Before starting my PhD, I spent the past three years as a journalist for The Economist. The final year was the best. I was based in India, lived between Mumbai and New Delhi, and travelled across 10 states and over 30 cities and villages as the country carried out history’s largest election. I was responsible for the paper’s India economics coverage, which culminated in a 10-page special report and cover story, and at a personal level, grew closer to my heritage.
The central challenge of reporting from India is that it is a vast, heterogeneous and only half-modernised state, so information is more dispersed and likely to stay private than in US tech and finance, my previous beat. Finding the often unexpected guides who opened their worlds to me was what made writing in India so rewarding, and I’m happy to share those stories here.
It surprises me that so few international resources go into understanding India on the ground. The country has 1.4bn people and counting, is compounding at a 7% annual rate, just surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-biggest economy and will plausibly become the largest within my lifetime. While China is upending the world order today, India may prove just as important to the 21st century.
If you have feedback or questions, I’d love to know: arjunsramani at gmail. This essay is cross-posted from arjunramani.com/india-dispatch.
Contents
I. Decentralisation: One subcontinent, many nations
It is strange that India is one country. No language, not even Hindi, is spoken by more than half the population. Like many aspiring India watchers, the first book I read to prep was Ram Guha’s “India after Gandhi”, the definitive book on India’s modern history. As Guha details, before independence in 1947, the British lacked direct control of over 550 “princely states” including the massive states of Hyderabad and Mysore. The princely states made up roughly half the subcontinent’s area. Even before this, the Mughal empire had never conquered South India.1 After independence, foreigners thought democratic India would fail to stay unified. Here is the last British commander of the Indian army just after 1947:
“The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime. I think they probably will and that will be only a start of a general decentralisation and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.”
Lee Kuan Yew, a keen watcher of India, concurred. India was “not a real country” but rather “32 separate nations that happened to be arrayed along the British rail line.”
In recent years, the international commentariat has become increasingly alarmed that India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is backsliding from democracy. An industrialist told me about a time he questioned a Modi decision on TV. Later that day he received a call from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), where power is centralised, demanding he immediately qualify the statement publicly. He complied. This situation is commonplace. More concerningly, almost all the major TV stations have been bought by tycoons favourable to the BJP. Some newspapers remain independent, but they pick their hard-hitting stories carefully. Fire too often and trouble will come. The opposition refers to them as the “Godi media” (lapdog media).
Yet as the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson once told her student Amartya Sen: “The frustrating thing about India…is that whatever you can rightly say about [it], the opposite is also true.” As I travelled through India I began to see that power and allegiance within the country were surprisingly dispersed.
Go to Tamil Nadu in the South where Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has little support and it is not Modi’s face slapped on billboards, but that of MK Stalin, the chief minister (yes he’s named after Joseph Stalin2). Indeed South India in general, the economic centre of gravity of the country, has largely resisted the BJP’s electoral rise.3 Go to the old British capital Calcutta and it is Mamata Banerjee whose cult of personality looms large. These fiefdoms are not like governorships in America. Numerous regional parties have power bases independent from the national scene. So while Modi has nationalised politics to an extent, in some ways he still has less of a hold on India than Trump does over America. The BJP has never topped 40% of the national vote. Even the Congress Party under Nehru, the first prime minister, peaked at 45%.4
There are tradeoffs to diffuse political power of course. Many in India look longingly upon China’s double-digit annual growth rates from 1978-2020, which depended on a strong state that could smash through opposition to build infrastructure at remarkable speed and scale. India’s diversity in language, politics, religion and way of life, makes emulation unlikely. Yet in the long-run, it could prove a hidden source of strength. Already, India has achieved a remarkable feat. It has been a relatively stable democracy with full franchise since 1947 at an earlier stage of development than any major country in history.5
An underlying political culture of decentralisation is also why I think the likelihood of authoritarian takeover is low. Most Indians look upon the Emergency, a two-year period of martial law from 1975-77, with horror. The military has a strong culture of respecting the Constitution. While overt criticism of the prime minister himself is avoided, discourse on WhatsApp groups and on YouTube channels is vibrant. The temperature has also cooled a bit since the 2024 election in which the BJP lost its single-party majority and was forced into a coalition government. A journalist friend even recently told me: “In my last call with the PMO, they were feeding me information!”
II. Illegibility: Inside the black economy
The most salient difference between writing about US tech/finance and writing about India is the quality of public information. In the West, it is quite possible to read some bank analyst reports, crunch some data, scroll Twitter, talk to a few experts and write about economics for a popular current affairs magazine. This is not to diminish the job, just that it doesn’t necessarily require much shoe-leather reporting. By contrast, reporting in India will burn through pairs rather quickly.
India’s underground economy is vibrant. Despite demonetisation, I’m confident a big chunk of political donations and property transactions still happen in cash (I asked a lot of developers and campaign operatives). Corruption and crime are commonplace–more than 40% of Members of Parliament have an ongoing criminal investigation! Business and politics happen over WhatsApp and telephone calls. India’s Internal Tech Emails would be a bore. A good chunk of red tape from the Licence Raj is still on the books, making rent-seeking a necessity for business. Amazingly, prohibition is still active in Bombay so you need a liquor licence to drink, but basically no one has one! Economically, the majority of activity is “informal”, or in small unregistered firms that do not pay tax. As a result, many economic statistics are best described as educated guesswork.
