Business Today: Editorial

Midnight's Children: The Sequel

Don't listen to the suits who appear frequently on the tube, dispensing sound-bytes on how the country's economic, political, and social landscape is changing; they are merely stating the obvious. If you come face to face with any of these experts, don't forget to ask them when exactly the changes they speak of will start manifesting themselves. And don't let them off with vague explanations of how the transformation is already on, and can be seen all around us.

We know something the suits don't, and if you are patient enough, you will too, by the time you reach the end of this essay. All change is the response of organisms to a change in the environment around them.

The most significant stimuli in the Indian context is the process of economic liberalisation that started in 1991, but what we are seeing around us is a superficial transition. It is the tired response of people familiar with life and business before 1991. The real change will start soon, but it won't happen simultaneously in all domains. At the heart of this change will be the generation of individuals who were either born, or started schooling after 1991, Generation Next.

The first real change will be societal in nature, and while signs of what is to come can already be seen, it will really happen around the year 2004. That's the year the first generation educated in a post-liberalised India will turn 18. Big deal, you say. Actually, it is. These are young men and women who've been weaned on a staple of satellite television-even in rural areas- worn happening labels, transnational or Indian, and seen their families get richer than they were before the flood.

These are young people who've grown up in an information-rich society, and thanks to the Internet-which first became popular in India when they were still in school-they believe in the average individual's right to know.

The second change will happen in the business firmament around 2010, although sparks of it will be evident from 2005 itself. That's when Generation Next will start working-either for existing enterprises, or for companies that they've founded themselves. The entrepreneurial activity the country will witness then will be far greater than the it-boom of the nineties, and the BT (Biotech, not Business Today, although we have no complaints) boom of the 2000s. Not only will we witness the emergence of enterprises with radical business models, conventional ways of doing business will change. Still better, e-commerce will really take off then: for Generation Next is also India's first digital generation. The first personal computer may have rolled off assembly lines in the early 1980s, but it wasn't till the early 1990s that PCs became ubiquitous desktop devices in India.

Since educational qualifications-even if it is only four years of schooling-are unlikely to become a pre-requisite for political office, it'll take substantially longer for the changes to manifest themselves in the political domain. The average age of an elected representative in the 12th Lok Sabha was 53 years; that of one in the legislative council of the most populous state in the country, Uttar Pradesh, 47 years. Given that, we will likely see the first representative of Generation Next in a political office by the year 2025. That's when an individual who was 4 years old in 1991 will turn 38. Forty is a better bet, but 2025 has a certain ring to it; 2027 does not.

Remember these years, then: 2004, 2010, and 2025. That's when the changes the suits speak of so knowledgeably will happen. There is, of course, a school of thought that believes the changes will remain superficial because the benefits of liberalisation have accrued only to an insignificant proportion of the population. But that is an altogether different issue, and, perhaps, the subject of another essay.

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