An Indian education

Last week I was in Bangalore for a week's training. I'm a policy wonk by background, and that's very much my focus in my job here, but I am also a member of the management board of the UK-Indian joint venture company I work for. Which means, horror of horrors, that I have to show some kind of insight into business matters as well as making earnest statements about evidence-based approaches and public goods.

Most of the time this isn't a problem. I actually quite enjoy switching from policy to business mode, thinking strategically about business issues and spotting where the new opportunities are (clue: in the skills business in India, they are everywhere, but finding the ones that will actually allow you to break even is trickier). Besides, in my line of work the line between business and policy is very blurred: education businesses have to keep public benefits at the heart of what they do or they quickly lose the faith of their customers; conversely, they have to be businesslike or the market will simply eat them alive. So policy affects business, and business affects policy. That's even more the case in India, where training is just taking off and the gold rush is just beginning.

Anyway, I digress. My point was that I was mostly fine tackling business issues, except for one rather important point: numbers.

I don't mean I can't do maths. My maths is actually pretty OK, although algebra beyond x=2y can still sometimes induce mild hysteria if I don't take some deep breaths first. What I struggle with is finance. As soon as those enormous spreadsheets appear on the power point, with lots of months and decimal points and terms like EBIDTA, something tends to switch off in my brain. I know I should follow it. I know the numbers aren't that difficult. But the spreadsheets are just so big. And there are so many columns. And can't we just talk about how policy fails to incentivise enough employers to offer apprenticeships? Please?

So to cut a long story short I decided I needed to find a course on finance for people who will never - god forbid - actually work in the field, but who need to be able to go to a board meeting and talk intelligently about performance against AOP and so on, without being reduced to a quivering pile of jelly. And so it was that I spent last week putting in 11 hour study  days at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

If you want to see how serious India is about business, go to IIMB. I went to a pretty good university and I have some very, very clever friends, but this was some of the best teaching by some of the smartest people I've ever come across. It was intense, it was exhausting, it left me feeling like my eyes were propped open with sandpaper - but god, it was good. And to my enormous astonishment, it also managed to be really, really interesting. I can't say I can now confidently reel off all the principles of financial management, but I am fairly sure that the next time I'm in the board room it'll be with my head a lot higher than before.

Let me just say this again: these people made me find finance interesting. That's rather like managing to convince Ann Coulter that actually, Barack Obama isn't such a bad old stick.

Sitting in classrooms like those at IIMB it's hard to imagine that India isn't following a manifest destiny to become the most successful and largest economy in the world. But the fact is that, on current trends, it isn't. The pockets of superb quality education like IIMB exist in a sea of educational underachievement; the brilliance of the faculty (and some of my fellow students) has to be set against a system where vast numbers complete their education without sufficient capabilities to be employable. India excels at excellence, but it currently fails at adequacy.

In my last post I commented that some of the social patterns in India remind me of some of the damaging trends seen in my own country and in the USA, trends that are associated with high levels of inequality. This strikes me as another one: in all three countries there are pockets of academic brilliance, with truly world class people and incredible results, but swathes of the population are left behind completely. And the problem is that academic brilliance alone isn't enough. Sooner or later all those people will need people who are brilliant in other ways. The people who probably won't ever lecture a room full of businessmen about macroecnomics or create innovations in nanotechnology, but who will make sure the people that do those things live in a world that works - and will do so by achieving high level skills that may lack glamour, but that are sorely needed.

All three countries are committed to developing skills at all levels and to offering opportunities to all. But sometimes I wonder if that's enough. In a world that idolises a privileged minority of celebrities and business leaders, and emphasises material gain as the way to happiness, who'd want to become a hotelier or a plumber? Who'd want to settle for just being an ordinary, successful person? And who, when they realise they'll never earn a seven figure salary or appear in Hello!, wouldn't be tempted to just throw in the towel altogether? Policy commitment to diversity of skills and opportunity may not be enough in the face of a modern culture that sometimes seems geared in entirely the opposite direction.

The more unequal we get, the more aspiration is narrowly defined, the more the middle is hollowed out, and the less liveable our societies become. And that's a challenge India has in common with a lot of places that, superficially at least, it looks nothing like.

Wheels and class

There are many visible indicators of class and wealth in India. You can see it in the way people move, their body language towards each other, the clothes they wear (not just the quality or costliness, but the aesthetics), and in their faces (a browse through the faces on milaap.org, a brilliant site that facilitates micro loans to needy people in India, will show many people for whom the daily toil of life for millions of Indians adds decades to their appearance). And you can also see it in how they get about.