This makes the job of a reporter a lot more fun. Let me tell you some stories. The manager of a contract manufacturing firm tells me (paraphrased): “Every election season, on cue, workers stop showing up, so I have to pay way more to find people.” Why, I ask? “Bribes,” he says. I don’t claim to know the details of how this works. Milan Vaishnav’s “When Crime Pays” is a more thorough account. But here’s what I heard: At least a tenth of voters are bribed, more so in rural areas, gifted everything from food to animals. In Eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) the cash bribe averages 2,000 rupees per person. “Goondas” (goons) might take your voter ID card and then return it to you after the election with the cash, while checking you don’t have a black mark on your finger (voters receive a semi-permanent mark on their index finger after voting to prevent fraud).6
All this raises the costs of running elections well above legal spending limits, which means politicians have to raise a lot of black money.
I learned about this in an unexpected way. I was doing a background interview with a well-known politician running for election. In the middle of the conversation he took a phone call. I still don’t understand why he didn’t go to another room. Maybe he assumed I didn’t know any Hindi. In any case, the politician was asking a businessman for black money as he had run out of campaign resources. “Liquid chahiye” (I need cash) was the tell. After the call, he looked at me sheepishly and explained that there was no other way to survive without cash. You need at least 6-7 crore rupees ($1m) to run an MP campaign, he said (eight times the legal limit). Gesturing to his bungalow, he protested: “it’s not for me, I don’t even live in a big house!”
But as I found out, the more consequential graft involved high-stakes relationships between tycoons and central political parties. India places no limit on donations to political parties, so businesses fund parties in exchange for influence over contracts and permits and immunity from law enforcement. The most commonly-alleged example is Modi’s relationship with Gautam Adani, an industrialist centi-billionaire whose rise to power has been part and parcel with Modi’s. Adani is said to do the bidding of the state. A transmission line and airport in Nepal, the port in Sri Lanka, a shipping route from Israel to Greece–the list of geopolitically relevant deals reportedly pushed to Adani by the government goes on. (Adani and the government deny all such allegations. And in fairness, there was plenty of corruption under previous governments.)
Is India’s corruption necessary or overboard? Yuen Yuen Ang will tell you that countries throughout history from the US to the Asian Tigers and China saw industrialisation and corruption coincide. The key was that the graft was “efficient” in that money greased the wheels of the business-politics nexus. This is happening in parts of India like Tamil Nadu. One of my uncles describes it as “organised corruption”. Yes, there is a skim for government contracts and you have to donate to the right politicians, but relative to the rest of India, corruption causes little uncertainty and delay. A friend unironically says: “it’s somewhat remarkable how transparent and honest [Tamil Nadu] corruption is.” Businesspeople the world over complain about regulation far more than tax. So it makes sense that when corruption is efficient, it converts regulation into a tax, mitigating its damage.
As for the country as a whole, one of the grand projects of the Modi government since 2014 has been centralising a previously more decentralised system of corruption. Operating through his enforcer Amit Shah, Modi has tried to clamp down on petty theft and embezzlement by lower-ranking officials and politicians. Technology helps. Basically everyone has a mobile phone and bank account (a major development of the past decade) which allows the centre to send cash directly into people’s accounts for most welfare programmes, preventing skimming by lower levels of government. Yet at the same time, “access money”, or money paid to the central party in exchange for influence, remains pervasive. Adani and other favoured businesses saw their market valuations surge and fall in line with the BJP’s polling results over election season. So rather than falling wholesale, it is the nature of corruption that has been transformed.7
III. Revolutions: the new Khan Market gang
When tech’s most powerful CEOs lined up at Trump’s inauguration, I was reminded of India at the start of 2024. The country’s top bosses descended upon the holy city of Ayodhya to witness their prime minister inaugurate a temple that doubled as a kick-off event for the ensuing campaign. In the past Modi and Trump have seemed to like each other.8 They share many similarities. Both are pro-business strongmen with a penchant for protectionism and bullying the opposition and media. Just as Trump decries the Washington swamp, Modi rose to power denouncing the establishment New Delhi “Khan Market gang.” The two are also masterful public communicators and have built strong cults of personality. For a time, they even both had first buddies (Trump + Elon; Modi + Adani).
But one of my more widely-read pieces looked at the differences between Modi and Trump. In most countries, having a college education is associated with less support for the loose bundle of right-wing strongman populists. But in India, surprisingly to me, college-educated Indians disproportionately support Modi and the BJP. Furthermore, the BJP has roughly the same level of support among men and women, whereas conservative parties globally are male-dominated. The piece was extra fun because a social media mob came after me.9
I understood the pushback. Many Indians are also sensitive to The Economist’s commentary on their country because of its association with India’s former colonizer, Britain, and because when foreign newspapers write about India for international audiences, they inevitably must simplify. In that sense a big lesson for me was the importance of covering countries on their own terms, with respect and humility, and assuming you are missing lots of context. The piece was also criticised for viewing India through a Western lens and not understanding the BJP was welfarist.
But I think it is precisely these nuances that makes the topic worthy of explanation. The BJP does share a lot with conservative, right-wing parties globally: it promotes religious nationalism and is genuinely fiscally conservative (relative to the opposition).10 But Modi still bucks international trends in terms of elite support, for reasons of caste, economic growth and nationalism. In the piece, I offered three reasons: caste politics (the BJP has historically been a part of upper-caste Hindus, who are highly-educated), economics (Modi is good for growth), and elite admiration for strongman rule (India is mired with bureaucracy; maybe strongmanship is what the country needs). When I discussed this with some senior BJP leaders in India, they concurred: “See! Educated people support Modi!”
