>We do not have enough respect for our Indian consumers.
This is clearly visible. You can take any area of business and you would find bad customer service everywhere. The very few cases where customers are being treated a bit better would fall into one of 2 categories:
1. The company is a foreign multinational.
2. The company is Indian, operating in an area of business which has foreign multinational competition.
Any field which does not have foreign players has businesses sitting on their asses, treating customers like crap and not innovating at all.
A big example is supermarkets. Big bazar, Reliance, More, etc are all homegrown supermarkets but they offer little over regular mom and pop stores or medium sized local supermarkets. Their prices are not significantly low. The service is crap. They suck up more of your time because they don't have enough cashiers. They refuse to innovate by introducing self-checkouts. Nothing. It is as if they are waiting for someone like walmart to swoop in and capture all the market and teach them how it's done.
> Access to higher education in India is available only in English ... this creates a general differentiation, an unwritten apartheid.
I couldn't agree more. Have always felt this without being able to fully articulate what it was until now.
I've always felt having so many languages has hurt India more. I can validate that Chinese people in the west can still think about heading back to China and living in a place like Shanghai, without causing a dent to their standard of living or salary expectations. It's nowhere near true for Indian expats. At least not yet. I would argue (but can't confirm) this was part of the reason why Punit Soni went back to US (https://www.linkedin.com/in/punitsoni).
Well, he was politely 'fired' for going gung-ho on the stupid idea of mobile only frontend for Flipkart. All the senior people who championed the idea have been silently moved out (founder included), but in a way so that none suffers an obvious loss of face.
"I've always felt having so many languages has hurt India more." - why?
Many languages are dying in India and that's just sad - every language lost erodes identities, stories, and diversity.
However, more and more people are moving to 'link languages' like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali etc. The challenge is to ensure all local language users are treated equal in India
> very language lost erodes identities, stories, and diversity.
But they're lost because they've outlived their usefulness. Language is about communication. A language with which you can only communicate with a tiny minority of the humans on the planet is nowhere near as useful as a global one.
I'm not sure how I feel about linguists and historians who want to preserve a language in place. This gives them joy, but handicaps the children who have to allocate limited resources to learning a language that is pretty much useless outside of their villages or districts. You basically handicap children who were already born into poverty just so you can say you preserved a language.
You're not wrong about the economic utility of certain languages. However, every language lost is a tragedy. This obituary explains it better than I could.
Making changes of this scale takes time, and it takes a unified will to make change. The hardest thing in the world is to say "25 years from now, if we do all these things, this will be greatly improved." It is made hard because people cannot easily see slow change, and they often are unwilling to wait so long for change. Making the change instant is very expensive and also hard to pull off.
Imagine some group that could decide to take about 15,000 hectare of land and decide to build a city[1], from the ground up, with current building standards and codes. They would have to start with a way to power the city. So building infrastructure to bring fuel to power plants and assuming a modern city of 2 million souls, call it 1.5GW of reliable power (so closer to 2GW of capacity so that plants can be off line for maintenance and you still have power). You'll also need to develop a water source, and water treatment facility. You can go the Israeli route and desalinate water for this city (constrains locations) or pump it to it (adds to the power budget). At this point it would be easiest to add a subway system (you can do it by digging trenches and then covering them up, easier than boring tunnels under existing buildings) which means you also have to have some of the basics of what your city is going to look like laid out, residential areas, industrial areas, high tech areas etc. Since you have the benefit of looking at problems in other cities, you focus on making travel within the city as "car free" as possible so that individuals can either walk or take transit. You maximize people space. Now you build an airport, something which can handle both cargo and passenger traffic at the same time. To start bringing in people and materials while the rail system and a connection to the highway system is built.
Anyway, you can follow this along and realize you'll probably need a couple of trillion dollars worth of GDP to go from bare ground to "modern" city, and it will still take years. There are examples you can look at in China of cities built from the ground up. There are probably things you can learn from that. Someone more logistically astute than I am could come up with a "molting" approach where you first cover the area with tents, then as you build things you remove the previous layer and replace it with a more improved layer. You might be able to go through several re-development cycles to get to the final product.
