Last week at Davos, there was the usual contingent of Indian chief ministers and central ministers along with a familiar bunch of media representatives. Seeming quite cosy among themselves, they might as well have been sitting in a TV studio in Mumbai or Delhi, having tea before going live.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said his government signed 19 memorandums of understanding worth ₹30 lakh crore, focused on green energy, data centres and semiconductors.
Jharkhand reportedly signed an agreement with Tata Steel worth over ₹11,000 crore for advanced ‘green steel’ technology. Why could this not be inked in Jharkhand?
Madhya Pradesh secured a logistics hub deal with DP World to boost the state’s export competitiveness.
Since there have been annual MoU jamborees by the dozen in India almost every year, none of the above is a reliable indicator of the future. Indeed, it would be good to conduct an audit of the MoUs that the country and the states sign with compulsive cheer every year. How many of them have actually materialised?
To the sceptic, Davos bared India’s painful position, both politically and economically. And the main reason for that was articulated by Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard. The session moderator asked her rather hopefully about how India would deal with the trade tariffs put in place by Donald Trump, one of the most disruptive US presidents of all time, and Gopinath said that air pollution in India was a far graver economic and health threat than tariffs.
Gopinath, a former deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund said that pollution accounted for roughly 18 percent of all deaths in India, according to the World Bank. The economic toll of this—more than 4,600 daily fatalities on average, inflated health bills and eroded productivity, coupled with deterred investment—likely outweighs any damage a Washington tariff could inflict, she said.
In this light, India’s ‘restraint’ at Davos felt less like a choice and more like a necessity. When your capital city is gasping for air, posturing on the global stage holds potential for comedy.
But it’s not just Delhi. If the capital, housing so much political power, cannot do a thing about the air it breathes, what could be the state of infrastructure—breathable air included—in other cities?
The appalling urban squalor, the lack of basic comforts in transport and roads, and an unhelpful bureaucracy translate into a general condition of anxiety. India recently overtook Japan to become the fourth-largest economy. How ironic an achievement this is when the per-capita income of Japan is about $36,390 and India’s is $3,050.
India’s structural fragility gives the lie to its Bovarism. Its old cities are hell-holes. Its inability to build new cities is proverbial—the last major one was Chandigarh, built in the 1950s and now essentially a sort of nice senior community centre where retired army officers enjoy their morning walks.
Cities like Mumbai can no longer ‘redevelop’ beyond a point. Bengaluru—our Silicon Valley—is bursting with garbage. Despite the progressive noises that CM Stalin makes, Chennai is coming undone at the seams. Which partly explains why foreign talent, a true measure of a city’s potential, does not find India attractive.
According to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, almost 25,000 foreigners were in India on work visas at the beginning of February 2024. There’s no telling if any of them have made India their home, but anecdotal evidence suggests hardly any have.
We are constantly talking about ease of business. Maybe we should begin by talking about ease of life. The ugliness of Indian cities is a source of perennial depression. A squalid lifestyle indicates a squalid economy. This is why, when Indian leaders and businessmen talk about the “resilience of the Indian economy”, it sounds like a locker-room pep talk.
No one at Davos or back in Delhi said a word about one of the fallouts of Trump’s tariffs and H-1B visa restrictions. In the last few months, a new trend has emerged in which Indian-origin professionals are returning from the US in large numbers. While they are not ‘foreigners’ in the legal sense, they are international talent. One count estimates about two-fifths increase in tech workers moving from the US to India.
In a related development, Indian student arrivals in the US plummeted by more than two-fifths. They are mostly stuck in India now. Many of them are brainy kids with real ambitions. Once brain drain was the problem; now brain gain is a problem. Has the government formulated a policy for absorbing the returnees? Has any opposition member raised this vital question in public forums?
True progress, as discussed on the fringes of Davos, requires more than just aggregate growth; it requires elevating Indian per-capita metrics towards the $4,000 mark by 2030.
Without deep reforms in education and skilling, India risks remaining that odd and perplexing thing—a poor man’s superpower: a nation with a massive military and space programmes, but a workforce that lacks the basic habitability and health to sustain its climb. What is it like to send a rocket to the moon and then wheeze one’s way back through litter to the urinal that will not flush?
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)