I would go further and say Modi and Trump are leading right-wing (non-Marxist) revolutions. In his book “India’s Power Elite”, Sanjaya Baru observes that while Mao purged Chinese society of traditional status markers, Modi is trying to replace the old ruling elite with a new one. The fight over the exclusive Delhi Gymkhana Club is a good example. As my friend Ben Parkin wrote in the FT, rather than ignoring or upending the club, the government is attempting to change its character and composition.
The old Congress elite was internationally-oriented and academic, socialist and outwardly secular.11 In fact, the phrase “socialist and secular republic” remains in the preamble to India’s Constitution to this day, and the Supreme Court has rejected BJP attempts to remove it. Modi’s new elite is more business-friendly, outwardly nationalist and proud of its Hinduism.12 Eventually the BJP will lose power. But as with the rightward vibe shift in America, I expect the underlying political dynamics and shift in elite consciousness behind Modi’s rise to prove durable. India is a deeply religious (mostly Hindu) society–now more people are willing to admit it.13
IV. Technology: Bangalore and more
Bangalore is one of my favourite cities. It has an openness and adventurous spirit that is hard to find outside places fuelled by technology. It’s become a joke that Bangalore culture now often mirrors SF culture–the same Twitter memes and blog posts go viral in both places. The tech scene is also maturing. A decade ago, it was Koramangala, a tree-lined neighborhood in the city’s southeast, that had the greatest density of startups. Nowadays, the hub of choice is HSR Layout, further south. It is a sign of maturity and reminds me of how new startup activity in the Bay Area shifted from the South Bay to San Francisco in the 2000s.
My favourite Bangalore billionaire is Nandan Nilekani. For those not in the know, he is an Infosys co-founder and drove the creation of India’s national ID system (“Aadhaar”, which translates to foundation) showing tremendous political skill in keeping the project alive across successive governments. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which I profiled in 2023, was also his brainchild, alongside India’s broader set of digital public infrastructure projects. He’s a technologist who has truly dedicated himself to his nation over decades. Silicon Valley could learn from him.
There are many reasons to be bullish on the Indian tech/startup scene. India has an increasingly integrated national market and a huge pool of young talent for whom the internet is an exit from a creaky educational system. There is a decent amount of risk capital connected to American VCs, successful exits (Flipkart, Swiggy), and high-performing indigenous firms beyond tech services e.g. Lenskart (consumer health), Zepto (quick-commerce), RazorPay (fintech).
But I'm sceptical that India's tech scene will grow to be akin to China’s in the next decade or two (apologies to those feeling DeepSeek FOMO). Indian universities and firms spend little on basic research and the best talent leaves. More important is market structure. There’s a reason Sequoia Capital and other big early-stage investors recently left India. As one Indian VC explained to me, the top 10 consumer and software companies in India from WhatsApp to YouTube, are all American. Such categories have economies of scale that ignore borders, leaving little room for fledgling Indian companies to compete.
Thus far, India’s successful startups have been in sectors that touch the physical world or are highly-regulated, which gives local players an advantage (Zoho and Freshworks are exceptions). China escaped the weight of global economics of scale by erecting the Great Firewall and using tech-transfer agreements to learn from foreign firms before displacing them with local champions (see Noah Smith’s “China Cycle”). It will be tough for India to do the same given its democracy.14 For now, there is the US internet, the Chinese internet, and little else.
The implication is that India can’t count on its tech sector to rapidly scale, export and fuel growth in the way manufacturing did for China.
Will AI help or hurt? A lot depends on your view of AI progress, but my guess is it will impact the composition of India’s services exports in the short-run, and pose more of a threat to the overall sector in the long-run. A quarter of India’s exports are business services, the type of stuff AI-powered “drop-in remote workers” should disrupt. But at the same time, AI also helps Indian engineers compete closer to the global frontier. Some of my former classmates have an AI accent-correction startup that has leveled up Indian customer service agents servicing global markets. AI is also a massive demand shock for IT firms–every business now needs someone to help them adopt AI.
The domestic economy is another story. I suspect that the more illegible a society is, the slower AI diffusion will be. Part of this is simple. If businesses do not have well-kept historical data or internal documents, there’s nothing to do RAG on. But I think it goes deeper. Many of the basic facts needed to operate in Indian society are not recorded anywhere, but rather sit inside the heads of various information brokers who live off the rents from keeping that information private. Plenty of businesses survive despite being inefficient because one guy has the right contacts with regulators and suppliers.15
I met one such information broker in a small town in UP–he was young, persistent, knew English and basically ensured less sophisticated people in the town actually got access to government services and permits. “All have my number, and I have all numbers,” he said in between fielding calls with common people and officials the entire time we spoke. Private information is a moat for humans. I sometimes joke that if AI automates economics research, investigative journalism in emerging markets will be my AI-proof job of choice.16
V. Growth: The elephant is moving
Throughout my year in India, the dominant mood was ebullience. India’s time had come. Quarter after quarter growth rates smashed expectations. In the first quarter of 2025, Indian growth accelerated to 7.4% annualised, retaining its title as the fastest-growing major world economy–impressive given the global macro slowdown.
