Archive for November 21st, 2006

Thoughts on the streets of India…

November 21st, 2006 by Sheel

In India it is popular to use Rangoli to make beautiful designs near the entrance of a house to welcome guests… Rangoli is colored sand or rice powder… sometimes people do it year-round, sometimes just during the festive season. In many traditional households the lady of the house starts her daily chores by drawing the rangoli (which is usually symmetrical) outside of the house.

Last week when we went back to ESI where we had training, I saw this rangoli set-up… It says Peace, Satya (Truth), Prem (Love), Ekta (Unity), Abhay (Fearlessness)

The streets here, even smaller side streets, are absolutely full of activity. I took a few pictures from my grandfather’s sister’s place where I come on occasion… Here (in this household), during the day the women usually don’t leave the house, not because they are tied down or anything but because they get everything they need right outside their door… The older women in the house don’t drive, so when they leave to visit their friends, etc, they take rickshaws. It’s a very interesting family - there are 12 people living in 2 adjacent 2-bedroom apartments… it’s really hectic - there is a wide range of ages and on top of the large family size they always have visitors dropping in… I could write an entire post on the family, maybe some other time… anyway,

At about 9am, right outside of the apartment building come a bunch of carts, selling all different kinds of vegetables. It’s a mini-vegetable/fruit market. They yell what all they have to offer loud enough that you can hear and take a look from your balcony before heading down. There are plenty of fruits and vegetables to choose from. From my understanding, these guys buy it in wholesale from the big market (Subzi Mandi) which is a little far away every morning at like 4am, and then mark up about 30% to get their cut for bringing it to your doorstep. The Subzi Mandi buys the veggies either from a middleman who buys it from the farmers or from the farmers themselves, who often rent trucks and travel huge distances to bring their goods to the market, and then are forced to empty their lot at whatever price the Mandi gives them that day… so there are a few steps between the producer and the consumer in this model, and each middleman takes a portion of the profits. There are new models coming to India though - Reliance (huge Indian company in many industries) has recently opened a few supermarkets in Hyderabad, and from my understanding they source vegetables straight from farmers, giving farmers a better price, and yet charging consumers less. They also plan to start selling to the push-cart vendors at lower costs than those at the Mandi, realizing that that model will continue to thrive as the primary means of receiving goods in India for time to come. The market is growing by something like 8% per year, and Reliance only wants to capture 2% of the total market by it’s superstores, so I don’t think its a huge harm to the small-scale guys. Part of the reason they can offer more to the farmer and sell for less is that there is a LOT of wastage that can be eliminated with refrigeration and other techniques employed in travel. I don’t know enough about the subject to speak on it with a lot of authority, but this sounds great… people talk about how big business suppresses the poor farmer, but I see this as one way that big business can help. The National Commodities Exchange is setting up electronic tickers announcing spot and future prices in local languages at Mandis and Bus Stands in some states (source and a great read). The RBI problem mentioned in the article is a frustrating one… Banks can’t lend against warehouse receipts, meaning that a farmer who needs money now (like most farmers do) must sell his crop now at whatever price the Mandi is giving him even if he knows the prices will be higher later.
Market on the street at 9am:

One cart, 20 different kinds of vegetables:

another cart

Throughout the day, people sell all kinds of stuff on that same small side-street… Including brooms, pots and pans, even vaccuum cleaners! Here’s another cart that has kids games, locks, bangles, cell-phone covers, bags, sandals, hairbands, soap, etc. It’s amazing how much they can pack into a small portable area!

Another amazing thing is how easily the kids on the street can entertain themselves. Often a stick and ball or stick and old tire can entertain people for hours on end. I saw this kid pulling another kid (presumably his brother) in a huge piece of styrofoam that was probably used for a computer or some other large appliance. The remarkable part is that I saw these kids on my way to a speech(below), and they were still at it 2 hours later when I decided to take the picture. Admittedly, the kid doing the pulling doesn’t look like he’s having a very good time.

I went to a speech by the Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, C. Rangarajan, at IIM Ahmedabad which is a place I wrote about earlier. I really liked the guy and what he had to say about the country, its needs, and future direction… I think India is in fairly good hands from an economic standpoint. His target audience was International business school leaders (he was the keynote speaker for a conference being held at IIM-A, I just came as a guest of my friend Nimit). He covered a lot of economic & educational ground in a short time… a few nuggets that I remember -
Failures in the Indian education system… A few good state-supported universities and a lot of bad other universities doesn’t do any good because the people who get into the top universities are highly intelligent to begin with, and often leave the country because there aren’t enough opportunities in India itself. There aren’t enough opportunities for cutting-edge research, partly because there are so few research universities like we have in the US. That to me is one of the best things about the US. A lot of cutting edge work is done in the US simply because we have some of the best research universities, and smart people from around the world come there to study and teach.

