India's Fortune

Title Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation

Author Nandan Nilekani

Publisher Penguin

Year 2009

Pages 528 pp.

Price $29.95

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"Businessmen, after all, do not usually make good public intellectuals," writes Nandan Nilekani early in his book, as he recalls discussing with a friend whether to put finger to keyboard. A few pages later, he describes himself as an "avid amateur" when it comes to modern India's political economy. Avid and proficient, it turns out, for his efforts have produced one of the best and most thought-provoking books on India in years. Few Indian, or indeed Western, businesspeople would be capable of drafting such a dispassionate and self-critical account of their country's prospects. And perhaps no other Indian public intellectual could write across so many disciplines -- politics, economics, finance, education, the environment -- with as much clarity and acuity.

Nilekani's book, Imagining India, charts how India arrived at the potentially transformative moment it has reached today and describes the gargantuan challenges the country will have to overcome if it is to fulfill that potential. ("Potential" is always a key word with India, which explains why the titles of so many books about this extraordinary country begin with Imagining . . . or The Idea of . . . or The Invention of . . .) Nilekani, one of the most prominent faces of India's success in information technology (IT), is especially well qualified to write this book. As a co-founder of Infosys, the country's second-largest IT company and one of its biggest earners of foreign exchange, he both departs from the traditional Indian way of doing business and embodies its recent promise.

First, Nilekani did not inherit his business or his wealth. His father, a smalltime mill manager and a supporter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, raised him to believe that the state, rather than the private sector, would provide for India's future. Nilekani remembers the logic that dominated in those days: "Why allow wealth to be created in private hands where it would probably be used for nefarious purposes?"

Second, Nilekani is a risk taker. Nobody, including his father, gave him or his company much chance of success when he was talking about launching it in 1981. He remembers one conversation: "'Don't be an idiot,' an uncle told me. 'A start-up will find it impossible to do business here.' Two decades later, however, I was being fêted as a first-generation entrepreneur, and my socialist father was in attendance at each of Infosys's shareholder meetings."

Third, Nilekani is a genuine philanthropist. In a country where giving private wealth usually involves building a temple to a Hindu god and receiving pride of honor there for generations, Nilekani is a socially progressive altruist. He has given millions of his own wealth to improve civic governance in his hometown, Bangalore, and education at his alma mater, the renowned Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. (In contrast, Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man and the chief executive of Reliance Industries, a company founded by his late father, is building a $1 billion home with 27 floors and accommodation for 600 servants on the site of a former orphanage in Mumbai.)

Finally, Nilekani is a meritocrat. This should be unremarkable, but with its caste system, Indian society is entangled in perhaps the world's most binding network of traditional social ties and obligations. Both in theory, through his stated dislike for kith-and-kin patronage in public life, and in practice, as co-chair of a company that has provided many lower-caste Indians with a ladder to wealth and respectability, Nilekani is an unapologetic modernist.

THE STRENGTH OF WEAKNESSES

Imagining India is essentially divided into two halves. The first explains why democratic, English-speaking India is starting to achieve its potential and how that could lead to a globally influential position for the country. The second catalogs the often-alarming, although never alarmist, reasons why the country could still fall apart.

"India now stands evenly balanced, between [Indians'] reluctance to change in the face of immense challenges and the possibilities we have if we do tackle these issues head-on," Nilekani writes, in reference to the country's dismal public health policies, growing energy deficit, and unwillingness to confront environmental problems. "In the long term we will either become a country that greatly disappoints when compared with our potential or one that beats all expectations."

Nilekani makes a persuasive case that key attributes, some of which were once seen as India's weaknesses, have "matured at the same time" and together have become strengths. For example, although for years after independence many Indians saw the English language as a humiliating reminder of British imperial rule, it has been an essential ingredient of India's growing competitiveness and one of the few decisive advantages India has over China. (A chapter title of Imagining India says it all: "The Phoenix Tongue: The Rise, Fall and Rise of English.") Whereas India's state governments were until recently trying to stamp out English in schools -- an effort as ineffective, fortunately, as many other misguided policies -- nowadays even communist West Bengal and Hindu-nationalist Gujarat have made the teaching of English compulsory starting in the first grade.