In an interview on India, Ancient and Modern

The next book you’ve recommended is based more recently, Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods.

Like Partition, this story has been much told, but Edward Luce’s account is authoritative, balanced, sensible and enjoyable. If there is a businessman going to India who wants to get a hang of the economics of the country in an accessible form, this is the book, no question. Luce was the Financial Times correspondent, married to an Indian, and really got under the skin of the place, really travelled. And most of all, he can write. A rare combination. I’m a non-economist. I don’t really understand money but he explained it to me most lucidly, more so than any other book.

He touches on the IT explosion in India, but he’s not convinced it’s the answer to all their problems, is that right?

Well, he makes comparison with China, where there is a completely different model of development. The Chinese model is, in a sense, a sort of mass manufacturing – everyone’s making car parks and industrial things. India is a culture in which huge swathes of the workforce are illiterate and so on, yet you’ve got this small, super-clever, over-well-educated, incredibly ambitious middle class who are doing the pernickety bits – the software, the fancy finance, the high-value stuff. But there’s a much smaller proportion of the population who are doing this.

So there are these two models of development, and at the moment the Chinese are pulling ahead. They’re educating their people much better. India is always the elephant, you know, moving slowly. But immovable once it gets going.

I visited South India a couple of years ago. You’d come across these IT cities rising out of the paddy fields, in the most unexpected places.

Yes. Even the flagship, Electronics City, outside Bangalore, is more or less impossible to get to. There’s a Sanjeev Bhaskar joke about Bangalore: “Honey, I’m only a mile from home – I’ll be there in six hours!”