TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.038

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 9KB | 150 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."