The hidden adventures of the Hindi heartland
Lessons from our visit to Bhopal
Dear readers,
I write this newsletter once every month or so. It features my reflections on the deployment of creativity to making the world’s economic systems (and by extension social and to some extent political systems) more inclusive and, therefore, fairer. That sounds like a tall order – and it is!
If you would like to get the updates directly in your inbox, do subscribe!
Earlier this August, my 23 year-old daughter and I visited Bhopal, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It was the first time I’ve been to central India, a shock for me to realize after spending decades otherwise traversing the length and breadth of the country, as a resident, student and professional. My daughter was initiating work on a project with an NGO focused on mental health in India, Sangath, co-founded by my friend and colleague Vikram Patel, now a professor at Harvard Medical School. I went along for the ride.
I spent a truly pleasant three days there, in wide ranging tours, long walks, and conversations. The visit to the Sanchi Stupa, iconic site in the history of Buddhism in the world, was a highlight. Learning of the state’s success in tiger conservation was a pleasant surprise (and I even got to see a couple of the majestic big cats in a reserve in the city).6p
The city itself is an architectural palimpsest. The hand of the past is everywhere. Most notable are the stunning palaces that, despite their archaeological disarray, still have their beauty shine through. Shaukat Mahal, for example, is an unheralded small palace built in a curious mélange of Islamic and French architectural styles, and is in a disastrous physical state, but its underlying beauty is unmistakable even through the miasma.
Perhaps the most insightful bit of my Bhopal sojourn though was the result of a lunch I convened on my final day there with some of the city’s most experienced citizens, under the auspices of Harvard’s Mittal Institute. My guests included policymakers, civil service members, conservationists, doctors, entrepreneurs, journalists and educators, a fascinating ensemble who kindly agreed to spend a couple hours discussing the state of their city and their state.
We discussed the lack of investment in public goods, apparent everywhere. Despite being one of India’s greenest cities, the physical infrastructure needs attention. More importantly, the state has utterly failed to invest in education; Madhya Pradesh ranks near the bottom of India’s states on literacy (The Indian NGO Pratham’s ASER report is an annual authoritative look at education effectiveness). My guests highlighted this core problem that likely explained low civic consciousness, why human capital fled the state, why investment shunned it, and why political opportunism was rife. On this last point, Bhopal is peppered with signboards of local political figures promising all kinds of handouts that to my eyes looked like opportunistic sops to various electoral groups, effectively recycling public money from one group to another with no direct productive use.
Equally curious to me, however, was why these informed and well-connected people did not take matters into their own hands and start fashioning at least partial solutions. Perhaps they did in their individual capacities, and I am unaware. Certainly, one person had an idea, as proof of concept of what I think is feasible. He pointed out that the United States faced an acute nursing shortage that was projected to worsen as the population aged. Nurses in the US earned between $50K to $100K depending on the geography and their level of qualification, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why not qualify trained nurses from the state, get them to learn English, and have some of them work overseas? Their remittances to the state would help the economy as well. Now, there are of course lots of complexities associated with this – for one, the gentleman acknowledged that nurses in the state were unwilling to invest in learning English – but the point is that someone was thinking about a solution that did not involve simply waiting for the government.
That would get us away from the insidious seduction of ‘waiting for the government’ to do something, the kiss of death due to the inaction it triggers. How does one get the flywheel of creativity spinning in places where it has ceased to do so? I’m no Panglossian, but I will say that, to someone looking for it, the residue of current and past entrepreneurship is everywhere.
Sparks of entrepreneurial energy
On opposite ends of the skill spectrum, here are two examples from Bhopal. My car drove past Raju’s Tea Shop, which my guide claimed was the busiest tea shop in India (serving between 7000 and 10000 cups of tea daily, along with associated snacks and savories). It was certainly humming with activity and features on tourist must-see stops. I could relate to ‘Raju’ (not the entrepreneur’s real name, he simply embraced a name for convenience) since, in another part of my professional life, I am the co-founder of one of India’s biggest tea chains, ChaiPoint. For comparison, our biggest store does 2200 cups a day, although catering to a more white-collar professional audience, though the ensemble of our reach gets to 600,000 cups/day.
On the other end of the skill spectrum, consider Bhopal’s Dainik Bhaskar, the world’s third largest newspaper by print (Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun in Japan are bigger, followed closely by Dainik Bhaskar’s Hindi language daily). The company was built by the previous generation, and professionalized and expanded further by three brothers, two of whom I had the good fortune to meet. This is the quintessential entrepreneurial incumbent, hustling to innovate and stay ahead, expanding from Bhopal to other states in India, providing an economically viable service to the citizenry.
What would it take for cabals of motivated individuals to catalyze action to improve Bhopal further, just as Raju has done and the Dainik Bhaskar team has done, just as a thought-experiment? Not much, actually. Probably discussion forums to brainstorm ideas – not dissimilar from the couple hour impromptu lunch gathering I hosted – and small experiments anchored around insights from the assembled groups, perhaps amplified by crowdsourced commentary from like-minded groups elsewhere in the country.
A lot of this phlegmatic behaviour of the political class and the decision making bureaucracy is accrued to the lack of a mechanism that can make anyone accountable. Also, the immersion of the general public in their mundane daily story of struggles and success, just to lead a fulfilled life, that is limited to their own and not beyond, leaves no room to tidy the civic space and infrastructures. So, we come to the point of ‘Who Cares? ‘ and really.
The article is a great starter for a new initiative to a better environment. Loved it.