To the legions of readers of T.N. Ninan in the press, it would perhaps come as a surprise that The Turn of the Tortoise is his first book in a writing career of over four decades.
To the legions of readers of T.N. Ninan in the press, it would perhaps come as a surprise that The Turn of the Tortoise is his first book in a writing career of over four decades. It would also be a surprise that unlike volumes by even the best-known commentators, this is not a collection of previously published columns barely held together by a wispy notion of a motif. Ninan, a distinguished economic journalist and editor (who is, mercifully, seldom seen on the nightly shout-fests of 24x7 news channels), has produced an original work with a strong core concern. Its chapters, thus, do not suffer from the bane of books by columnists, word limits and obviously transient pegs to whatever was in the news. That is a boon for the serious reader.
The blurb says, “Like the proverbial tortoise, (India) is now finally in a position to reach some of its long-sought-after goals having made steady progress for years.” That statement identifies the book’s theme, albeit in a slightly misguided fashion. The tortoise of Aesop’s fable had a firm purpose and made steady, if slow, progress towards achieving it. India’s purpose was often ambiguous at best and its progress all but steady, as Ninan convincingly tells the reader at the outset:
“The problem at the root was confusion about goals and tools... The confusion and resultant mistakes have meant that India is the last major poor country on earth... India continued to hurry slowly... (and) picked up momentum after 2003 and went on to clock its best decade... (M)any forecasts have been made about India’s time has come, only for the tide to ebb again.”
The book is divided into 18 chapters grouped into six sections, ranging from current euphoria about India to its medium-term future.
Ninan begins by taking head on arguments he has termed elsewhere as premature triumphalism, that India will soon equal China if not outpace it. These very flattering notions, which began with the 2005 hyphenation between the two Asian behemoths with the coinage of Brics, have found new currency at present in view of China’s presumed slowdown and India’s equally presumed sprint. The author reminds us yet again that the Chinese economy today is five times larger than India’s reckoned in current dollars and its slowdown is evident only when compared to its last two decades of double-digit growth rates. China, despite loss of momentum, remains the world’s factory and its largest exporter of manufactured goods. India, too, has suffered steady loss of exports for close to a year now and its volume of manufactured goods exported is just about the same as that of Taiwan, a country barely two per cent of the size of India.
Ninan explains that a major reason, if not the major one, for the Indian impressive economic numbers in the aggregate is its sheer size, which cuts both ways. If India today is the third-largest economy in purchasing parity prices (seventh in current nominal dollars), it is also home to the world’s largest numbers of poor, illiterate, sick and hungry people, malnourished and underweight children and pregnant and lactating women. This has been the case always, and was so with China as well, but it managed to break the shackles a generation ago while India is still struggling. Which is why the two countries are “not twins and not alike.”
In the classic school book review fashion, we now turn to the end. The concluding chapter, The Next Ten Years, is an entire section in itself, and rightly so, since it is the best in the book, containing the essence of Ninan thinking. Having started with the eminently sensible proposition that “forecasting has to be discarded as a mug’s game” in view of the enormous global uncertainties and statistical legerdemain influencing growth rates, the author gives us glimpses of various likely events. He begins with the caution that “you can still approach the India story from fifteen different angles and get multiples of that many different narratives.”
He believes that much the same that has been happening so far will continue, since there is still reluctance “to break the egg”, which manifests itself as partial reform, “by stealth”, as he describes it. The impressive growth is largely because of relatively high savings/investment rates, which will propel more people into the middle class, even when defined in the global framework. The role of the government is likely to diminish even in areas such as banking and defence production. The power balance will increasingly favour states in the spirit of true federalism. And finally, the garrulous, often dysfunctional, liberal democracy is here to stay. That scenario may not light up high-wattage bulbs of hope and aspiration, but is a comforting safety blanket.
The author conducts a most interesting guided tour between these two points. With the deft touch of an ace tour guide, he stays at each halt just long enough to retain the audience interest.
The waystations include stop-and-go decision-making, its impact on various activities, cronyism and corruption, entrepreneurial explosion, populism and its close cousin, the newly vocal urban moralists, the superpower aspirations and its consequences for what is taken as India’s domain of influence. That is just about the entirety of the landscape concerning India in the second decade of the 21st century.
The book is data-rich but not data-burdened. It has some tables, but they can be counted on one’s fingertips, and no charts. It contains interesting insights drawn from anecdotes, such as the one concerning Supinder Singh, a messenger in Chandigarh who struck it rich by selling a part of his land at astronomical prices and invested in commodity trade on its upward march. Ninan offers nuggets such as bids for Olympics being the mark of nations having “arrived”, made when the per capita income approaches $6,000. That point, he believes, will come around 2019, in time for a bid for the 2028 games (current Delhi gossip has it that the government has already started clearing its throat for just such a purpose). Above all, the book has a generous sprinkling of lively wit and a sense of irony, gifts that practitioners of or writers on the dismal science rarely possess. All this makes it an eminently readable tome for the specialist and lay audience alike.
Marketing strategist Rama Bijapurkar popularised the aphorism “we are like that only” to describe India. Ninan uses a variant of that, “we are (not) like that only” to contrast India with China. This review’s title is a variant of that to depict the author envisioning a timeless, eternal India, incredible — or not!
Disclosure: The reviewer is a good personal friend of the author
Shreekant Sambrani taught at IIM Ahmedabad and helped set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He writes on economic and policy issues.