I am bullish on continued strong Indian growth relative to the world, but less bullish about it in absolute terms. Start with the relative optimism. India has better demographics than East Asia and Europe (its population will peak in the 2060s at 1.7bn people). For the first time in its history, it now has a truly integrated national market as well as an elite consensus across major parties that growth and markets are broadly good.
Most interestingly, is geopolitics. You might think the new India would be a natural American ally in its contest with China. Yet most Indian bureaucrats have serious qualifications about American partnership. Indian non-alignment should be taken at face value.17 This is advantageous for India economically in relative terms. It and other non-aligned nations (Singapore, Brazil, etc) can play arbitrageur in the new global order. For example, India is importing plenty of Russian oil, refining it, and exporting it to the West. One official explained to me why this was necessary: “India is surrounded by China, Russia, and Pakistan; it would be a strategic disaster if we made enemies of all of them.”
Despite these tailwinds, don’t expect double-digit growth a la China or the Asian Tigers. To grow faster, India needs (i) more autonomy and accountability for cities (ii) mass deregulation and judicial cleanup (iii) more productive investment in R&D/science. But currently, cities are controlled by their state governments.18 Elected mayors are ceremonial. I hardly met anyone in Mumbai or Bangalore who knew their local leader. Chinese localities had autonomy on process combined with accountability for outcomes which led to experimentation and competition. Achieving this in India is one of the great political challenges of the coming decades.
The automation of manufacturing and Chinese manufacturing heft means the classic manufacturing export-driven growth model is out of the question. The alternative is services-led growth e.g. tech and business services as I wrote about with Mike Bird. But tradable services are not very labour-intensive–all of Indian IT and tech creates less than 10 million jobs. This limits the “learning-by-doing” benefits of services exports. Dani Rodrik told me the “ceiling on growth” is probably just lower today than in the past.
Indeed, India’s macroeconomic statistics pose a conundrum. Inflation is running at 4% and growth at 6-7%, yet everyone complains about a lack of jobs.19 I think the problem has similarities to what could happen in a dystopian-AI future. The marginal product of many workers in the formal sector is too low to bring them out of informal work in agriculture and the small-scale services sector.
You see this everywhere. Also in UP, I met a dozen men in their 20s, who at 2pm on a weekday were hanging out in their village. Most had phones out. Some were snacking. I asked what they were up to. “Timepass,” one said. (Translation: nothing much.) For a third of the year, most worked on nearby farms, earning 300-400 rupees ($4-5) a day. For another third, some would go to a big city to do contract work in a manufacturing plant earning around 12,000 rupees ($150) a month. The final third of the year was for timepass. I asked what it would take for them to migrate full time to a city. Most wouldn’t consider it because of family or high prices. Language was also an issue. One said “25,000 rupees a month” would do it. This is why India isn’t seeing the type of rapid rural-to-city migration that China experienced over the past 30 years.
Go to the cities and you’ll see more timepass. There are automated gates to enter the Ahmedabad metro. Yet there is still a salaried man standing by the gate who takes your metro token and inserts it into the gate for you.
I’m reminded of Arthur Lewis’s 1954 classic paper, “Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour” (thanks to Rohit Lamba for the suggestion):
[A]n unlimited supply of labour may be said to exist in those countries where population is so large relatively to capital and natural resources, that there are large sectors of the economy where the marginal productivity of labour is negligible, zero, or even negative. Several writers have drawn attention to the existence of such “disguised” unemployment in the agricultural sector…The phenomenon is not, however, by any means confined to the countryside. Another large sector to which it applies is the whole range of casual jobs--the workers on the docks, the young men who rush forward asking to carry your bag as you appear, the jobbing gardener, and the like. These occupations usually have a multiple of the number they need, each of them earning very small sums from occasional employment ; frequently their number could be halved without reducing output in this sector.
Maybe AGI theorists should go to developing countries.
VI. Culture: Religion, travel and content recommendations
Religion: Young people in India are religious yet modern in a way that surprised me. Chamundeshwari temple in Mysore is one of India’s most beautiful places of worship (the city was one of the 550 princely states). My cab driver to the temple was a 26-year-old dude who knew perfect English. He was visiting the altar too, so became my companion. During the one-hour queue he described his religious devotion. (We could have paid a small fee to skip the line, as is common in many parts of India, but he thought that would be unfair.) He visited the temple twice weekly, but also that he was studying to become a police officer and had an unsanctioned girlfriend from a different caste; his parents didn’t know. “She’s much cuter than me,” he said.
A week later I visited Varanasi (Benares) in UP. Varanasi is India’s holiest city and an overwhelming sensory experience. The city is built around the Ganga (Ganges) River with ghats (stone steps) extending into the holy water. Every evening at sunset, there is a grand “Aarti”, a ceremony where large lamps are lit and slokas (hymns) are sung.
Varanasi is dear to Hindus. But it is also a fast-growing commercial enterprise that is causing overcrowding and eroding the city’s charm. If you go I recommend the Dashashwamedh ghat for the full experience. If you get claustrophobic you can pay a few hundred rupees to sit on nearby rooftop. While there, I met a college student who visited every weekend. We discussed whether the Aarti would still be happening 100 years in the future, given the growing secularism of young people.
