Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Economic boom in India

My friend Srini called me and told that there is an interview of Manmohan Singh on Charlie Rose and on subsequent days with other Indian CEOs. He also mentioned that Charlie was a very good interviewer and it was a very sensible show to watch. This was on the backdrop of a discussion that we had about an interview with Jayalalitha (CM of Tamilnadu) by Karan Thapar and it was a lesson in how to not conduct an interview. Karan Thapar always tried to be on the offensive and asking all negative questions and Jaya reacted back appropriately. It was great fun though.

Charlie is one of the really good interviewers that i have seen. The theme of the interviews was the growth of Indian economy and India as a force in the world, India vs China and the dynamics of Indo-US cooperation. Interviews were held with Manmohan Singh, Azim Premji, Nandan Nilekani, Kiran Mazumdar, Ratan Tata and Anil Agarwal. Some of the questions he posed to the Indian top shots were the same and it was quite interesting to see that they were all giving almost the same answers. The questions were really deep and the conversations were enriching.


I would say that these interviews were a good brand building exercise for India. All of them were very positive about India's growth and its emergence as an economic world power. I liked Azim the best in terms of his deep understanding of India and his vision to further improve the quality of life in India. The interviews gave me a good understanding of how the Indian economy has evolved over the last few years not only from an IT perspective, but from other industries as well. I could understand that the growth that we are experiencing is for real and it is going to be sustained.

India's strength being the intellectual capital at reasonable cost, secular democracy (probably the only country in the world that has a muslim as the president, head of the ruling coalition as a catholic, PM being a sikh and the opposition leader being a hindu. Can you beat that?), a country that is going to have the largest working class population in about 5 yrs, spirituality and so on. The weaknesses being infra, infra and infra. Politicians in the country have not come upto speed with what is happening in India.

Everyone identified that China is far ahead right now in terms of the overall economic scenario and were quite positive that India will catch up sooner or later. They also suggested more synergy between the two countries to take advantage of the new world order. The population of the two countries combined is more than one third of the world (2 bill out of 6.5 bill roughly). The videos of these interviews are available for a price of 0.99$.

Interesting times ahead for India and only time well tell whether this century is going to be called 'chindia'.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with you that India has an intellectual capital and I am happy that finally we are putting it to good use...even George Bush on his recent trip to India was candid enough to admit India's growing stature internationally....I wish we could build our infrastructure fast enough and stop filling cases on loosing a bid..this further slows the process...

Anonymous said...

The indian society needs to stop their old habits of having classes as it may just benefit the country's boom.