Just to be contrary... (Part 1)

The UPA government will be viewed in history as a group of visionaries who brought true equality to India or as a group of idiots who destroyed the chances of India ever making it big in the world economy.

With our relatively elite background, our instinct tells us that doom is near; the government is pulling us to destruction. The forcible lowering of drug prices will kill the competitiveness of the Indian pharmaceutical Industry and ruin the possibilities of innovations happening out of India, the reservation of SC/ST/OBC/Muslims in elite institutes and in the private sector will utterly ruin the effectiveness of the industry, the wastage of the taxpayers money in ruinous and futile projects like Sarva Siksha Udyog and Rural Employment Guarantee bill will bankrupt the exchequer and the Prevention of Domestic Violence Against Women will only help a small number of scheming women with an agenda against their husbands and in laws.

It's easy to agree, and predict Armageddon.

But what if we're wrong? What if we, in the words of Naipaul, the nattering nabobs of negativity, have as usual caught the wrong end of the stick? Way back in the early 90's when the economy was opening up, it was fashionable for us to look at the east Asian economies with envy and curse the government for a non convertible currency, a socialist mai-baap sarkar and for too much protection for the domestic industry. And lo and behold! The entire East-Asian economy collapsed, causing untold misery to millions and only poor left-behind India, due to its non-convertible currency emerged unscathed from the mess.

Today, we can see the ruinous short-term effect of the reservation in the private sector. But even without reservation, there is a severe shortage of employable people. The labour pool has to be seriously increased, and unless the vast numbers of backward classes are brought into the pool of educated people, India will not be able to have the necessary workforce it needs.

Of course the government is not going about it in the optimum way. Neither the 5-year term of a government, nor the necessity of reaping short term electoral benefits guides politicians to take the sensible, optimum, decades-long path to social upliftment. It has to be done now, by force if necessary, so that we have our names in the history books and our constituency votes for us.

Of course we will not get excellent English speakers with proper table manners in the first few generations. The straight-out-of-the-boondocks hillbillies will be gross misfits in the steel, glass and concrete corporate offices in Gurgaon, Andheri or Whitefield. But slowly, over a period of time the elitist culture of corporate offices would change, and the hillbillies will get smarter with the exposure.

It's not as if corporate houses are the epitome of civilized behaviour that we need to worry about the barbarians at the gates. In my experience, the veneer of civilization is very thin indeed. If SCs and STs enter the office, the infighting may become more open, but cannot be more vicious than it is now. If the new employees favour nepotism as a policy, so do the current people, under a garb of civilised behavior for sure. If we object to people who will be so sure of their immunity from dismissal that they do no work, so do many people in any office today.

We will face many hiccups initially while we adjust to the presence of each other. We may lose many American and European customers who will fear that our productivity will decrease with our reduced ability to speak fluent English, will take their business elsewhere. But once the SCs/STs/OBCs pick up, they will return, out of a greed for cheap trained labour.

After all, to a WASP executive in London or San Francisco, it doesn't matter if you are a upper caste Brahmin with a degree from Harvard or Oxford, or a poor Harijan educated at NIIT from Raigarh or Bhopal, if you can be voice trained to speak with an American or British accent. You are a FTE (so much more civilised to refer to you as an impersonal FTE rather than a Brownie, Paki or a Nigger!), who does the work for one-tenth the cost of an American employee.

(Cont...)