Transportation may not seem a particularly important marker of class or power, particularly in a country where millions identify themselves as poor by proffering a begging bowl. But as any country's economy develops, the need to move about - and the desire to do so in comfort - grows inexorably, and this puts massive stress on infrastructure and inhabitants. In Delhi, with its crowded roads and might-is-right traffic rules, traffic and transportation are becoming one of the most visible battle lines of class conflict. As the city grows, so does its inequality, and this battle looks set to go for a good while yet.

Take this story, for instance. Gaurav Jain, a 26 year old journalist, researching the lives of cycle rickshaw pullers by doing the job himself, was assaulted by a police officer for 'blocking the road'. Before I say anything else I want to say: kudos to Mr. Jain. Most of the time, Delhi seems to consist of a million or so "important" people and countless millions of others who get ignored. The cycle rickshaw pullers, the street hawkers, the hijras tapping on your car window at the traffic lights. Your average car-driving Delhiwalla barely seems aware of the existence of these people, never mind having such an interest in how they live that they'd be willing to take on a tough and - let's face it - demeaning job in order to understand it.

I don't say this to be critical. Anyone who has lived in a big city will understand that urban survival depends on an ability to act as if you're the only person walking down the street, standing on the train, driving to work. There are just too many people. We can't acknowledge them all. And the ones we do acknowledge tend to be those most like us, the ones to whom we can relate. So in Delhi it's no surprise that the aspiring middle classes pay scant attention to the poor guys slogging their guts out dragging a family of five on the back of their bike for 15 rupees. It's the way things are, and after living here a while you find your blinkers tend to come on pretty quick.

Anyway, back to Mr. Jain's story. Following the attack he went to the local police station to make a complaint, but was ignored. "It's strange how much a person's professional standing or profile can affect the way the law treats him", he said. Quite. Somehow I don't think his rickshaw puller colleagues would find it all that strange.

That the rich and privileged can expect better legal redress than the poor and excluded is no surprise. What was interesting to me was the reason for the attack: "blocking the road". Read: getting in the way of the car drivers, who are far more important than you.

This reminded me of another story that came out a few weeks ago, about the ongoing saga of Delhi's bus lanes and the objections from car users that they are causing delays. The quoted comments in the article lay bare the stark class divide here, and the assumptions made by the privileged about the millions of dispossessed Indians (on whom they depend for everything from domestic cleaning to shoe shining). "People" are being delayed by traffic jams because of the bus lanes, argue campaigners. "How does it matter if a peon reaches his office five minutes before time?" asks one. The apparently radical idea that "people" should also include those who use public transport has to be specifically pointed out by a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology.

It should be obvious that when only 10% of a city's inhabitants drive, yet the streets are already clogged to all hell, public transport has to be at least a part of the solution. But the fact that the bus lanes are fighting for their survival is testament to the disproportionate power held by those 10%. Of course, while they appear to be fighting for their own benefit, if they get what they want it will simply ensure a miserable future for everyone: a city even more gridlocked, fume-choked and cacophonous than it is already.

And this is what worries me most about the emerging battles around Delhi's transportation system. It seems to encapsulate a situation where growing inequality leads to class-based battles that belittle ordinary people and lead to the privileged taking decisions in their narrow benefit, rather than recognising the need for development to work for all, not just the "wealth creators".

The result, it seems to me, is usually a set of outcomes that are worse for everyone.  There are parallels to be made here with the increasingly unequal societies in the UK and the US (among others), which in the past 30 years or so have become massively richer, massively less equitable, and arguably a good deal less happy, healthy and secure. Repeating those patterns in a city the size of the Netherlands - let alone a country of 1.3 billion - is a scary prospect.

A Building Site in Bangalore

Spending all day on a building site in Bangalore may not be most people's idea of a reason to feel grateful for life's opportunities. But that's what I did on Wednesday this week and that's how it made me feel.

I was down in Bangalore supervising the pilot stage of a research project we are doing at the moment. I won't bore you with the details, but it involves evaluating an initiative undertaken by a local NGO to assess the skills of labourers working in the informal construction sector. There are a lot of people doing this kind of work in India - putting in long, hard hours - and they live a fairly precarious existence, traveling wherever the work is and with no contractual protections. They've very rarely had any kind of formal education and the skills they have have been picked up on the job, with no formal recognition at all. So the idea of the project is to recognise and certify their skills, facilitating access to work and further training, as part of India's wider efforts to train its population. As a policy specialist, most of my work is done at a computer or in meetings; it's not all that often I get to see what's happening at the ground level. This was a rare exception.

Building sites in India are, by and large, hot, dusty, noisy and relentless. There's often very little shade. The workers slog under the sun before squatting in the unfinished buildings to eat their lunch. Underfoot is pretty much a mass of rubble; strange struts of metal stick at random angles out of bare concrete staircases. Mechanisation is usually minimal; bricks are either carried up flights of stairs on people's heads, or hauled up by pulleys. This is not an easy existence.