He responded with absolute certainty: “The old people are here for God but the younger people for [Instagram] Reels...maybe 50% Reels, 20% both, 30% God.” I asked about him. “I'm here for God…there are enough of us for this to continue,” he said. I think this is telling for the future. Enough highly religious people can keep traditions alive even for those who are not religious themselves. Indeed, 80% of Indians say religion is important to their daily lives, a number that has been pretty stable even while religiosity has declined in the West.
I am often asked what I think about Hindutva. In general, I hope India’s social fabric grows to be more pluralist (which is not the same as secular) and worry about the treatment of the Muslim minority.20 That said, there are interesting historical reasons for why Hindutva has grown to be a powerful social and political force. For example, the BJP claims that Nehru and Congress have erased the oppression of Hindus in the pre-British period from India’s history. There’s some truth to this. When Congress developed India’s educational system post-independence, they thought it best to paint the Mughal period as one of religious harmony to improve relations between Hindus and Muslims. Good intentions, but it’s unsurprising that people are not willing to gloss over the violence, just like Western progressives demand acknowledgement for past violence against minorities.
Villages: I asked a lot of people for advice about reporting on India. The most common suggestion was to venture outside cities for the villages, the “real India”, where over half the population lives and mostly works in agriculture. I spent some time at several villages in Eastern UP and Western Bihar, two of the poorest regions of India, partly because those areas (particularly UP) drove the surprising election swing. At one UP village, my first conversation was with the Pradhan (leader). Officially, they were supposed to be a woman. But a man, the Pradhan's husband, greeted me, as he de facto ran the show!21 Funnily enough, this is exactly like the opening scene of Panchayat, the popular Amazon Prime show about Indian village governance, which I highly recommend for understanding village life (it’s kind of like Indian Parks and Rec).
Most people I met in the UP and Bihari villages were not optimistic about the future. There were a few young men who had ambitions of moving to cities, but most were content to continue doing odd jobs, working part-time on farms. Mobile phones were common–the result of a rapid reduction in data and phone costs fueled by Ambani’s Jio–and there was typically one smartphone per household, usually controlled by the husband. Everyone was watching YouTube.
There was running water and toilets (another government programme) but people admitted open defecation was still common. The toilet-building programme, I was told, had a 20% skim i.e. the local officer in charge pocketed 20% of the construction subsidy given by the government. Government welfare (free ration of grain) meant no one starved. But amusingly, most villagers took their free unrefined and dusty grain and traded it back to the same distributor for a smaller portion of tastier refined grain!
Cities:22 The three most important cities in India are Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. There is an air of power and mystery to Delhi. My friend Roshan says you can tell how much political dealmaking is happening by counting how many people from opposing parties take walks on weekend mornings in Lodhi Gardens. Despite its pollution and poor usage of land, Lutyens’ Delhi is beautiful. Qutb Minar, Humayun’s tomb, Red Fort and Lodhi Gardens are especially stunning at night when they are brightly lit.
That said, Delhi culture is quite hierarchical (representing India writ large). In Washington, you routinely find people at top levels of government who come from regular backgrounds. In Delhi, that is rarer (Modi himself is an exception as the son of a tea-seller; partly explaining his broad-based popularity). Dynasties matter more. A large number of people remain devoted to the Gandhi-Nehru family despite their lack of political success over the past decade. London seems to fit in between in terms of the importance of class (while also being the smallest).
Bangalore, as I’ve said, is the SF of India. Mumbai, the financial capital, is most expats’ top city. It has the best nightlife, amazing food, the best houses and Bollywood. If you go, it’s worth seeing Dharavi, the world’s largest slum with around 1 million people. Dharavi, perhaps surprisingly, has a bustling $1bn mini-economy with thousands of micro-enterprises that supply the rest of the city snacks and leather (unofficially). Adani is redeveloping Dharavi, which is a major controversy. Many residents I met prefer their current setup to the high-rise apartments they are promised if the redevelopment goes forward. It’s an interesting case of progress clashing with community voice.
If I lived in India long term I would probably pick Bangalore or Delhi. I enjoyed the openness of the tech scene in Bangalore and a few of my closest friends in India live there. Delhi had the largest concentration of interesting writers and internationally-oriented thinkers, was full of gossip, and importantly, was the easiest to get around–you could simply do more activities in a given day.
Kolkata (Calcutta) and Chennai (Madras) are underrated for vastly different reasons. Calcutta, formerly the crown of the British empire, is on the economic decline. The state government was too communist for too long and business and young talent have fled. The city rests on the laurels of its cultural apex (count how long until a Cal resident reminds you of the poet Rabindranath Tagore), but even cultural production has shifted elsewhere. Yet the city has been lambasted so much it is now underrated. It is well-organised, not as crowded as India’s other metropolises, and the colonial architecture is beautiful and well-preserved. I highly recommend the INTACH heritage walk–you see the best sights, learn from very smart local historians about the city’s past, and also get a food tour (you can do INTACH walks all across India, which is also recommended).
Chennai on the other hand is on the economic rise. It’s one of the most important cities for IT and tech23 and is also the capital of Tamil Nadu, the most successful southern state for manufacturing. Go one hour west of Chennai and you’ll arrive at Sriperumbudur, the centre of India’s efforts to be the “+1” in “China+1” and home of Foxconn India’s biggest plant. In Sriperumbudur I spoke to a lot of manufacturing workers–most were from other parts of the country and had moved for opportunity. Indian inter-state migration is weak, but it’s not zero. Further west is the City of a Thousand Temples, Kanchipuram, which is especially known for its Vishnu temples. The city is one of the best places in India to see a slice of history preserved close to its original state.