Or you can try to take an existing place and go over it from the ground up and make it into something awesome. That latter path takes a lot longer, decades.
[1] That is a bit more land than is available in San Francisco
This so easily glosses over the linguistic apartheid in India (other African countries incl.), that it's shocking. See my previous interactions with the WASP imitations; I gather there are enough of them in India to form markets as large as Japan (oth. unicorns like Flipkart wouldn't survive).
A language without economic value dies eventually. It's likely that the complement of the set is poor enough to not be of consequence (India's median income is the lowest of the BRICS - ~ $600 per-capita).
India: you have bigger problems than the efficient milking of the population - you need to feed the cow first. Irony of ironies, the country is apparently a "socialist republic". It'd be interesting to know about the kind of "intellectuals" sucking off of the Indian state's (imaginably fat) tits - Chomsky mentions somewhere how post-modernism (the new religion in the humanities), rids a population of desperately needed leaders.
Others: No India is not going to beat China economically, nor will Africa. The former will probably produce enough clones and ship them your way for cheap (profit!); the latter will continue in ignominy as its land gets stolen from underneath.
The thing is - every state in India has its own language, more-or-less. Either you can translate into every single language at extreme cost, or you can use either Hindi or English. Of the two, English is likely slightly wider-spoken these days.
India doesn't have a language which you can be guaranteed nearly everyone will speak. English is the closest thing for the classes that are being targeted for ecommerce.
Aside from that... looking at your comment history, you seem to really hate India. Any particular reason?
While you are correct, those states are not small.
The number of native speakers for top five major languages as of 2001 are:
Hindi (and dialects) 422 mil
Bengali 83 mil
Telugu 74 mil
Marathi 72 mil
Tamil 61 mil
These are not insignificant populations. If you add in Bengali speakers in Bangladesh, the total hits 189 mil.
It's easier to think of India the way you think of EU: an aggregation of peoples and cultures under a political umbrella. As an example, sure many people in germany speak english, but would you really try to seriously gain entry into the german market without localizing into german?
This is of course true. But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.
In Maharashtra, virtually every middle class person speaks English and Hindi in addition to Marathi. Auto drivers or street vendors will speak only Hindi and Marathi. Of the people I've encountered who don't speak Hindi, most were cooks/maids/similar.
A peripherally related question: is it worth translating your software into Dutch? 90% of the Netherlands speaks English and by having English you've also covered the UK. So it's probably not worth it.
Now lets compare the Netherlands to Maharashtra. The GDP of the Netherlands is $850B (16M people). The GDP of Maharashtra is about $400B (for 110M people). Half that GDP is just Mumbai (about 20M people) and Mumbai is disproportionately a place where English and Hindi work well.
If you are very forward thinking (10+ years), it might be worthwhile gambling that gaining a foothold in regional languages today might pay off when those regions grow. But that's a very long play.
I get by with English and broken Hinglish in Pune and Mumbai. Those are the cities with internet and money. That wouldn't work so well in smaller cities, but those are also not the places I'd target if I were building a business.
As for the south, in my limited experience the same is true. English works fine in Bangalore if you restrict your conversations to upper middle class people with good internet and money to spend.
> But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.
About a 100M people in India know English out of a population of 1.3 Billion. It is only the MNC service sector wherein know-english-have-money holds true. The larger chunk of India's income is generated by people who do not know English or Hindi(~800 Million people fall into this bucket).
And yet if you could enter Germany with the same marketing you give to the UK... wouldn't you?
There's a lot of markets which get left out when a company expands to "the EU" - which often means Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and maybe one or two other countries.
As someone who studies culture (as you can tell), my hate is reserved for the neo-colonial entities and the bourgeoisie they cultivate to stay in power. If you call such entities by the names the kakistocracies christen, then yes, I hate most states in the global south.
India, like China, however was a historic center (天竺 - heaven axis they called it) unlike most in the global south. To see it brought to the same level as sub-saharan Africa is painful; to realize there are deep structural issues that will keep it that way is even more so. Hate, yes, for the fat maggots feeding on the dying corpses - but that too is a distraction, for it's not the maggots' fault.
Rhetorical devices of the form "ah, but that's the our only way towards progress", will not be answered to. I'm tired of worn narrative, you lot bombard me with.
