Farewell to Mumbai (Part 1): Millionaires moving forward

The strongest impression on most overseas visitors to Mumbai are the contrasts: between the lavish apartment buildings and the slums around the airport, between the exotic stores selling $2000 saris and the street food vendors outside offering 10 rupee snacks, between the packed trains arriving in the mainline stations and the air-conditioned luxury cars cruising the streets.

Everyone has their own examples. My own most recent was during a lunchtime stroll in the blocks around our office in the new Bandra Kurla Complex. I spotted the depressing sight of a group of  “ragpickers”,  ladies and their children  trawling through piles of waste on a nearby building site.

Seconds later the comparative quiet of the streets was disturbed as a sports car (retail price minimum £180,000) roared up and down at a 100mph minimum, as if it were competing in a F1 event.

Such contrasts tend to be drawn on an India – wide scale and discussed exhaustively when expatriates leave Mumbai. Time and again I have listened to departing businesspeople or journalists argue about prospects for the future of the city and the country.

One group points to the fragile infrastructure failing to keep pace with the demands of the middle class and the risks of the still huge rich-poor disparities  leading to urban disorder. The other maintains that India’s massive population will propel the country’s economy, and that India has moved beyond the occasional ethnic or religious clashes and is also beginning to erase some of its deep-seated governance issues.

In short, is the India glass half full or half empty?

Having spent the last three and half years talking to UK business about the advantages of being in India, and shortly and sadly to be joining the ranks of those leaving, no-one would expect me to be a pessimist. But I don’t believe that progress will be as vertical as the space shuttle.

When I arrived in Mumbai in February 2010 some of the country’s top businesspeople assured me that GDP would be running at 9-10 per cent by this year. At 5 per cent they were way out of line, and although some of the airports and highways I have used around the country  are certainly world class, there is a long way to go before Mumbai, for example, has the infrastructure to compete as an international financial centre.

Amartya Sen, and co-author Jean Dreze, have put it far better than me, in a new book on India, ‘An Uncertain Glory’: “ an agreeable picture of a country in a rapid march forward towards development with justice would definitely not be a comprehensive, or even a balanced, account of what has been actually happening: indeed far from it. There are many major shortcomings and breakdowns – some of them gigantic – even though privileged groups, and especially the celebratory media, are often inclined to overlook them”.

Despite the less than perfect 10 progress, analysed in detail in an “An Uncertain Glory”, everything that I have seen, and more especially been involved with for UK interests, leaves me confident that India has a future which should compel UK business and education to engage with the country.

In my concluding blog from Mumbai I will spell out some particular examples of British success here, and argue that we are doing better than some people suggest.