TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111389/11138900.038

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.4 KB | 163 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 53

INDIA

Puppies and Consumer Boomers


A brash new middle class is stirring up social revolution

By Edward W. Desmond/NEW DELHI


    Someone is knocking at India's door. No one special, just
Ravi Khanna, a well-dressed young man who works hard and talks
fast. But that unprepossessing exterior masks an agent of
revolution, a force committed to arousing passions that are
transforming India's tottering socialist order. "Good morning,
Mrs. Bedi," Ravi says. "May I come in to show you the new
Mitey-Vac? Is the man of the house in?"

    Before Mrs. Bedi knows it, Ravi is inside her small New
Delhi apartment, demonstrating his wonder contraption. "Can it
do cobwebs, spiders and lizards?" asks a wide-eyed Mrs. Bedi.
"Anything," Ravi boasts. Mr. Bedi, however, is not impressed by
the $200 price tag -- more than two weeks' wages for a
senior-grade civil servant such as himself. "The cost is too
much," he says. Ravi, sweating now, promises training, service,
lifetime devotion. "For me," he says, "the customer is like a
god." Mrs. Bedi looks expectantly at her husband, who walks out
of the room muttering, "It's your choice."

    Ravi and Mrs. Bedi are only drops in the ocean of India's
835 million people, but they are part of a wave that has
brought unprecedented change to India's economy and society over
the past decade, and especially during the five years of Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi's government. The participants in this
social revolution are the members of India's middle class. A
hardworking group with rupees to spare, they constitute a
marketer's dream of as many as 200 million people, and are
expanding rapidly. Ten years from now, predicts V.A. Pai
Panandiker, director of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research,
"about 300 million (Indians) will be members of the middle
class."

    In India social position used to be equated with an English
education and a job in the Indian Administrative Service. Today
it is money that increasingly defines status, giving rise to a
middle class that cuts across caste and region. The rush to
acquire has affected such sensitive traditions as arranged
marriages and has allowed middle-class women to emerge in the
work force. It is no longer regarded as shameful to covet the
good life and to seek an even better life for one's children.
"Indians always accepted drudgery as what life had in store for
them," says Mohammed Khan, chairman of Enterprise Advertising
in Bombay. "Today self-gratification is no longer a dirty word."

    The urge to splurge has been fueled by several interlocking
forces. Limited economic liberalizations instituted by Gandhi
have freed the private sector to step up production. A wealth
of consumer items now jam once poorly stocked shelves. Even
those who cannot afford to buy the goodies are affected by the
alluring images produced by India's upstart advertising industry
and transmitted into the homes of the country's estimated 180
million television viewers -- about 130 million more than five
years ago. Those images, in turn, deepen middle-class
dissatisfaction with the socialist restrictions that remain.
"This is a greedy class, a demanding class," says Abid Hussain,
a member of the Planning Commission in New Delhi. "It is crying
out against the tyranny of the small inspector and the
bureaucrat."

    But the capitalist outlook is still so new to India that no
mainstream leader is quite ready to renounce socialism for the
C word. Even Gandhi, who godfathered the middle-class surge,
fears the fallout when less fortunate voters go to the polls
later this month for parliamentary elections. For the past six
months, he has turned his attention to promoting vast poverty
relief and local rule schemes. Still, Gandhi's advisers say that
if the Prime Minister is returned to power, he will push forward
with deregulation and other reforms. If Gandhi is defeated, his
successor may have little choice but to do the same. Says
Surjit Bhalla, an economist with the Policy Group, a New Delhi
think tank: "After what has happened in the past five years in
the global economy, Indian policymakers have finally realized
that socialism has failed to deliver the goods."

    Indian leftists counter that Gandhi is leaving India's vast
numbers of poor people in the lurch. They argue that government
resources are being diverted to help the well-off minority, who
in turn are frittering away vital funds on luxury goods. Rajni
Kothari, a widely respected social scientist, is worried that
the middle class is dangerously insensitive to the desperately
poor. Says he: "There is a disturbing decline in compassion, in
charity, in pity."

    The consumer big bang was detonated in 1982 with the advent
of color TV, but really took off in 1984 when Doordarshan, the
monopoly state television company, began allowing advertisers
to sponsor shows. Over the next five years, the advertising
revenues at Doordarshan jumped more than tenfold. Top-rated
shows exposed tens of millions of slum dwellers and villagers,
as well as civil servants and professionals, to the
blandishments of housewives, models and children. A surge in
foreign travel and the arrival of the video revolution further
whetted appetites for consumer goods.

    As a result, domestic manufacturing is soaring. From 1982
to 1988, color television production jumped from 70,000 units
a year to 1.3 million, while the output of black-and-white sets
increased almost eightfold, to 4.4 million. Refrigerator and car
production has also mushroomed, softening Indian resistance to
borrowing. That means boom times ahead for a fledgling consumer
finance business that, according to J. Rao, Citibank's chief
executive officer in India, has skyrocketed from zero to $1
billion in just three years.

    The rush to buy is rooted in the new middle class's love of
ostentation. Many Indians consider those Punjabis who are most
at home in Delhi to be particularly brash entrepreneurs and
deride the type as the "puppy," for "prosperous urban Punjabi
who is young." But where the consumer itch is involved, even
ordinary Indians are not above one-upmanship. Onida, a
television manufacturer, runs a national ad campaign with the
slogan, "Neighbor's envy, owner's pride."

    The pursuit of a middle-class life-style is swiftly
altering Indian society. While most marriages are still
arranged, restrictions of caste compatibility are giving way to
considerations of money. Marriage advertisements in newspapers
often contain the phrase "caste no bar." Even more dramatic is
the emergence of the working wife, once regarded by the middle
class as a sign that her husband could not support his family.
Today, says Medha Damle, manager of a Bombay matrimonial bureau,
"99% of the men who apply want working girls. Most prefer girls
with bank jobs, so (they) can get loans."

    Like their yuppie cousins in the West, Indian puppy couples
are finding that the dual-income household can prove costly.
Headlines in the newsmagazine India Today document the
challenges: THE INDIAN MALE: MID-LIFE BLUES; MARRIED WOMEN:
CHANGING SEXUALITY; DIVORCE: GETTING COMMON. The last reflects
the clash of expectations in marriages in which the woman is now
educated, assertive and independent. While a typical
middle-class man wants a well-educated mate who works, he still
expects his wife to run the house, look after the children and
cater to his needs -- all without benefit of servants, who have
become too expensive. Not unexpectedly, women find such demands
unreasonable, and their quiet revolt is boosting the divorce
rate.

    Middle-class angst, however, pales beside the miseries of
India's poor. Free marketers argue that if economic growth
reaches 7% or more, the "trickle down" will benefit the poor far
faster than did four decades of socialist central planning. In
the meantime, India remains divided between the barely
subsisting poor and the consumer-happy middle class.

    An enormous national effort is necessary to reconcile those
two worlds. The challenge for New Delhi is to provide
education, health care and job opportunities to the poor, so
they too can participate in India's revolution before resentment
erupts among the have-nots. "You can view these changes as a
great success," says an economist close to the Prime Minister's
office, "or as the seed of a tremendous explosion." He adds, "I
see both."