In Bangalore, there was a girl in a red outfit with a toddler hoisted on her hip. She looked about seven or eight at most. My colleague from the local NGO asked why she wasn't in school; she ducked her head and wouldn't say a word. Her father explained that he couldn't afford to send all of his children to school. Some would get an education, some wouldn't, he said. She was needed to take care of her little brother. Like her parents, she will probably remain illiterate.

We interviewed a number of workers for the pilot. Of course I couldn't understand what was being said, but a translator was to hand. At one point, one said that "the big people" had come and asked him to take the assessment. Big people, I asked? He means the NGO folk, I was told. But we are all big people to him. We have an education.

I didn't feel like a very big person at that point in time; I just felt like a very lucky person. I wanted to ask, does that mean he sees himself as a small person? Is that just accepted? But I felt foolish. There's no way I can understand the perspective of someone whose start in life has been so utterly different from my own. And no amount of liberal hand-wringing about inequality or caste can change the fact that, for him, that's just the reality of his world.

Our research partner commented that he thought it was impressive that I was willing to come to places like this; most people wouldn't bother, he said. I tried to explain that I see it as an extraordinary privilege. In my work I've had the opportunity to meet village women in Ghana, labourers in India, policy makers and researchers from countries across the world. Every one brought fresh perspective to me and enriched my world. I know that the villagers and labourers will never have the chance to broaden their horizons in the way I have, and that their lives will likely be hard until the day they die. Meeting them, even briefly, is humbling and something for which I'm incredibly grateful.

Back home, my friends are posting about their excitement at being part of the Olympics, and I have to admit to feeling a twinge of regret at not being there to participate in the spectacle. But on the whole, I'm glad I'm here instead.

Shopping and segregation

I'm not usually a mall kind of person. This is maybe because instead of growing up in, say, Houston, Texas (where the malls are sparkly, the clothes are cheap and they sell interesting things like Dead Sea salt rubs which then leak all over your suitcase), I grew up in suburban Manchester in the 1980s. In Stretford, we didn't use the word "mall" to describe our local shopping centre; we called it "the precinct", or - more often - "the preccy". It was built of yellow public-toilet bricks and concrete, and had an increasingly pound shop-occupied interior that was scarcely less depressing. After I left Manchester, the place was indeed rebranded as "the Stretford Mall", but they weren't fooling anyone.

This wasn't a great introduction to the mall experience, though I've undoubtedly had a somewhat better experience since then. I retain, though, a healthy dislike for these places and their soulless capitalism, divorced from the civic and artistic life of the city centre. So I've pretty much avoided the various huge establishments that have sprung up in south Delhi in recent years, and done my shopping in the various family-run, stick-out-your-elbow-and-knock-over-an-entire-exhibit little stores in the various local markets.

Every now and again, though, needs must. This last weekend I needed to go shopping to buy a new outfit for the concerts my choir is giving this week. Last time the dress code was black; this time it is off-white, so I had to buy another kurta (yes, I now have two garments that I'm going to wear maybe four times in my life). I decided this time I'd go the whole hog and get the matching pyjama and juttis too (that's a whole other post) so I met up with a couple of friends at the Vasant Kunj mall to do the needful, as they say here.

Vasant Kunj mall is actually a set of three interconnected malls, that sit by the site of an enormous dusty highway somewhere amid the south Delhi sprawl. The location seems bizarre to me. As a non-driver I find the idea of putting commercial outlets miles from anywhere where people would naturally walk to be inherently weird; for those used to getting everywhere by car, I guess the perspective is different. But anyway, the view from the malls is of said dusty highway, a few sad patches of grass, and a lot of Indian style pavements (cracked stones, random gaps, even more random lumps of concrete stuck in the middle of the path). And that's it. You can't see any human habitation or other commercial activity, even though logically they can't be that far away. It's just the malls and the wasteland. It's very post-apocalyptic.

(I feel I must add at this point that I didn't take my camera with me, so the above photo is not my work. I hope I would have managed to get a reasonably horizontal shot...)

Talking of the apocalypse, like any self-respecting horror film fan (and I am one, though that seems to surprise people quite often) I can't go to a mall without my thoughts turning to zombies. And Vasant Kunj could indeed be modelled on the Dawn of the Dead mall. Once you've left behind the broken concrete, cooking under the 42 degree sun, it's definitely more Houston than Stretford: sparkling clean, completely sanitised, and shamelessly dedicated to shallow consumerism (in which, of course, I would NEVER indulge. Oh no). And like such places everywhere, it's populated by people who, in the main, are mindlessly in pursuit of exactly that.

