The other side of global success

It's grand to go global. I remember the excitement at school when Prince Aly Khan married Rita Hayworth. He was hardly Indian but his father, the old Aga Khan, was a familiar figure, especially in what was then Bombay, and we were thrilled to think that one of us, as we thought, had caught a Hollywood star.

It was with comparable relish (though affecting disdain) that someone told me that the Maharajah of Baroda owned Fortnum and Mason, London's fashionable food store. Whether or not it was true I have no idea, but having got over the surge of adolescent pride, I cannot but ask how such acquisitions help India or Indians.

It was an irresistible thought when an European ambassador to Singapore announced that Tata Steel had just outbid Brazil's CSN to buy the Anglo-Dutch Corus for $12.15 billion, the biggest-ever acquisition by an Indian company.

Inevitably, talk turned to Lakshmi Mittal and Arcelor Mittal being the world's premier steel company, with 330,000 employees in more than 60 countries. "Indians will make the most steel in the world!" exclaimed the ambassador.

"They can set the price, hold global construction to ransom." Jokes about monopolies and cartels did not quite conceal an element of concern.

That I can understand. But will Indians themselves be able - or even want - to buy the output of Corus and Arcelor Mittal for desperately needed infrastructure at home - the bridges, trains, underground systems and buses, to say nothing of schools, hospitals and other public utility buildings we lack? Will the government be able to afford the price? Will the profits from these far-flung companies be invested in productive enterprises in India? Will they create jobs, raise the living standard of millions of Indians who lack potable water or sewage and live in shacks without electricity?

Time was when the Nizam of Hyderabad was reckoned the world's richest man. But the Andhra region he ruled was one of the poorest in the country. The contrast crowds in upon me as the west rediscovers India, and I listen to Tony Blair's insistence that the G8 must "embrace" Asia's latest miracle.

Oh yes, many Indians will be immensely flattered as we children were by Aly Khan's marriage. We are like that. I remember K P Unnikrishnan once telling a London audience that Delhi drawing room coffee tables prominently displayed a copy of Time magazine whose cover portrayed our naval aspirations. We love the publicity. We love being stroked.

A young apprentice engineer from Uttar Pradesh in my English boarding house in the fifties, a shy, reserved man who had hardly any communication with the English lodgers, returned from a holiday on the continent bursting with pride.

"It's an honour to be an Indian there," he told me.  One of the Englishmen who overheard him said afterwards, "He wants us to tell him all the time what a great leader Pandit Nehru is!" So he did. National pride had to be fed. Not national hunger.

So, it's necessary to understand the underlying reason for effusive media coverage and the compliments of world leaders, and to balance their expectations against the reality of Indian experience.

A Singapore minister delivered a scathing denunciation at a closed door meeting to commemorate the 50th anniversary of independence, saying that the largest-democracy-in-the-world boast was a colossal sham. Speaking immediately afterwards, I argued that Indian democracy would have been assessed very differently if the proposal for a joint SQ-Tata domestic airline had gone through.

Or if India had accepted Goh Chok Tong's only half-joking suggestion that all of Singapore should be accorded NRI status for the purpose of real estate development.

Those who seek markets, partners and buyers feel - mistakenly - that there's no need to bother about Indian poverty. The nucleus of a consumer class is big enough for their purpose. The rest don't matter if corporate India attacks western capital markets.

Apparently, PricewaterhouseCoopers put a $25 billion tag on India Inc's approximately 130 major offshore deals last year. And that was before Tata Steel, emboldened by its $486 million acquisition of Singapore's NatSteel, which takes it to China, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia, sought Corus.

International opinion may believe that it matters not if the road to Gurgaon is choked with dust and traffic since ONGC Videsh has invested $404 million in Brazil. Or that India need not worry about health care when Dr Reddy's pays 480 million euros for the German drugmaker, Betapharm. Or that the world's most ramshackle buses are of no concern for Tata Tea, which owns Britain's Tetley: price, $500 million.

But nothing could be more shortsighted. The poor, 300 million of them, will drag down the rich. There can be no sustainable prosperity without uniform growth.

The successes - 9 per cent growth and $200 billion in foreign reserves - are certainly something to be proud of. There's money at the top. But there has to be a correlation between statistical achievement and conditions on the ground, between acquiring assets abroad and repairing and restoring the infrastructure at home.