On several dimensions, I found quality of life in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, the three places I spent the most time, was actually higher than in the US or UK. This is partly because labour-intensive services, like 10-minute delivery apps or having a personal cook, were more affordable due to the dollar’s purchasing power. India’s tier-1 cities also now have enough of an upper middle class to support a variety of restaurants, bars, concerts and clubs typical of global metropolises. If you’re in Mumbai, go to Bombay Canteen, one of my favourite restaurants in the world.
But the road of development is long. No city has a comprehensive metro system and pollution can get quite bad. Moreover, as Rohit Krishnan recently wrote, “life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations.” From playing chicken in peak traffic to haggling over prices, many parts of Indian society are in the uncooperative equilibrium of the prisoner’s dilemma, raising the costs of daily life. 60-90% of roads do not have names and the ones that do are often non-standard, so you always have to 1.5x the Google Maps time estimate for any trip. Sometimes the costs of noncooperation are deadly. By my former colleague Leo Mirani’s count, over 80 lives have been lost in stampedes at religious sites in the first half of 2025. That is more than in the recent terrorist attacks in Kashmir that nearly caused a war between India and Pakistan.
Content: I read (skimmed) many books about India. Here are some of the best. In non-fiction, I recommend Guha’s “India after Gandhi” for the classic post-independence history. I appreciated Vinay Sitapati’s dual biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, the two leaders who made the modern BJP, “Jugalbandi”. I enjoyed even more his biography of P.V. Narasimha Rao, the Congress leader who liberalised India as PM from 1991-96, “Half-Lion”. Rao in particular should be better-known globally. He is almost on par with Deng Xiaoping in history’s rankings for poverty reduction. The Congress Party, due to infighting, has unfortunately diminished his contributions.24
To understand corruption and crime in India, read “When Crime Pays” by Milan Vaishnav for an academic but still engaging treatment. In “Billionaire Raj”, James Crabtree, then the FT’s Mumbai Bureau Chief, gives you a look inside the business and political dealings of India’s biggest tycoons based on his five years reporting from Mumbai–it’s quite funny and engaging throughout. Josy Joseph’s “A Feast of Vultures” looks at the middlemen who grease the wheels of the business-politics nexus. It is a superstar work of investigative journalism.
For economics memoirs, I recommend Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s “Backstage” and Arvind Subramanian’s “Of Counsel”. Both take you inside the room of some of India’s most consequential economic policymaking periods–liberalisation in the 90s for Montek and Modi’s first term for Subramanian. For how India should approach the future, I suggest Karthik Muralidharan’s “Accelerating India’s Development” and Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba’s “Breaking the Mould”, both of which I reviewed. For fiction, check out Deepti Kapoor’s “Age of Vice.” It is gripping and useful context for those wondering about the culture of goondas, money and power politics. Finally, Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”, one of the great works of modern fiction.
Economic discourse in India primarily occurs in newspaper op-ed pages, including Mint, Business Standard, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Hindustan Times and The Hindu. The newsletter/podcast scene is less built out than China’s. But a few I enjoy include Milan Vaishnav’s Grand Tamasha, Shruthi Rajagopalan’s newsletter and podcast Ideas of India (I went on last May), Ajay Shah’s newsletter, Amit Varma’s podcast The Seen and Unseen, The Economist’s Essential India newsletter, Rohan Venkat’s India Inside Out, and Pranay Kotasthane’s Anticipating the Unintended (the Takshashila Institution is generally strong). Aaryaman Vir and Rahul Sanghi’s Tigerfeathers has deep dives into Indian tech. Marcellus Advisors also has great research notes.
India Link Weekly had an excellent weekly roundup of links but stopped publishing last year sadly. (Someone should restart this!)
The Indian diaspora (and why it's so successful): The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs, established 1950) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs, established 1961), are the exemplars of India’s historical focus on elite education. They are also major reasons why India produces a small slice of elite human capital that is disproportionately represented at the top of corporate and political America.
But to me the most interesting question is why Indian Americans seem to have outperformed other successful diasporas, especially Chinese Americans. To be clear I am specifically talking about the very top of the distribution i.e. CEOs, major politicians, etc. My grandfather, a retired IAS officer who negotiated arms deals with the Soviet Union and chaired the Bombay Stock Exchange, likes to say the British Empire left India with four gifts: the English language, parliamentary democracy, cricket and railroads. I think the first two, along with a long history of oral persuasion, explain a big part of Indian Americans’ success. In India, oral persuasion, in English, is necessary for success. In China, an exam-based culture where politics and business is conducted in Mandarin is less exportable to the American context.
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VII. An unexpected journey to The Economist
If you’ve read this far, thank you! Some friends asked what it was like to work for The Economist more generally, so here is a bit on that.
I never expected to become a journalist. In college, I thought financial markets were the best preparation for life as an economist–you need skin in the game to feel the macroeconomy, Taleb said. But it turned out the highest-Sharpe traders at Citadel found ways to avoid having to take views on the big longer-term questions. I also just didn’t have enough fun.
