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K. Venugopal

APRIL 1992. The heyday of Big Bull Harshad Mehta. The Sensex had climbed over 1,000 points in 30 days and zoomed past 4,000, lifting the spirits of investors. As well it might, for stock prices were 57 times their annual earning. Yet, those who were lucky to book profits could not count on having all of it. Take the case of this investor, a member of the Investors Club run by Vysya Bank (now ING Vysya), who sold 50 shares of Sesa Goa on a day in December 1991 when the newspapers said the price was Rs 820.

Yet, the Club informed him that the shares had sold at the Bombay Stock Exchange for Rs 750.45, and to add insult to injury, deducted 1 per cent as service charges. Protests to the Club brought the unflappable response that the execution of the transaction was genuine, and that there were jobber margins to be reckoned with as well. Nearly 8 per cent of the sale price had been shaved off by intermediaries.

Today's investor encounters a dramatically different trading world. The birth of the National Stock Exchange ten years ago ushered in the digital era. Computer screen-based trading made redundant the hordes of paper-pushing staff in broker back offices and brought about dramatic efficiency and speed to the process. Transactions are transparent: The time of trade and the exact traded price is available. And, most important for the investor, broker margins are wafer thin, thinner than one per cent.

When The Hindu Business Line made its debut ten years ago, it recognised the all-pervasive influence of information technology, noting that "soon there will scarcely be an area of human activity that will be beyond the ken of the microprocessor." It is to the nation's credit it adopted information technology wholeheartedly, and the results are showing. Take the telephone. Fifty years of independence were not enough to wipe out the long wait list for a connection.

Yet in just three years, the arrival of the cell phone and razor sharp competition has sent costs spiralling down, extinguished wait-lists and brought nondescript carpenters, farmers and even cobblers within its reach.

More new users took to the cell phone in 2003 than in the first one hundred years of the telephone in the country.

Consider cable television. Started almost clandestinely in the early 1990s by small-time entrepreneurs investing no more than a couple of lakh rupees each, the industry has grown from zero to 40 million connections within the decade.

The industry had no government backing. Indeed it was a development without rules, which is why, perhaps, it grew as fast as it did. The entertainment provided came at a fraction of the cost in the western world.

Consider railway tickets. Computerisation started in the 1980s, but networking of cities took off in the 1990s. One can now buy a ticket at any station in the country for a journey from any station to any other station.

Seats or berths may still be hard to get on occasions, but at least the information is available on tap, even in the comfort of your home through the Internet, which is how some 60,000 users buy their tickets each day.

Take air travel. A decade ago, one had Indian Airlines and Indian Airlines for choice. Now there are four airlines (counting Indian Airlines and its subsidiary Alliance Air as one) flying the domestic skies.

Airlines woo passengers for seats rather than the other way round. Started ten years ago, Jet Airways set new standards in domestic aviation with young, sprightly in-flight staff and younger aircraft. It was an act that upstaged Indian Airlines, which once ruled over passengers like a matron.

Yet the public sector carrier gamely reinvented itself and responded well to the challenge of the market within the limitations imposed by Government on fleet expansion.

Finally the launch last year of the no-frills airline, Deccan Airways, has provided the icing on the rich cake for passengers. Fares between many cities are now lower than they were ten years ago, and distinctly lower than those for air-conditioned first class travel on the train.

The blossoming of India's software genius and of the competence to carry out business process outsourcing is yet another consequence of the country wholeheartedly embracing the digital world.

While Tata Consultancy Services had long established a lone but high quality furrow in developing software for overseas companies, it took the entry of Infosys, Wipro and Satyam Computers to create a new appealing image for Indian talent.

The drastic lowering of international telecommunication costs has made it possible for young Indian talent to work for companies in the US or the UK sitting right here in India.

Doors shut on job-seeking Indians by stringent immigration laws there have been prised open by fibre-optic cables.

Many of these dramatic changes especially that of cable television and software came about without any encouragement from the government.

Some have transformed themselves despite government. For those in industry, policy-making has been tortuous, muddled and exasperating.

Yet when the camera of the historian zooms out to take in the full decade, the economic path charted by government has generally been in the right direction. The pace might have been slower than required, but democratic decision-making does take its time.

Change is always evident to one who has the patience to wait for it. A land with a long history can afford to be patient.

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