We want Gucci saris, new iPhones, and fresh masala brains please.

Actually, though, I was more reminded me of a more recent Romero outing, Land of the Dead. You know, the one where the survivors of Z-Day are walled up in an idyllic prison while outside chaos rules? Vasant Kunj mall feels a bit like that - a slightly surreal, too-perfect world that bears no resemblance at all to the noisy, hot, churning city outside. And while this may sound like I am drawing a comparison in the mall's favour, I'm not. For a couple of hours it was nice to escape the dirt and the heat, breathe in the air-conditioned goodness, and eat caprese salad in a sports bar complete with pool tables. But it gets old pretty quickly, and anyway, it feels as phoney as those impossibly handsome shop mannequins you see these days.

I'm not sniping at India for having malls, or romanticising the "real India" as something under threat from these developments. As I said, I don't much like any malls, and I think they do have a destructive effect on the vitality of the cities where they spring up. But I understand their attraction, particularly for Delhiites between May and September, when the weather is at its most intolerable. I can't blame people for wanting some cool air, some space, and some respite from the traffic cacophony.

If, of course, you have the money to afford it. Indian malls have tight security, and routinely turn people away if they look like they can't afford to shop there (which, of course, the vast majority of Indians can't). At least in UK shopping centres anyone can come and window shop; in India, part of the appeal of these places is that they are exclusive to a small number of well-off people who are desperate to escape the seething masses for a while.

And this is what I find a bit unnerving about them. Generally, markets in Delhi are quite equalising places. Yes, you have more exclusive ones where stores cater to people with large budgets, but to get to them you can't avoid rubbing shoulders with shoe shine boys, cycle rickshaw wallas, and all the others, hustling for a few rupees. The streets of Delhi simply don't allow for much segregation between different kinds of people.

So the mall seems symptomatic of a wider change in India, seen also in the proliferation of gated communities in cities like Delhi and Bangalore. A degree of exclusivity - in leisure activities or education, for instance - has always been a feature of being rich; but India's increasing wealth (and its concentration in the hands of a few) seems to be leading to a place where rich people's entire lives are becoming removed from those of their poorer countrymen.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. The markets at Lajpat Nagar or Sarojini Nagar remain, after all, melting pots of Delhi society (and despite the lack of air conditioning or piped music, a more rewarding experience for the visitor). But I think the trend is there - the same trend that, for instance, South Africa has seen (though for different reasons, I think). Is the future of urban India one of stark polarisation? Will tomorrow's rich Indian kids have any idea at all of the poverty existing on their doorstep?

More to the point, is the only option for an increasingly rich India a future of increasingly bland consumer environments and the decline of the vitality of the street? And is that just a patronising Western perspective on the inevitable changes taking place in a country that rightly wants a chance to experience the kind of living standards I've been able to take for granted?

A cup of coffee says a lot

, I had a meeting today at a branch of Costa Coffee in SouthEx (South Extension), a fairly upscale part of Delhi not far from where I live. Not having been there before, I arrived in plenty of time and (after having noted that there are a large number of rather decent-looking clothes stores there) went into Costa and ordered a cold coffee (no ice. Never ice).

It was 240 rupees.

That's £3.50, folks. Or for you international readers (of whom I have, oo, at least 2), about 5 and a half US dollars.

I was gobsmacked. I mean, I knew Delhi could be expensive, but that's more than it would cost in London. This in a country whose per capita income is less than $3,500 even at PPP, and where more than a third of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day. For a substantial chunk of Indians, that coffee cost over half a week's wages.

Actually, inequality in India actually isn't all that bad. In Gini coefficient terms, the UN gives it 36.8, not far off the UK's 36. By comparison, Denmark is the most equal country in the world with a coefficient of 24.7, and Namibia comes in last with 74.3 (thanks Wikipedia). But after less than a week here I've already seen how opulence exists alongside squalor - and Delhi is a long way from having the worst poverty in the country.

India, inc. is soaring, with an economic boom based largely on high-tech industries, supported by investments in higher education and based in hubs like Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi. It's quite astounding how rapidly this has come to be the story with which we're familiar when it comes to India, replacing the old image of desperate, poor and disease-afflicted India that I recall from my childhood. But the truth is that both Indias exist, and the more the economy depends on those high-tech hubs it seems the further apart the two are destined to drift.

Which is why India needs to invest in other areas of the economy and, particularly, in skilling the workforce in areas other than high-end IT, engineering and science where it has been so successful. Happily, the government seems to be taking this issue seriously (which is a lot of the reason why I'm here). So maybe, not too far from now, that coffee might be within reach of rather more Indians.

It'll still be a rip-off, though.