Writing on the other hand was the time of my life. I covered everything from venture capital and AI to Turkish inflation and Indian capitalism, reported from a dozen countries, and almost never had to wake up early. I loved my colleagues. My editors had accumulated decades of experience, with a taste for ideas and good prose I could only dream of. And they also had a gravitas and sense of purpose that inspired me. Though the world was at war with classical liberalism, the paper always stood by its principles.25
At the start I was a bad writer. My editor Patrick had me do one-hour writing exercises each morning. Generate a view on an issue of the day and pour out 500 crisp words in an hour. Focus on clear structure. Be concise. You can really only have one point. Two months in it was time for my first leader pitch. During leader meetings the entire London-based editorial staff crowds into a conference room with correspondents calling in from around the world. Pitches are a hybrid of academic seminar and mini-debate round. Make your case. Collect responses. Then rebut. Rinse and repeat. “Everything flows from the rubric”, Zanny, the editor-in-chief, told me after my pitch. I felt the clarity of thought.
Leader meetings epitomise the “hivemind” that makes the paper special. Turnover is remarkably low, and correspondents rotate beats frequently, so there is a deep pool of accumulated knowledge that surfaces in such discussions. The fact that the paper has no byline helps with this. Collaboration and mentorship are the norm. Everyone has a stake in their colleagues’ success. When I covered venture as an intern, there were four other people on staff who had previously been on the beat and could spot any holes in my reporting.
When I moved to India, I felt the stakes of my job were raised. There are so few foreign correspondents writing seriously about India, and even fewer about its economy. The Economist invests heavily in its international coverage. As a share of overall resources it’s conceivably at the top of all major papers. My sources from government, business and civil society knew this. I felt proud when both senior officials in the opposition party and the current government said they learned from my reporting, which was later cited multiple times in the Ministry of Finance’s annual Economic Survey.
Every year the day I looked forward to most was the annual Christmas party. Economist staff from around the world descended on the paper's London offices for an evening of booze, gossip and laughs complete with an in-house band and mixologist. I miss those late night conversations on the Adelphi roof dearly. The annual Christmas issue was also my favourite edition. Journalists spend months reporting quirky and wonky pieces that surprise and delight, from the economics of whaling and gay penguins in Central Park, to my own 2022 special on the ideologies of Silicon Valley (it was a more niche topic then).
A brief observation on business. A lot of the world is moving against traditional journalism these days. The internet is unbundling media consumption. AI threatens to be the perfect substitute. Yet I’m optimistic about the durability of the highest-quality writing (obviously I’m biased). Papers like The Economist have deep pools of tacit knowledge, relationships and connections that are difficult to replicate. Newsrooms pool risk across journalists enabling loftier, more ambitious projects. They also help writers specialise and collaborate. Journalism in general provides a trusted intermediary through which anonymous information can flow to the public. This third pillar is especially complementary to AI. AI will be adopted by everyone, so the residual alpha flows to that which is scarce–in this case, insights where private context is necessary.
News consumption will obviously change in the coming years. Short-form video is the latest most powerful new entrant. But for information billionaires, reading is still a lot more efficient than listening. Long live print.
VIII. Photos of underrated things
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I’m grateful to Neha Ramani for edits, Sparsh Agarwal, Hamish Birrell, Gopal Nadadur, Jasmine Sun, Zhengdong Wang, and Jason Zhao for comments, Patrick Foulis, Rachana Shanbhogue, Henry Curr and Zanny Minton Beddoes for framing my thinking on India and the world, Rachana, Patrick, Hamish and Jan Piotrowski for teaching me to write, Tom Easton for teaching me to observe the particular, my grandparents and Nihal Krishan for housing me, Arjun Soin and Sparsh for being my guides to India, and countless other friends and contacts for entrusting me with their stories.
See Vishnu Padmanabhan’s “A short history of India in eight maps” for a visual depiction.
M.K. Stalin was born four days before Joseph Stalin passed away. M.K. Stalin’s father, Karunanidhi admired the Soviet Union and reportedly attended a memorial for Joseph Stalin.
There are some signs of change. See Jeremy Paige’s reporting on the rise of the BJP in the south, led by the charismatic Annamalai.
A lot of this reflects differences in political structure. America has a winner-take-all and presidential system. India has a proportional representation and parliamentary system, both of which arguably reduce the power of individual leaders. That said, prime ministers are not term limited in India and many dictators throughout history have emerged from parliamentary systems.
India’s GDP per capita in PPP-adjusted terms was $1k in 1947 when it achieved independence. For comparison, the US was twice as rich per person in 1776 and ten times as rich in 1920 when women received the right to vote. See Figure 2 in Lambda and Subramanian (JEP 2020) for a quantitative illustration of India’s “precocious” democracy.
Speaking to a well-known businessman before the election, I asked if he had any insight into the results. He said: Well, of course. I have my people survey Phalodi Satta Bazar (an illegal gambling market in Rajasthan). Betting markets in everything!
That said, the Indian tycoon capitalism narrative might also be overblown. Critics of the Adani-Modi bromance concede that Adani executes. Same with Ambani. Perhaps Modi enforces sufficient discipline. Beyond the favoured few, the corporate sector is empirically deepening. Marcellus, an asset manager firm in Mumbai with especially thought-provoking research notes, has calculated that corporate concentration in India has actually been declining in the past five years. This has been driven by a huge increase in profitability for firms in the middle of the distribution. If this continues and is not just a blip in the data, that would represent a monumental shift towards a healthier Indian capitalism.
More recently, though, the relationship has cooled. Delhi was quite annoyed when Trump put India and Pakistan on the same level after the recent terrorist attacks and claimed credit for a ceasefire. Trump also seems to have become more transactional and goal-directed in his second term, putting in less effort to pursue an alliance with India.
