First Thoughts

As part of the Rutgers Travel Course to India, I had the chance to experience the challenges and opportunities of this great country. Our group traversed the country from Bombay to Bangalore, from the old city of Delhi to the tranquil and modern campus of Infosys. If anything was clear from this trip, India is a nation of severe contrasts. From a malnourished, naked child lying helplessly on the sidewalk, to a well-dressed, highly-articulate business executive speaking of opportunities for his company to emerge as a market leader; the contrasts challenge your senses to the extreme. While it is clear that India continues to face significant challenges, it has also become clear that India is a country with limitless potential.

India is a country of extremes. The largest democracy in the world, India boasts a powerful middle class consisting of over 300 million citizens. At the same time, this is a country with more than one-third of the world’s chronically malnourished children . In fact, over a quarter of the population live below any humanly-accepted poverty level . India became an independent nation in 1947, however the young government installed socialist policies and largely aligned with the Soviet Union with regards to centralized economic planning and the regulation of markets. By 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and it had become clear that deregulated, free markets were outperforming socialistic trending markets around the world. With such clear evidence in hand, India began to privatize industries and increase foreign direct investment opportunities.

Today, India supports a growing business process outsourcing (BPO) industry and is moving into higher and more complex technological service sectors. The country continues to suffer from a regulatory hangover and rampant corruption that has prevented government resources from being uniformly applied to the burdened infrastructure. A traveler within India today, will discover enormous variance in the level of infrastructure quality and efficiency. Additionally, business growth has largely been concentrated in tax advantage zones. Prospective MNC’s will typically find their way to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). SEZ’s afford tax and infrastructure benefits that cater to foreign direct investment. India offers the potential for MNC’s to leverage a talented workforce and outsized profits. Organizations that couple tax advantages in conjunction with the accompanying talent pool will find endless opportunity to profit in India. The challenge, however, is in negotiating the burdensome regulatory environment along with the costly corruption practices that still prevail in many regions.

While in India, our Rutgers Business School group met with senior leaders and executives from Boeing, Coca Cola, WNS Global Services, Bicon, Infosys, SKS Microfinance, Johnson & Johnson, YES Bank, and with members of the U.S. Embassy. Our travels brought us from Delhi to Bangalore to Mumbai. In less than two-weeks, we rode endless buses, took domestic flights, boarded a regional train, braved rickshaws, and walked through streets and slums. With these fantastic experiences in mind, this blog has been created as a forum for members of our team to share their thoughts and ideas about the emergence of the Indian marketplace today.