Another unfortunate consequence of the huge disparity between good and bad universities is that I think the students that are less than great that have the ability to rise up through education. Unfortunately that kind of education is hard to come by in India, whereas in the US I think the quality of our state-level institutions is pretty good and not all that far off from what is offerred in some of the elite private universities.

Rangarajan also suggested that maybe an entrance exam isn’t the best way to judge talent for entrance to universities… In the US universities use a combination of test score, high school grades, essays, recommendations, and sometimes a personal interview to decide who they admit. In India its often strictly based on the results of an exam, which gets you a lot of students of the same type who are really good at taking tests. It seems to discard the thought that diversity inside and outside the classroom is one of the best ways to learn about the world.

Rangarajan talked a bit about economics and the growth in GDP of nations, and what that is based on. Growth in GDP is based on a combination of more inputs (resources, labor) as well as higher efficiency… Rangarajan was pretty good at breaking it down simply - India is doing well because of foreign resources/money, but also because of efficiency. Here’s an article comparing India and China in this regard (pro India)… Anyway, I find that India still has a long ways to go on the efficiency front, compared to most other countries I’ve been to, especially China. Because of the availability of cheap labor in India, often times the easy “solution” to a problem is to hire another employee rather than putting into place a system that fixes the problem. It sucks!

When people ask me if I think I could live in India forever, the one thing that holds me back is inefficiency. I get really fed up with waiting in line when there are simple solutions if people would be willing to work just a little bit harder or come up with proper systems… More ranting on Indian Efficiency (InEfficiency for short)… There are too many damn people where you don’t need them and not enough people where you do… 4 bank tellers serving 200 people in the bank (huge lines, especially in gov’t banks), 2 people can conduct driving permit exams when 600 people show up to take them every day (huge lines), but there’s a guy in your tiny-ass elevator pushing the button for whatever floor you tell him to. Mind you, the guy probably won’t help you with your bags - his job is only to push the button. Security guards won’t watch your bags, the guy who washes your dishes won’t wash the floor, etc. It’s pretty frustrating. I went to Big Bazaar in Nagpur and there were 5 employees at the checkout line. 5!
All of the guys in orange shirts and the guys with the strings on the shirts are Big Bazaar employees…
I’m not sure what they were doing, but the checkout line was really really tiny, so they were just making the place reallllllly tight. We bought some groceries and then realized that we had to buy more, so we asked one of the 10 security guards to watch our stuff for 2 minutes. He wouldn’t… his job was only to watch the one door. There was another security guard also watching that same door. At buffet-style dinners, there will be plenty of people serving food but not enough stations. Either increase the number of stations or let us serve ourselves on both sides of the line! People often combat efficient solutions with the problem that it will take away jobs… I don’t really buy the argument - it’s similar to one that was used in the Industrial revolution, and I think everything worked out OK. I don’t have a solution for the huge unemployment problem in this country, but I don’t think that hiring additional people to get in the way of work is a good solution.

Back to the street… After the festival season, people start flying kites around here, and I believe it culminates during a huge kite festival that is called Makar Sakranti in some places, and I think it’s called Uttarayan here… anyway it happens on January 14th, and Ahmedabad is reputed to be the best place for it. Street-sellers are emptying their inventory of firecrackers (that they sold for Diwali, the festival of lights) and more and more are starting to sell spindles and kites. You start to see spindle-makers on the streets… Here’s a colorful bunch of spindles waiting to be strung.

These guys are manually laying out the string, chalking it pink, and then roll it on to the spindles… the whole thing is a completely manual process, done on the street.

Sewing - on the street!
This guy brings a table and sewing machine on the street everyday and people come to him to fix stuff… There is no set prices, it’s all by negotiation. I doubt he pays any rent and I would guess that the police could probably come shut him down (or ask for a bribe) anytime.

The trash collection system is this a guy on a tricycle (employed by the muncipality)
… he comes around to each house everyday and collects the trash that you give him. He then takes it to a bigger dumpster and trucks come there every week to pick up the trash. In the meantime, rag-pickers come and sort recyclables to take with them, in the process sifting through a lot of dirty trash, occasionally broken glass and needles,etc. Here’s a picture of the rag-picking process, though this is a picture I took on the street in Delhi, not at a dumpster.