More power to ‘People India’ and Middle India

India's superpower is her people.

- RAMA BIJAPURKAR

Flawed as we all are — loud-talking, rule-breaking, system-gaming, hierarchy-creating — Indians are super hardworking.Of course, disguised unemployment exists, but people work sincerely, even at jobs that don’t need to exist — like three people and a handheld scanner at a toll booth, as backup for system malfunctions. Household savings and consumption propel the economy but Indians are generally uncomplaining (different from grumbling), despite the many daily challenges and discomforts from below-par public goods and living conditions. They are very optimistic about the future, which blunts the metric of “optimism about the future”, a staple in consumer confidence surveys.

Our study, Drivers of Destiny, among the lower-income youth that popular media excludes in its celebratory reporting of Gen-Name-Your-Alphabet, showed that the paucity of regular and steady-income jobs with real career paths is not blamed on government failure but accepted as caused by “the market”, and responded to by learning more skills and finding more earning avenues, even as they keep studying for the illusory pot of gold on the horizon, the government job.