For example: “This piece isn’t worth the electrons expended typing this tweet leave alone the paper the economist is printed on.” And even better: “It's good that you still have a job when you have such a poor understanding of India or RW/LW or Trump or Modi. One pays hushmoney to pornstar & the other one goes for a 3 day silent meditation at the end of campaign.” People love Modi!
Yes there’s a welfare state that Modi claims credit for, but that’s hardly unique among right-wing populists. Look at India’s budget deficit, especially during Covid, for evidence of the underlying fiscal conservatism in the BJP.
While outwardly secular, the Congress, like all Indian political parties, has been willing to participate in religious politics when expedient. The best example is the anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
The idea of a cohesive identifiable “new elite” is admittedly hand-wavy. In broad strokes, while business has generally supported Modi, he has much less support among academia and journalists.
Nehru clearly grappled with the relationship between religion and state in his magnum opus “Discovery of India” (its 600 pages were amazingly written by hand while in prison over five months). He viewed secularism as a way to temper the communalism of both the Hindu majority and minority religious groups. In my view, despite periodic outbreaks of communal violence and the recent worsening of Hindu-Muslim tensions, the overall project of religious coexistence has done pretty well compared to other countries and should expand our sense of possibility.
Nor should it necessarily try. There are huge benefits to technological openness. Bangalore has the best tech ecosystem in Asia outside China. The state capacity required to pull off the Chinese balancing act is enormous, comes with great costs, and it’s far from clear it can be repeated.
Read Josy Joseph for a much more thorough account of the middlemen who thrive off the business-politics-crime nexus.
The countercase is that AI will address expertise deficits. Shortage of doctors? AI is a pretty good alternative! I’m sure this will help. Yet as with MOOCs and the internet, the binding constraint in poor countries is neither information nor intelligence. It is high-agency humans who can barrel through bureaucracy and get stuff done.
India was quite friendly with the Soviet Union during the first Cold War but led a bloc of non-aligned nations. In recent decades it has gotten closer to the West, but many Western analysts have extrapolated this shift too far. S. Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, has written entire books explaining his country’s realpolitik plainly. (Insiders will tell you that Aji Doval, the National Security Adviser, is the real mastermind behind strategic autonomy).
The easiest way to visualise India’s lopsided governance is with many India-watchers’ favourite chart by Devesh Kapur (see figure 2). There are historical roots. B.R. Ambedkar, a leader in the independence movement (with doctorates in economics from both Columbia and LSE!) was born a Dalit (an untouchable, or lowest caste). He did not trust local leaders to treat low-caste Indians well: “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and communalism?” he famously said. And so the Indian state was set up with little power delegated to localities.
There is much debate on what the true growth rate is given the difficulty of inflation adjustment in a highly informal economy. I weighed in on the great GDP growth rate controversy last year.
Nearly every demographic group’s support for the BJP increased substantially over the 2000s. Muslims are one of the only groups that barely budged, sticking around 7%.
Since the 90s, India has had reservation laws that mandate one-third of local Village Council leadership positions are held by women. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo have a famous paper showing that female village leadership does have causal effects on the types of public goods investments made by the village. This suggests that female leaders retain some influence even when their husbands take on an external leadership role. The show Panchayat aligns with this.
I also visited Gurgaon (Delhi’s sister city, which shows the power of SEZs), Ahmedabad (which is remarkably clean and law-abiding), Lucknow (great but empty metro, reasonably-well governed, Yogi & Akhilesh Yadav both deserve credit), Jaipur and Udaipur (remarkable architecture, great literature festivals), Baroda (home of Laxmi Vilas Palace), Lonavala (overrated imo), Darjeeling (do go to Selim Hill Tea Garden, and try out Dorje Teas), but I’ll save those for another time. I regret not visiting many places, but most of all Surat and Bhubaneshwar (for their governance), Kashmir (for its beauty), many parts of the Northeast including Assam and Manipur (for the independent spirit), and Amritsar (for the Golden Temple).
But while Chennai has some of India’s most successful tech startups including Zoho and Freshworks, my guess is that it is too culturally conservative as a city to compete for young talent with the likes of Bangalore and Hyderabad. I could be wrong.
Sitapati notes that Sonia Gandhi, the wife of the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who was assassinated in 1991, felt that Rao, rather than acting as a stand-in for the Nehru-Gandhi family, wanted to move Congress beyond the family dynasty. After 1996 when Rao lost power, he was cast aside.
It is noteworthy that the paper’s constitution disallows a single entity from having majority ownership.
Great! I think elections bribes as a phenomenon is now limited to Poor regions of UP and Bihar and coming down fast. Even if some handouts happen because of the past culture of it, people no longer vote on the basis of it. They just take stuff from whoever is willing to give with no strings attached and vote whomever they want. The read deal in elections throughout India today is caste. People lobby for their caste man to get election ticket and vote for him. Parties give tickets based on which caste has majority in constituency. This is probably one thing that's uniform across all of India today. They only feel represented(and proud) when their caste comrade is MP/MLA. But this too is changing, albeit slowly because rural middle class size is expanding and more people are learning about all the benefits, schemes, their rights etc.
This is from my first hand experience growing up in rural gujarat, also a poorer region (eastern Kutch)that got richer in last decade.
Great stuff!