How India can realise its potential to lead the world

March 2022, Mumbai: Naushad Forbes — Co-Chairman of Forbes Marshall, Past-President of CII, and a creative thinker — launches his new book The Struggle and the Promise: Restoring India’s Potential, a very interesting take on India’s potential of being a leader of the world.

The book argues that while India faces many challenges, it has some really unique strengths we must build upon. These strengths include a diverse culture, a young population focused on achievement, a set of democratic institutions, and a strong and diverse private sector. The trick is to get the balance right between industry, institutions and policy.

In this new book, published by HarperCollins, Naushad highlights the power of the promise, and how to address the challenges. He details out some possibilities — targeting rapid economic growth as the collective goal of all Indians; investing in innovation, design, education and research; building independent institutions step by step; and harnessing India’s diverse culture.

As president of Cll in 2016-17, Naushad had regular interaction with industry across the country, the government, and several world leaders. This reinforced his conviction that India had unique potential, which, harnessed wisely and well, could make it a world leader.

Speaking about his book launch, Naushad Forbes says, “I deeply believe in India’s promise, in our potential for great achievement. I am also old enough to appreciate our ability to snatch failure from the jaws of success. While the STRUGGLE lies in getting the role of the state right as we address our lag in innovation, education, public health and the quality of jobs; the PROMISE comes from our diverse culture that has something for everyone, a young and aspirational population, and a strong private sector as our engine of growth. I truly believe we have the potential to lead the world in the future.”

This book doesn’t just talk about a dream, it also has a clear and practical work plan to achieve it. Naushad hopes this dream of his meets many supporters across different segments of the country – thinkers, policy makers, young people, corporate managers, educationists – and triggers discussion around the steps to fulfil India’s Promise.

A few ideas from the book: 

1) A strong rupee may be good for our psyche, but it makes imports cheaper and exports more expensive. Around Rs 80 to the dollar would restore the rupee to where it was in 2014. Rs 100 to the dollar would remove all need for protection, and be an export incentive like no other.

2) The great economist Gary Becker was outwitted in negotiation by a photographer at the Amber Fort in Jaipur. For the rest of his life, he told this story as an example of Indian entrepreneurship, with an underlying message that someone working in the informal sector seemed to understand incentives better than a Nobel laureate in economics.

3) Vikram Seth’s autobiographical book From Heaven Lake has a wonderful story of him arriving in a small town in north-western China in the early 1980s. He finds a group singing songs, and joins in to sing a Bollywood song from the 1950s. The musicians know the song, and several there join in, singing along “in Hindi at that”. Talk about India’s soft power! And it’s only grown phenomenally since then.

4) A few years ago Forbes Marshall systematically applied Jim Adams’ principles of good design to a new condensate pump. This industrial pump turned out looking spectacular – painted red, black and silver, and shaped like a rocket. A textile owner in Surat saw one installed on a dyeing machine – and ordered one for each of the machines in his plant – without knowing what the product did. Good design matters everywhere.

5) The richest quartile in India is 350 million people. This top grouping is not homogenous. It ranges from Asia’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, to someone owning a small shop, to an engineer at a good company, to almost anyone who buys this book and reads it. The remaining three quarters of India live a much shakier existence.

6) India has 37 million students in higher education today. That is more people than the population of three-quarters of the countries in the world.

7) A security guard in our company came to us one day and said with great pride that his daughter had graduated as a doctor and his son had gone to work for GE as an engineer. In one year, family income had gone up ten times to Rs 1.5 Lakh each month. Such increases in consumption power have driven our growth story for thirty years. This security guard is not unique; there are hundreds of thousands like him. But he is also not typical; there are many millions of Indians who aspire to repeat his story but cannot.

8) The right leader can make a big difference in the most troubled institutions. T N Seshan reinvented the role of Election Commissioner of India in the early 1990s. He enforced long-forgotten (and now again forgotten) rules in the Model Code of Conduct, censured communal practices and banned candidates who violated the Code. He made the Election Commission a powerful and independent institution.

9) An industrialist criticising the government should not make the headlines. That must be our metric of an independent private sector.

Five key concepts from the book – for India to lead: 

1) India has the potential to be a leader of the world. No other large country is better placed to provide the inclusion, openness, liberal resilience, and private sector primacy that can lead to global leadership. We are not there yet by any means, as this book makes clear. But we have many attributes – culture, a diverse and vibrant private industry, distinguished private and public institutions, a large and committed NGO sector, inspiring norms of behaviour – that make for a unique foundation.

2) The Indian state’s low capacity to implement leaves gaps everywhere. These gaps are opportunities to contribute. Only industry has the widespread management and implementation capacity that is needed to fill these gaps.

3) Design is key for environmental sustainability, looks, functionality and life cycle. But, too few companies prize it, too few of our products, services and public spaces reflect good design practice, and too few people in the country have better lives thanks to good design. Design enables companies to move up the value-chain and give the world great products. Great products are ‘and’ products — products that are beautiful and functional, elegant and simple, high quality and accessible to many. It is the task of great design to deliver on that ‘and’.

4) We have in India a tremendous opportunity in higher education — to produce over one million engineers a year with very slight state support, is no mean achievement. We must do four things — build true research universities by moving public research funding into the university system. Use the market more and more to improve quality in the largely private professional education system, with the state ensuring a compulsory assessment is made public. Ensure equity of access on merit by permitting institutes to set their own fees and recover them in a transparent manner, for which state-guaranteed loans are easily available. And focus our higher-education investment on building a few world-class full-service universities that will produce our intellectuals of the future.

5) A large and diverse country like India particularly needs strong, independent institutions. In a rowdy democracy like ours, progress happens by checks and balances from autonomous institutions such as universities, election commissions, courts, a free media, an effective opposition and a structure where power is shared with the states. We need independent institutions that balance incentives with protection and economic freedom with social responsibility. Our aim must be to liberate the enterprise of millions of animal spirits and not rely only on one state animal.