While it seems as though we’ve been in New Delhi since the beginning of time, I think that impression might come from having arrived this morning around 1 am, following an 8 hour flight to London that gained 6 hours on the clock, a less than 3 hour layover at Heathrow Airport in London (where, fortunately, we did not have the three hour waits at security that were featured on Monday evening’s news, but did have to navigate the tube from terminal 3 (American Airlines)to British Airways in terminal 5), and then another 7 hour flight gaining another 4 ½ hours to the new airport in New Delhi.
Anyway, our day began around 7 hours later, with the usual outstanding Asian breakfast; for me it was lots of fruit, good Masala chai, and dosa—a wonderful pancake type stuffed with spicy potatoes. For others, it could have been waffles, egg omelets, toast, cereal—etc. But it should be no surprise. We are in India at one of the hotel chains managed by the Tata group, India’s largest business (and one of the best; my guide from January, whose agency arranged our India trip, joined us for dinner, where he noted that Tata announced it is developing a car that can run on water! I sometimes think that the guru of the group, Ratan Tata, walks on the stuff!)
It was obvious on our trips around New Delhi that Indians had been working on one of the main challenges it faces, infrastructure, since my last visit here 5 years ago. Simply put, one of the biggest economic differences between India and China was in transportation and especially roads. New Dehli, the fifth city to emerge in the area, had somewhat of an advantage because it was built by the British early in the 20th century to accommodate the political functions as capitol of British India. That means wide, leafy streets, cantonments and large colonial, majesterial buildings, roundabouts (to my horror; I am so glad someone else is driving!). What has changed since the Raj moved from Calcutta in 1931 is the addition of people and cars. Delhi is now more than 15 times the size it had in 1947, and the number of vehicles has escalated even more. Since my last visit (I understand largely as a result ohe Asian games a few years ago), major toll roads and the world’s largest metro (subway) system (I think the fares are really cheap; a tourist day pass is less than $2) have taken pressure off. I understand that the government will be opening a 12 lane highway to Agra, but that will come next year (it was 12 lanes last time I was on it, but only four of those were ‘roads’ ; the rest were cars, trucks, and creatures (camels, oxen, horses, and even a dancing bear) creating the additional lanes!).
We had three visits to business. One was our lunch stop—at a business you might have heard of—McDonald’s, partly because we needed to eat somewhere, and I knew we were going to have a spectacular dinner that night (at a restaurant designed by a fashion designer, and it showed). I also wanted students to see what adaptations a global corporation, one best known (and sometimes reviled, as in “the McDonaldization of the world”) had to make to adapt to Indian tastes. One adaptation occurred when the company came to India, where the Hindu majority (75% of the population) does not eat beef, the cow being sacred (and that’s another thing I’ve noticed here—a lot fewer cows roaming the streets). When I was here in 2001, we stopped at McD’s and had a “Maharajah Mac” that featured lamb. About 5 years ago, in response to an animal rights attack, the company abandoned lamb for chicken. So we had, at the recommendation of our IWU student who is Indian, variants of the spicy chicken that is the featured meat. And it was spicy!
The first visit was to a company named Britannia (how’s that for indicating India’s heritage as a country which had been ruled (certainly in terms of its foreign policy) by the British, who linked together British ruled India (and Pakistan and Bangaladesh and Burma) with states run by maharajas and sultans (depending on whether Hindu or Muslim) into the “Jewel in the Crown”. The conglomerate, which also owns an airlines, has a major share of the biscuit (again, a British term—for cookie) market in India. We visited a factory, which for many of our students was their first exposure to any manufacturing facility. The 800 employees make several lines for north India, which the company trucks take to 14 warehouses for further distribution to the variety of retailers; India is, by and large a country of small businesses. Laws have blocked the emergence of multi-brand stores, a synonym for Walmarts or Carrefours (French) or Metros (German) or Tescos (British) or Lottes (Korean) or Mitsui (Japanese), so common elsewhere. When I asked students what they saw, they remarked on how labor based the production was. Telling for me was “quality control”—where men (the facility was mostly male) stood looking for the ‘non acceptable’ cookies—whether because of shape or shade or size or broken—and physically pulled them from the line. Men physically put the cookies in sleeves and packages, then put the packages into boxes for reshipping. The factory manager told us—and this is typical of what I’ve seen of manufacturing in India—that ¾ of his employees are contract labor, who are seasonal workers, going back to their villages when non needed. Though the manager assured us that the contractors get the same benefits as the regular employees, they do give some flexibility to management in a system that has been working to become more “free trade” since 1991, when the License Raj—very government controlled or regulated—system collapsed. The company practices “kaizen”, a Japanese process which encourages employees to make continuous improvements, sort of a “suggestion box”, but routinized; throughout the factory, we saw pictures posted of the changes that indicated Japanese manufacturing practices are world class. One other corporate initiative I saw—and questioned—was to go international and reposition cookies from baked goods to healthy snacks. The cookies are already exported, mostly—and this is typical for Indian companies—to the Middle East and nearby SE Asian countries. The health is partly aspirational, and partly new ingredients. I am munching on fiber cookies as I type.
The other business visit was to the Apollo Group, a private 54 hospital chain (India and Middle East again) with 2200 pharmacies (a new one opens every hours), which has a hand in education of medical personnel as well. Many of its patients are foreigners, as part of what could be called medical tourism—people who come for surgery (over 10 major operations per day) and stay for a tour of the Taj Mahal when they recover—at bargain prices. The one operation that sticks in my mind was heart bypass, which might be $150,000 elsewhere, but is around $7, 500 in India. Our guide told us that many middle class Indians use the doctors for diagnosis and consultation, then maybe wait for the free health care at government run hospitals. Incidentally, the $7500 includes amenities such as pickup at the hospital and a translator. The suites we saw have microwaves a separate room for family members….
If you think low labor costs keep manufactured prices low, I went into a shoe shop nearby which custom made shoes. I don’t have any, and asked, “out of curiosity”, how much would a pair cost. $500, he said. “My curiosity is satisfied,” I said.