Emergence of New India in 90's
Welcome to Globoworld: the new face of India
CONSUMER CULTURE PICKING UP STEAM
By Daniel Sneider
Mercury News
GURGAON, INDIA - If you want to understand where this huge and sometimes slowly moving Asian nation is headed, you need to go to the mall.
That is what my Indian friends told me. And they were right.
India's first shopping malls -- three of them, in fact -- opened in recent months here in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of the Indian capital of New Delhi. I stepped out of the muggy afternoon of a July monsoon day into the air-conditioned sparkle of the newest, the DT mall. The lines were forming at the multiplex while shoppers moved up escalators from a sari store to a Benetton outlet. The menu at Ruby Tuesday's offered everything from ribs to chicken tikka.
Where are we?
``I'm not in India,'' my driver declared, wide-eyed, as he looked around.
Maybe not. Let's call this place Globoworld.!
Globoworld is where India's new middle class lives. These are the 20-something kids in blue jeans and T-shirts who work all night in nearby call centers, talking to folks in Des Moines about their credit card bills. Or the Indian managers who run the offices of the multi-national companies that have set up branches in this suburban boom town. They are shopping for shoes at Lifestyle, the mall's three-floor anchor store, or grabbing a chicken sandwich at the McDonald's in the mall across the road.
To be sure, most of India doesn't live in Globoworld. And even in Gurgaon, steel and glass office buildings are surrounded by a jumble of tiny machine shops and fields. The road to the mall floods in a moment with swirling brown waters when a monsoon shower hits, and the traffic has to swerve to avoid the cows resting on the pavement.
But this is the leading edge of a transformation of India that is just beginning to pick up steam.
``This is the new Indi! a -- you are seeing it in front of your eyes,'' declares Pramod Bahsin, CEO of GE Capital, a pioneer of the movement to shift service industries such as customer call centers and the processing of company insurance claims to India. The boom is spreading from big cities such as Chennai down to smaller cities like Jaipur.
Where it comes from
This is a revolution led by the young. They are pouring out of India's fine higher educational system at a rate of 2 million a year. Thanks to British colonialism, English is the primary language of instruction. It is an official language of India, linking a vast country where more than a dozen major languages are spoken.
The younger generation built India's world-class computer software industry, followed now by the globalization of the service industry. Hundreds of thousands of kids join its ranks every year now -- and with their pockets full of money, they are sparking a consumer movement.
``They will change ! India's face more than any of India's politicians will,'' predicts Bahsin.
The rate of change is dizzying. Five years ago, credit cards, now widespread, were unheard of. In a span of a few years, the jingle of cell phones has become as ubiquitous as cow bells. In a decade, India has gone from one state-owned television network to a cacophony of stations carried by cable and satellite all over the country.
Take Khan Market in Delhi, a relatively upscale collection of stores where I used to buy my groceries two decades ago. Foreign goods were unavailable, thanks to India's policy of sealing off the country from imports to protect domestic industry. Today the shelves are stocked with everything from extra virgin olive oil and Italian pasta to Dijon mustard.
A traffic jam used to consist of a few cars jostling with bicycles and exhaust-spewing buses. Now Korean and Japanese carmakers are battling for a growing market, building cars here and creating that dub! ious sign of progress -- rush hour crawls.
Much of this flows from a fateful 1991 decision to adopt reforms, shifting away from a state-directed economy and opening markets to global competition. The tech industry helped catalyze that change, but it was not alone. After decades of barely hitting 2 percent growth, India has averaged more than 6 percent during the '90s and is poised to grow even faster. In the most dynamic parts of India, the growth rate is already 12 percent or more.
Others see Globoworld as the invasion of multi-national corporations that swallow native industry and fail to dent the deep poverty that still prevails in large parts of rural India.
Those are not trivial concerns. But Globoworld has come to India, and any attempt to roll it back is certain to fail.
DANIEL SNEIDER is foreign affairs columnist for the Mercury News. He appears on Thursday and Sunday.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/new...der/6477938.htm
Some pics, from a diff site:
![user posted image]()
![user posted image]()
![user posted image]()
![user posted image]()
DLF SQuare Tower: http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/pc/138706-8-1/
http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/df/142260/
http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/df/175533/
http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/df/142259/
CONSUMER CULTURE PICKING UP STEAM
By Daniel Sneider
Mercury News
GURGAON, INDIA - If you want to understand where this huge and sometimes slowly moving Asian nation is headed, you need to go to the mall.
