Thoughts In Progress: 2
In the Thoughts-In-Progress posts, I write about ideas some of which I may not be fully convinced of yet. Or about which I have not made up my mind yet- this way or that. Like Work In Progress, these thoughts are not done yet.
I used to read Naushad Forbes’ newspaper articles when I was in college. He is a co-chairman of Forbes Marshall- one of the prominent industries in Pune/ India. He has a Ph.D. from and taught at Stanford. He wrote about industry, economics, etc. and I understood some of it. I did not then understand much what other industrialists wrote. Third, he wrote regularly in the papers available in my library- thus was accessible. Maybe other people wrote regularly in pink papers. Occasionally when I read those papers I did not understand much of what was written. Does anyone?
Anyway, I recently started reading Forbes’ book The Struggle and The Promise. Purchased it after listening to his interviews on Ideas Of India and The Seen and the Unseen podcasts.
The book is subtitled Restoring India's Potential. It talks about whether India even has the potential to lead and what are the factors governing that. It talks about policy decisions of governments over the years, what kind of mindset change would be required. The footnotes, references to papers and books, charts, data, quotes, etc. are wide ranging but to the point. Plus he uses R. K. Laxman’s the common man cartoons and Wodehouse quotes. In the podcast interviews mentioned above he says he’s always reading at least one Wodehouse book- Leave It To Psmith being his favorite. It was my first Wodehouse and has a special place in my mind.
The book is not on economics, industry or policy as such. But it has his views on how to do better in these areas. Plus he mentions where India has done good. Some good insights include that Indian state does a lot of things; instead it should do fewer things but excel at those. Why should Indian government be in the business of running hotels, banks, etc.? M. S. Ahluwalia mentions this on Shruti’s and Amit’s podcasts. He says Nehru in his speech mentioned the age old burdens of poverty, lack of education and ill-health. After reforms of 1991 poverty has been reduced a bit but the other two areas are still burdens. Forbes alludes to these areas. Also he talks about labour reforms, agri reforms, etc. In fact, these are the prominent areas of next reform needed as per many experts. They also mentioned that India created wealth/ increased GDP without much proportionate increase in jobs. Of course, these reforms and job creation are difficult. (I remember listening to How Asia Works and how countries like Indonesia handled land reforms, etc.)
There are quite a lot of things I learnt from the book and I am not even halfway through it. Some of these ideas are talked about at many other places as well. For example, India should target a sustained growth rate of 9-10 percent, the primary education should be a state priority, vocational training and skill development should be targeted in partnership with industries, etc. I guess I may have some more thoughts-in-progress by the time I finish the book and some referenced material.
A couple of things I found in this book and elsewhere and which I have not fully digested yet are:
- Ease the movement of people to cities.
- Agriculture is low productivity sector and manufacturing is high productivity. (Even food delivery is higher productivity than agri, etc.)
- Research should happen in Universities and industries rather than in dedicated institutions.
Well, all these points make sense. But…
- I agree that cities are hotbeds of innovation and drive employment, aspirations, etc. And I don’t fully subscribe to Gandhi’s idea of self sufficient villages. It is somewhat idealistic and in a connected world where goods and services can be easily transferred it may not make a lot of sense. Still, looking at the condition of Indian cities I will argue for some decentralization. Create or develop more cities rather than burdening the existing ones. M. S. Ahluwalia say that if we had smaller states, each state will have to develop its capital and a few other cities. I think such top down approach may be good/ required. Let’s accept that nobody wants to move to villages. Even if you are poetic in nature, the idea of idyllic hamlets has worked, if it has, only in Europe. That may be because of smaller nations, good transport and good enough economic activity. But, in general, if you look at job opportunities, education, lifestyle we aspire for, etc. people would always want to be in cities. But can the state not do more to develop tier 2, 3 cities and near enough towns? We have seen during pandemics that people don’t mind leaving cities for good enough towns. On the other hand, there are essays explaining why Silicon Valley cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. Good enough infrastructure, concentration of educational, research institutes/ universities, good enough weather, acceptance of failure, diversity, etc. are some of the factors given.
