Let Go! Let's Go!! It's Now India's Time!!!

Whichever way you slice and dice, India’s future is blindingly bright, and its potential is immense. Now, thanks to all-round bruising that has been dished out by COVID, the world’s confidence in India is sky-high. Even in normal times, the world always had a much higher opinion about India than India had about itself. Imagine walking into the bank as a borrower and being hesitant and tentative about your own future. Even a confident banker would whittle down the amounts he was going to lend you. That is how India is behaving today as a borrower, in the eyes of the world (the lender), who is waiting and willing to invest in India’s future.

You borrow because you know that your bright prospects will make enough money for you to pay off the borrowings, and the bank lends because it sees a great potential in you.

People borrow on leverage, which is the word used to describe the faith you and your lender have on the bright future that you are destined for.

In 2020, in a tightly connected world, along with a huge stimulus of Rs. 20 lakh crore, we are advised to 'Go Local' and be "self-reliant". A charitable interpretation of this announcement could be "Build Global Indian Brands through Make In India." For that to happen, we need massive investments from abroad, and a lot of imports that will boost our exports. That is the way you become part of the Global Value Chains (GVCs). To both 'Go Local' and become self-reliant, we have to go global, and become dependent on investments, technology and markets that reside outside India.

India is famous for its hesitation in opening out to the world. It also has shown a disturbing pattern of one step forward, many back in a maze of policy announcements that do not provide a coherent road map.

The MSME retrieval plan, power sector reforms, labour laws, foreign investment facilitation, smoother ways to work as a federation, easing export norms, shoring up the food self-sufficiency, hand-feeding the bottom 20% of the pyramid are measures that will make the world rush to India.

There seems to be an obsession with fiscal deficit ratio, which has now been fixed at 5.5%. This happens to be a primary parameter by which rating agencies grade countries, and India seems to be unduly worried about their opinion. Just as we were going on and on about the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) rankings, as if fixing that will solve all our FDI problems. We have had a 100% improvement in those rankings, with nothing proportionate to show in investments or in the economic performance. These are avoidable distractions.

What matters is how a budding entrepreneur feels about starting a small workshop with 10 employees and a few machines. In Peenya Industrial Estate in Bangalore, that still involves dozens of approvals. Things get really messy if you want to have 40 or 50 employees. Or, to keep things simple, try opening a restaurant in any of the Metro cities in India. You can talk to these entrepreneurs about India’s EoDB ranking, and risk being assaulted.

 All such rankings are bit of a farce with processes that can be gamed. Ask any employee who works at a company that ranks high on the global Best Places to Work surveys. He/she is invariably surprised that his/her company has scored so well. How do you explain companies not on that list continuing to find good quality talent, technology or markets with consummate ease?

With the people's confidence behind you, and the opportunity-riven world ahead, the people who run the country cannot worry too much about what others think of them.

With the brute majority the ruling party has in the parliament, and the total non-presence of Congress, we still have senior people in the government responding to spurious and juvenile comments from the Opposition. How can you be so pitifully thin-skinned?

On our responses to comments made by other countries on India, the less said the better. We don’t even need a red herring. Our herring can be in any colour. We will bristle and respond in kind. Notice the steps we took to cold shoulder Turkey and Malaysia for their pro-Pakistan stance. People in power cannot behave like sundry trolls, or idle twitteratti. We are bigger than those countries, and not just in size. We have a job to do in getting to a future that these countries cannot even afford to dream of.

Post-COVID, such behaviour will have to change. Our steps must be bold, confident and loud.

Every move, every announcement will have to show the path we want to take and the world will step aside to let us pass.

We can afford to show a swag, and we must. It all starts with ways in which we put our own house in order. One has to watch out for a thin spread of the Rs. 20 lakh crore in attempting to satisfy far too many constituencies.

 COVID has given India a stage to strut all our wares. This is a 'big match' moment. Like true World Champions, we should switch ourselves on to our peak state. NOW!