Globalization (I): India the Isotope

Reading Kishore Mahbubani's recent essay on Yale Global regarding India's emergence as a global power, we were reminded of an idea we and a colleague of ours in Singapore have been discussing for some time. A couple of years ago, we had been musing about how developed India has many things that the developed West has - high-rise buildings, luxury hotels, industries such as automaking and steel production, a sophisticated business culture, financial markets, and so on. While these exist, they were built by Indians for Indians according to Indian tastes and style, created at a time when import substitution was the way to go. Rather than bring in what you needed from the West, you made your own.

Today, visitors to India are struck by how "Indian" things are. Now, that may sound naive, maybe even stupid. But hear us out. What we mean is that the buildings, the airports, the hotels, the vehicles, the physical stuff we see and use, they are all familiar to those of us from other parts of Asia but yet are distinctly Indian. The cars on the road are probably the best example. India developed its own auto industry and produces automobiles that are unmistakably Indian. The Ambassador taxis are as much an iconic presence on the streets of Delhi and other Indian cities as the black "hackney carriage" cabs are in London. The distinctiveness may be discerned in service practices, customs and procedures too. Indian English, both written and spoken, has its own special characteristics. The quirky half hour added on top of the five-hour time difference from Greenwich Mean Time says it all: Indians may tell time like the rest of the world but they set their own pace and standards.

Fair enough. So consider India's development path something of an isotopic phenomenon. The part of India that modernized - mainly its cities and industrial areas - did so in an Indian way. Imitation wasn't really a motive. In those days, the notion of global competition and producing world-class products, ie the pressures of globalization, were not paramount. The aim was development - to meet the needs of citizens.

Times have changed. As India has opened up, the world has creeped in and Indians have been looking out. There are now foreign marques from Japan, Korea and Europe among the Tatas and Marutis on the road. The question is whether India the Isotope is converging with the rest of the world - or will India globalize in its own distinctive way? To us, the latter seems the most plausible. Already, India has turned conventional Asian development wisdom on its head. Its service economy has led the way in growth and it has achieved international success in such sectors as IT and pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, agriculture has faltered and manufacturing has not grown as fast.

India is still beating its own path. And given the extreme poverty that continues to plague the country, it must produce its own globalization format - what we might call Globalization (I). It's a development model that is both outward-looking and inward-focused. It is about keeping India on a high-growth track equal to those of the most open dynamic markets in Asia, while aiming for inclusiveness. India will develop innovative products and services but at a low cost that would make them available and accessible to its people and those of other emerging markets. That's the global niche India is claiming for itself.

While China is trying to become the United States and Japan and has an embarrassment of riches in foreign direct investment and foreign exchange reserves, India doesn't have the money to throw at its ambitions. In this, it seems more like Brazil or South Africa. Will Indian cars start looking like American, European and Japanese models? Maybe so, but we reckon they will still retain a clearly Indian style. Will Delhi begin to look like Bangkok or Detroit? Again, perhaps some of the city will, but more than likely Delhi won't get scrubbed clean and bland like Singapore.

Isotopes are typically the less stable form of an element. It may be, however, that the Indian way of globalizing will slowly but surely result in a stable, equitable and self-confident society that projects and protects what Indians want to preserve of their unique culture yet remains as open to the world as any.