- Agriculture is a low productivity sector. More so in India. There is no doubt about that. And hundreds of times I have heard that a country grows when people move from rural agriculture sector to manufacturing sector which is high productivity- higher than agriculture at least. I don’t doubt that at this stage. Then why have this in thoughts in progress? First, let’s accept that at least for a generation or two we will need agriculture- till we can synthesize/ artificially create chlorophyll, meat, etc. Or maybe we can create blood, sugar, proteins/ amino acids before that. Some of this progress has been already happening as 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry highlights. It seems that the first new protein was created in 2003, and in last 4 years structures of virtually all known 200 million proteins have been mapped. So the future is already here. But it may take some time for it to be evenly distributed. And if till then we need agriculture then I- naively- believe that if reforms happen then the Indian agriculture could become more productive. As I said above, I know that these reforms will be difficult. Agri reforms would be as difficult as land, labour reforms. But say if we allow free market, futures, etc., and industrialization of agriculture sector, then that would be substantial. I think some of it needs to happen and will happen in what is called reforms by stealth. Third, the thought that a country develops when people move from agriculture to manufacturing may be a thought residue of industrial revolution, I think. I mean purely as a thought/ thought process. Why manufacturing? Why not services, tourism, etc.? I think that may be because of optionality of those. In the worst case scenario, we can live without services but we cannot live without manufactured goods. Need to read more on this.
- Lastly, about the research centers being located in universities rather than in dedicated institutes, etc. Forbes mentions that businesses/ industries can do their in-house R&D and if they need some expertise then they can approach universities. And universities can use those funds for additional research in basic and applied sciences, etc. Having dedicated labs/ institutes has not yielded good enough outcomes in India whereas the other model has succeeded elsewhere. Well, this thought is in progress because it is very new to me. Why didn’t I think of it before?
Tangentially: I think Forbes later moved on to write in some different newspapers which I did not read. But while I don’t actively seek his columns these days, even now he is one of the few writers whose columns I read if I see them. A lot has changed in that space since then. First newspaper columns never were/ never will be replacement for books. As I aged, perhaps I preferred 500 page books to 500 word columns. Then internet ruined newspapers. Because of financial pressures newspapers became small and had fewer pages. As a result content took a hit. Explosion of news channels/ twitter, etc. ruined news and journalism. News became bites and people liked that and for a period nobody cared much about depth or even facts. As long as it was sensational, nobody cared for much else. And then probably due to some demand for analysis a sort of separation happened where some publications focused more on analyzing the news than being first to report the news. Yet it’s sort of paradoxical that due to information age there certainly are more experts with better insights; but good columns are hard to find. With growing number of readers, biased opinions got columnists more loyal readers than otherwise. And maybe even in the good old days, the press pandered to their readers’ prejudices. It may also have to do with my age. Maybe people of formative years do find such columns and writing easily. Anyway, while I could name some 20-30 columnists I read regularly then, these days I don’t actively read many of those. Passively, if I see their writing, I still try to read. Of course, there are some new columnist these days which I didn’t read/ know of those days. I think because her (syndicated?) column- Inside Track- was always available in the papers I read, Coomi Kapoor has to be the columnist I read for the longest period. I still do. Her gossip style of writing hides the depth. But it has helped me understand, connect the dots and make sense of an otherwise quite noisy field.
Further: I don’t have some simpleton-like ideas about India. I have some knowledge of how India is perceived in terms of ease of doing business, corruption, infrastructure, competition, rule of law, meritocracy, crony capitalism, etc. While you may not know all the details to understand how a new state government did not honor the Enron deal or even to understand restrospective taxes case of Vodafone, you can see that these kind of things are not good. And sometimes directly or sometimes between the lines Forbes talks about these things.