For foreign correspondents, Business Standard publisher TN Ninan’s newspaper musings on Saturdays are the go-to column — where every turn and twist of the Indian economy is meticulously explained. For Ninan fans, his first book, The Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future , will prove an even richer treasure trove, sketching out India’s recent financial past and present, and offering a prescient view on what’s ahead.

The title, of course, is a reference to the Aesop’s fable in which the plodding tortoise won the race against the speedy hare.

The default narrative favoured by foreign correspondents has twinned India and China as two rising powers and virtually each economic story they file contains some comparison — usually with a sigh — between India’s flagging performance and that of surging China.

But as Ninan’s book points out, analysts forgot along the way that China and India are two very different entities with divergent pasts, cultures, political systems and people.

Ninan, who has spent four decades chronicling the economy, sketches out why for a host of reasons the country’s growth path must be a made-in-India one and that the nation is unlikely to be able to copy the Chinese script. In fact, he says it may be a little like the Europeans asking the Greeks to be like Germans. It could happen but don’t bet on it.

Arrival of a global power In the best of all worlds, India should see one hundred flowers bloom over the next decade: entrepreneurs flourish, audiences and markets grow for film and music, sports and art and books. There could even be a bid for the Olympic Games of 2028 (pace 2010 Commonwealth Games) as a statement of the country’s “arrival” as a global power, Ninan suggests.

But the emphasis is on ‘should.’ While India is estimated to be the seventh-largest economy in nominal dollars and some of its markets such as mobile phones are world-scale, large numbers of people still travel by train on rooftops; 600,000 primary teaching school positions lie vacant; infant mortality stands at 39 per 1,000 births; 60 million Indians fall into poverty each year from medical expenses and malnutrition levels are worse than in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

And there’s another consideration. For all those breathing the not-so-rarified air of India’s capital or cleaning up after Chennai’s devastating rains, Ninan devotes a chapter to green issues in a chapter titled ‘Growth or Environment — A False Choice’. In 1972, Indira Gandhi laid out the dilemma, saying, ‘We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of a large number of people.”

Now, though, it’s no longer an ‘either-or.’ Ninan says India is caught up in an ecological crisis with noxious air, growing water scarcity, loss of tree cover and worsening soil quality.

He cites a depressing paper by Cambridge professor Partha Dasgupta and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow and others that concludes between 1970 and 2001 India’s growth rate after taking into account environmental costs was just 0.31 per cent per capita in contrast to the official rate of 3 per cent for that period.

National accounting traditionally treated environmental damage as ‘an externality’ and therefore did not take it into account. Such an escape route is no longer defensible, he says.

Making change But ‘who will bell the cat?’. Since taking office, Narendra Modi’s government has been eager to kick-start stalled industrial and infrastructure projects and to show results in terms of reviving growth as normally defined — even if nature’s capital suffers damage in the process.

Ninan sketches out some solutions to change a manifestly unsustainable situation from making paddy cultivation less water intensive and promoting mass transport to imposing environmental regulations on effluent treatment. But he says anyone who asserts the environment can be overlooked while economic growth is made the main focus is asking for trouble — especially for the poor.

Given these constraints and concerns, what of the future? As British economist Joan Robinson famously remarked, “Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.” Ninan marshals legions of facts and figures to build up and knock down pat assumptions about India’s economy.

The book is a bit like many Indians who oscillate between doubt about the country’s ability to get its act together and a quiet confidence that it will. Still what seems true is even if the economy grows at less than optimum speed, it is the country’s economic momentum that matters.

Hope in future For the next five years, India is expected to be the third-largest contributor to world growth after China and the US, which have held the top slots in the last three quinquennia. So, as Ninan notes, the tortoise is narrowing the gap.

In fact, he concludes on a broadly hopeful note, suggesting life for the next generation will get better for larger numbers — perhaps not at “miracle” speed but at an acceptable pace.

Even a business-as-usual approach along with incremental reform — if India fails to grasp the reform nettle boldly — should manage to deliver what the country has mustered in the past quarter-century: respectable 6.4 per cent annual economic growth and thus slightly more than a 5 per cent rise in per-capita income.

The reviewer is a former New Delhi-based correspondent for Reuters and AFP

MEET THE AUTHOR

TN Ninan donned leadership roles at India’s leading publications such as India Today, The Economic Times, Business World and finally at Business Standard where he also served as the publisher before becoming its chairman. His Saturday column ‘Weekend Ruminations’ has a dedicated following. This is his first book.

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