That is what my Indian friends told me. And they were right.
India's first shopping malls -- three of them, in fact -- opened in recent months here in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of the Indian capital of New Delhi. I stepped out of the muggy afternoon of a July monsoon day into the air-conditioned sparkle of the newest, the DT mall. The lines were forming at the multiplex while shoppers moved up escalators from a sari store to a Benetton outlet. The menu at Ruby Tuesday's offered everything from ribs to chicken tikka.
Where are we?
``I'm not in India,'' my driver declared, wide-eyed, as he looked around.
Maybe not. Let's call this place Globoworld.!
Globoworld is where India's new middle class lives. These are the 20-something kids in blue jeans and T-shirts who work all night in nearby call centers, talking to folks in Des Moines about their credit card bills. Or the Indian managers who run the offices of the multi-national companies that have set up branches in this suburban boom town. They are shopping for shoes at Lifestyle, the mall's three-floor anchor store, or grabbing a chicken sandwich at the McDonald's in the mall across the road.
To be sure, most of India doesn't live in Globoworld. And even in Gurgaon, steel and glass office buildings are surrounded by a jumble of tiny machine shops and fields. The road to the mall floods in a moment with swirling brown waters when a monsoon shower hits, and the traffic has to swerve to avoid the cows resting on the pavement.
But this is the leading edge of a transformation of India that is just beginning to pick up steam.
``This is the new Indi! a -- you are seeing it in front of your eyes,'' declares Pramod Bahsin, CEO of GE Capital, a pioneer of the movement to shift service industries such as customer call centers and the processing of company insurance claims to India. The boom is spreading from big cities such as Chennai down to smaller cities like Jaipur.
Where it comes from
This is a revolution led by the young. They are pouring out of India's fine higher educational system at a rate of 2 million a year. Thanks to British colonialism, English is the primary language of instruction. It is an official language of India, linking a vast country where more than a dozen major languages are spoken.
The younger generation built India's world-class computer software industry, followed now by the globalization of the service industry. Hundreds of thousands of kids join its ranks every year now -- and with their pockets full of money, they are sparking a consumer movement.
``They will change ! India's face more than any of India's politicians will,'' predicts Bahsin.
The rate of change is dizzying. Five years ago, credit cards, now widespread, were unheard of. In a span of a few years, the jingle of cell phones has become as ubiquitous as cow bells. In a decade, India has gone from one state-owned television network to a cacophony of stations carried by cable and satellite all over the country.
Take Khan Market in Delhi, a relatively upscale collection of stores where I used to buy my groceries two decades ago. Foreign goods were unavailable, thanks to India's policy of sealing off the country from imports to protect domestic industry. Today the shelves are stocked with everything from extra virgin olive oil and Italian pasta to Dijon mustard.
A traffic jam used to consist of a few cars jostling with bicycles and exhaust-spewing buses. Now Korean and Japanese carmakers are battling for a growing market, building cars here and creating that dub! ious sign of progress -- rush hour crawls.
Much of this flows from a fateful 1991 decision to adopt reforms, shifting away from a state-directed economy and opening markets to global competition. The tech industry helped catalyze that change, but it was not alone. After decades of barely hitting 2 percent growth, India has averaged more than 6 percent during the '90s and is poised to grow even faster. In the most dynamic parts of India, the growth rate is already 12 percent or more.
Others see Globoworld as the invasion of multi-national corporations that swallow native industry and fail to dent the deep poverty that still prevails in large parts of rural India.
Those are not trivial concerns. But Globoworld has come to India, and any attempt to roll it back is certain to fail.
DANIEL SNEIDER is foreign affairs columnist for the Mercury News. He appears on Thursday and Sunday.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/new...der/6477938.htm
Some pics, from a diff site:
DLF SQuare Tower: http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/pc/138706-8-1/
http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/df/142260/
http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/df/175533/
http://www.skyscrapers.com/re/en/im/df/142259/
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