2023 Observations The Passage of Time "For some, there is fear that India is moving too fast, for others, not fast enough." -Ayaz Memon and Ranjona Banerji from India 50 - The Making of a Nation Nearly twenty years ago, when I originally selected the title for this book, A Time for India, I sensed that India and the world were experiencing one swing in the perpetual movement of a global pendulum-something that would slowly approach an apex, and then, with a predictable kind of cultural, political, and economic inertia fed by all the forces of human nature, retreat to a new home position while slowly building up energy to begin another swing. Each swing measured in decades. Each swing moving India closer to levels of technology and infrastructure common in much of the rest of the world. India had plenty of catching up to do. As a new age built on a vast and colorful history, trends were emerging in India that my own mind imagined as two expanding graphs. The first with one line following the world's changing appetite for globalization, intersecting with a second line indicating India's willingness to provide services outside of its borders. Another graph was laying out a line reflecting India's desire to achieve social infrastructure on par with other countries in Asia, Europe, and North America, alongside a line showing India's interest and ability to rebuild itself from within. The period about which the book was originally written (1996-1998) was the beginning of India's modern industrial revolution which fueled increased mobility for Indians at all levels of the social structure, broader access to communication, a wider exposure to information, and easier access to a large selection of new things that the rest of the world had already enjoyed for some time. That time, the time of my assignment in India, seemed to be near the starting point on both graphs when the lines began to change from static level positions to trajectories that showed plenty of movement. Since my assignment, I have returned to India more than 80 times, each time enduring the difficulties and benefits of change underway. Each time marveling at the rapid rate at which change was taking place. And, yes, despite India's inherent chaos, the complete package of change-transportation, communication, public utilities, banking, and commerce-seemed to be following a logical plan with one step leading to the next. My Indian colleagues who lived the change from day to day, perhaps only seeing the chaos, often remarked about how slowly and inefficiently it was all occurring, almost at an imperceptible rate. But my own eyes saw it differently. Brief snapshots every few months made it easy for me to watch India's remarkably large, continuous strides with a kind of outsider's view. When reflecting back to the time of my assignment, and understanding the monumental mountain of red tape that must have been waded through to complete even the smallest steps of India's city projects, I stood in awe. I think back to a small greenfield factory we built in a new industrial area on the outskirts of Bangalore in the early 2000s. The sloped terrain on this five-acre rock parcel was leveled in order to comply with vastu recommendations and to prepare an even surface for its building. A small team of subcontracted workers lived on site and completed the task using dynamite, a small, ordinary Mahindra utility tractor, and a heavy-duty, two-wheeled, wood-sided trailer. Based on all the options available in those days, this local solution did not seem so outdated or impractical. What really took time, though, was the municipality who was responsible for bringing in electricity needed to operate the factory. I do not know why this was an ongoing surprise. Ours was the first plot to be developed in a three-phase industrial complex. Nothing was delivered by the municipality within the timeframe they had promised. It was not even close. Not only the industrial area's electricity and water infrastructure lagged but so did the red-tape-ladened permits required for each step. As we completed the factory's construction and its related office structure, we eventually brought in and restored second-hand European factory machinery to like-new condition. Our project was already nine months behind schedule. For construction like this, delay was more common than not, and not many people were seriously worried, perhaps because they felt helpless in the face of uncontrollable circumstances. But the developing financial problem was also not so hard to see. Carrying the loan we had drawn on to finance the construction while delaying production and revenue expected from sold-product for months built up quite a bit of unplanned interest cost. Indian annual interest rates were 12%-18% at the time. To keep the project from falling into a financial abyss, we reached into our pockets and ran our own utility poles for several kilometers from the nearest power station to the factory. We also bored our own water well. The project went on-line one year late and took five years to catch up to and overtake its original financial projections. So, building a new network of second-level roads (affectionately called flyovers) crisscrossing the tightly congested city of Bangalore, while at the same time relocating segments of the population, lopping off pieces of homes, installing urban utility systems, training people to operate India's first cement-mixing trucks, and managing the daily chaos of Indian traffic seemed like something only God could do. I stood in awe. When stepping off an airplane that has landed in one of India's new international airports, it is easy to overlook some of the hidden-from-view upgrades that are now part of Indian life, and to simply accept the benefits while imagining that life was always this good. The fiber optic communication cable that is now embedded below ground along every major roadside, which enables high-speed digital communication. The electric grid that seems to work steadily, despite exponentially increasing power usage. Perhaps today's electrical output is due to full reservoirs behind India's hydroelectric dams, a factor that varies from year to year. Perhaps it is due to India's new wind farms with acres of modern wind turbines lined up in neat rows. Perhaps it is due to the solar panels, installed by municipalities and private companies alike in a country that never seems to lack sun. It is easy to not see the upgrades to India's banking infrastructure, though visitors who were last on the subcontinent in 1996 will immediately be surprised by the modern mechanisms for transactions at all levels of society. India has moved in nearly imperceptible steps from cash transactions and bank drafts with long queues at disconnected banks, to ATMs handing out small sums of cash, and finally to cashless pay apps on smartphones. But to make each of these improvements practical, India first needed to shift to a more reliable electric infrastructure. At the same time, India moved from its sparsely available private telephone land lines (which took years on a waiting list for ordinary citizens to acquire and which were supplemented by dark public telephone kiosks staffed around-the-clock by sandal-footed attendants who sat in shady spots within each kiosk) to simple first-generation private cell phones (whose ownership was highly regulated), and then to the modern smartphones available in one day to almost anyone in India and set up with data plans that most people could afford. Even to find smartphone inventory available with nearly every supplier every day across India is a marvel that travelers are unlikely to notice. It is factors such as these that continue to drive the image of India still today as a land of remarkable contrast. Because now, a fruit seller pushing a colorful, wooden-wheeled cart to a favorite spot in the shade of a mighty banyan tree will bargain with customers wanting bananas or mangos and complete the transaction using a smartphone pay app enabled by a QR code mounted to the side of the cart. Or consider the auto-rickshaw driver who still weaves unpredictably from one lane to the next but now follows GPS directions on a smartphone mounted to the tiny dashboard of his vehicle. Well, that is interesting. Because of India's heritage for unlabeled turns, one-way alleys, and shortcuts, the driver - whose mother-tongue is almost certainly the local language - might hear a voice in distinctive American accent coming from the smartphone GPS, literally instructing him to turn left after the second pillar supporting an overpass. The autorickshaw itself is no longer the animal it used to be. The days of pull-start gasoline engines have given way to LPG fuel and electric-start. Horns are now electric, rather than old-school coiled brass funnels with their squeeze-bulb ends. And a new electric single windshield wiper has replaced the hand-operated one of years gone by. While the autorickshaw, with its three-wheeled charm, has from the beginning been part of India's transportation evolution (perhaps transportation revolution), contrasting traffic partners have moved the autorickshaw a few steps lower on the hierarchy of the road. One will see the world's most luxurious sedans, electric vehicles, a full range of trucks - old and new - motor...
