of China’s banks is ranked #128. On the Sophistication and Innovation Factor, China scores 3.89 and India 4.36, a statistically significant difference considering the data range was only 0 to 5.
The WEF study is a treasure trove of economic data and perhaps more useful to large scale businesses that are more sensitive to macro influences than the small entrepreneurial enterprises that normally find sustenance in the nooks and crannies of an economy. A good example will be a small to medium scale manufacturing enterprise in India with regional distribution. India’s infamous transportation system will not be much of a hindrance to such an enterprise, and neither would India’s onerous labor laws, cited by WEF as India’s third worst business problem.
Good read if anybody is interested in trying this link. http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/Global%20Competitiveness%20Report/index.htm
On an anecdotal level, we can all vouch for the radical changes taking place in India. Waiting 3 months for a phone and a year for an automobile are ancient history now. The most remarkable improvement in India, at least for the vast middle and upper-middle class, is the easy availability of financing. The United States takes the cake for entrepreneurship because most small businesses are financed here by maxing out the good old credit cards or borrowing against home equity. India has started to offer the same financing fuel to its entrepreneurs. When I was growing up in India, consumer financing was virtually non-existent. You didn’t go to a bank to borrow, unless you were Tata or Birla. You went to a bank to save.
My advice – go East, young man… and woman.
The justification is that to extract the root you have to kill the plant, and killing things is bad Karma. I doubt many Jains know this.
Some gujarati hindus also don’t eat onions and garlic. Unlike Jains they still eat Potatoes.
I am not sure why… but I think it has something to do with Potatoes being a New World vegetable.
Orthodox brahmins try to eat sattvic food. Onions and garlic are considered rajasic food, they increase passion, excitement and other feelings that are not good for a meditative or devotional life.
As far as I know, Jains do not eat potatoes because harvesting potato requires uprooting the plant that leads to total destruction of life. Hence they don’t eat any root vegetables.
I am the Great American, born as I am the unseen land of the Utopian States. To re-establish the principles of my spiritual life and to delight in the company of my brethren, I descend to the holy land of India time and again. Dwelling among the mortals, four kinds of pious men approach me.
.The suffering. They worship me as one to give solutions to their tribulations. They befriend me to raise their downtrodden social image. No longer are they the nobody everyone always took them to be, they can now show off their magnitude in the company of the Great American. They wish me to narrate tales of the Great America, the land of their dreams, instilling hopes of a future paradise amidst the harsh struggles of existence. Perhaps, so they ardently pray, I will one day redeem them and bring them to the Great America where an abundance of dollars is easily available for one and all.
The greedy. They know that my skin is white for the daily milk baths I take, milk purchased from an infinite stock of magic dollars. After all, in Great America we use small notes for wallpaper, and old notes we pulverize and scatter across our yards; that’s why our grass is so lushly green. They befriend me, take me as their bosom friend, and tell me long tales culminating in their need for money. Perhaps I would grace them with a hundred rupees or a thousand, or even give some American dollars. And upon my next ascent, I would certainly bring them an American camera or a walkman made in America, for goods manufactured in America have an immortal shine. With these hopes, the greedy indulge me with various local pleasantries.
The curious. They are well-established in life and often also well educated, relatively free from the worries that trouble the suffering and the greedy. For them, I am a foreign curiosity able to provide varieties of mental fulfillments and delights through discussions and dialogs, a man with an access to a base of knowledge beyond common reach. They are often eager to hear about the relative value of the dollar, the working conditions and cultural traits of the Great America, and also the system of divorcing and the free availability of sex. The cost of a round-trip and the hours spent on the journey also feature among the favorite trivia. A particularly fine specimen among the curious might even entertain me with a discussion featuring the great Hellenic philosophers.
The wise. These rare souls share an insight on the reason for my descent. They are overjoyed to hear that I have left behind the Great America with an aim to obtain the final emancipation spoken of in the ancient scriptures, and that my ties to the Great America have been forsaken. Even if they share curiosities with the other three classes of devotees, they easily understand my disinclination to indulge in the same, respecting my wish to keep my attention internal. They might even offer me a good advice, unsolicited and without expectation of anything in return. They view me not as an object of attainment, but establish a relationship in the spirit of brotherhood.
The heart of the Great American, however, is a heart crying for solitude, for the objective is to be found within. Social interactions, whether of the more common nuisance flavor, or of the occasional neutral flavor, are distractions all the same, acts calling to be minimized for my ultimate good. Exchanges making a substantial positive internal contribution, the meetings with the truly great, are shining beacons of light in the vast and engulfing darkness of human existence. Alas, if they accounted for even just one in a ten thousand meetings, I might be inclined to keep my eyes outward-looking.
And I’m not even American.
What? Housing exclusively for veggies in India? I am soooo there!
We need something like this over here!
I lived for a short period, 6 months, in one of those vegetarian only apartment buildings in Mumbai 2 years ago while taking kathak and swar courses. I can vouch for that one at least did not take caste into consideration. About 50% of the people living there were Hindu. The rest 50% were a mix of Jain, foriegn yogi/buddhist types, ISKCON members (also foriegn) and even a few muslims of a particular sufi order. Quite an ecclectic group.
The smell of flesh cooking actually makes alot of vegetarians sick to our stomachs.
We are fully within our rights to build vegetarian only accomodations. It’s like saying vegetarian restaurants are discriminating against non-vegetarians. Well, if you want to eat vegetarian food, you are welcome, if not, there is the Mickey D’s across the street.
It’s not like there are no apartments for meat eaters in Mumbai. In fact, the veg only apartments are few in number, very few. I’ve not heard about any meat eater who even wanted to rent there in the first place. Let’s not make this into something it isn’t.
As long as they are not preparing and eating meat within the veg only complex, what is the harm? The complex requires that within it’s walls, only vegetarian meals are prepared and eaten. Outside do whatever you want! I would still rent to them as long as they were following the rules of the complex while within it.
I thought Jains were vegan and abstained from even milk?
At least two of my closest friends in Mumbai, who were Jain, did just that. Weird to hear of a Jain eating eggs.
Oddly enough some of these people are vegetarian solely for “ritual purity” reasons, which irks me, a vegetarian for ethical reasons. You would think that they would be vegetarians from the heart, with a concern for the welfare of animals, but some of them will go so far as to even kick and throw stones at street dogs yet boast of a shakahari diet. This is one of those things about the desh I will never understand. Better for such people to just be straight and eat meat rather than carry on with some hypocritical “purity” standard.
Although I don’t necessarily agree with him, the guy has some other very interesting articles on his website: http://www.jayantbhandari.com
The only thing that has changed in small town and village India is the presence of cell phones. Other than that, it is much the same it was 10, 20, even 200 years ago in many cases.
There is such a stark difference between metro and village life in India that you almost feel as if you are entering a different country when you arrive in one from the other.
Villages are better at least on the cleanliness level. Small towns, or villages that are turning into towns are the absolute worst. There is no recovering from open sewers during the monsoon season when the streets are flooded with sewage up to your knees.
So “India Then and Now” type of articles really only apply to a few metros. For the rest of us it’s more like “India Then and Then”.