Focusing on 'Culture' is blinding you to what's going on. Tribal cultures are inherently economically inferior due to scaling issues. Western culture is not the only way forward, but the limitation is not the specific ideas, but rather the level of organizational structure.
Stable and mature underground economy's for example operate based on reputation not just tribe. As allegiance to even arbitrary tribes (crips vs bloods) limits commerce. Nation states are arbitrary and transitory, however when larger groups of people limit us vs. them to those outside the nation the internal economy's has fewer self imposed barriers.
PS: China demonstrates other failure points, but as a very non western culture they still show the same trends.
Hasn't India always been like that though, with the caste system? Nobody writes epics about the person who dug Arjuna's toilets, and so we see the past through rose-coloured lenses.
Nobody has written epics about anyone digging someone else's toilets as far as I know. This is not unique to the Mahabharatha or other Indian epics.
As for the caste system, yes, it has had a lot of evils. But then almost all populations around the world have some notion of "class" that is loosely defined, with its own set of evils. I fail to see how this is unique to India, see for instance the topic of ghettos in medieval history.
In modern times, the "class" is usually based on financial wealth.
Furthermore, in the sense of classification based on profession (the idealistic interpretation of caste), this certainly exists across the world (merchant guilds, high concentrations of a single occupation like Harley St, London, etc).
Finally, as for viewing the past through rose-coloured lenses, every historian has his/her own set of biases in terms of coverage and emphasis. There are some who are honest about the reality of this, such as Howard Zinn who mentions it in his preface to "A People's History of the United States", but many delude themselves into thinking that they somehow are magically "unbiased".
With respect to works of fiction, the same applies. In the case of Tolkien, the treatment of the orcs is an example, we never see an orc perspective or pov. In the case of the Song of Ice and Fire, there is arguably little treatment of the common population. Military engagements are reduced to the standard historical style focusing on the leaders and "important" entities involved. As for the Mahabharatha, similar issues arise. Nevertheless, it has a surprising amount of depth and complexity in many respects (e.g morally grey characters and a bittersweet ending).
America, for all its deficiencies, does not expect its citizens to be loyal to a foreign culture or language, in order to come up in life. Some idiot being elected to the throne is not going to change the U.S, nor will it change the fact that US's GDP per-capita is about 25-30x that of India.
> India: you have bigger problems than the efficient milking of the population - you need to feed the cow first.
Absolutely disagree. Some data-points in this regard:
- Rural FMCG share is already greater than Urban.
- While rural markets grew by 16%, urban did 12%.
- For many like Dabur India, 50 per cent of their domestic sales comes from rural markets.
> No India is not going to beat China economically, nor will Africa.
I wonder why you'd think that monetisation via Internet is the only thing that adds value to a society. In developing nations, Internet trickles democracy down like nothing else. The kind of equality and voice that the Internet gives, is especially required for people who don't have a high SEC category.
Another important pillar of long term economic growth to a nation is- productivity growth. Internet inclusion drives that.
India a socialist republic? I'm not sure where you're getting that from. Sure, there's tons of subsidies for the poor, but that's necessary in a country as large and poor as India.
Re: language. There's plenty of strong linguistic identity in the south, East and West of India. The north has a weaker cultural identity, but the rest take great pride in their language and culture.
There might not be many online local languages business sites but when you have to do purchase offline it done through local languages. Some of them don't have written written script yet spoken daily by millions.
> linguistic apartheid in India (other African countries incl.)
You appear to be a reasonably educated person, so I guess your use of the word 'other' above is a kind of oversight (because last that I knew, India was in Asia, and not in Africa).
> you need to feed the cow first...
I am sure the government - and all the citizens - of India will forever remain indebted to you for generously contributing and sharing this piece of infinite wisdom - whoever could have even thought of this otherwise?
Hmm. In India, education, laws, governance, pretty much every sphere of power, last I looked, is run in English, for the English (vestiges).
China, like most nations, may aspire towards Western nations, but K-pop/Internet/TV inspired fads are no match for such awesome structures enforces under the threat of violence.
As outsiders, it's likely to be difficult to appreciate this - I recommend Naipaul (although he tends to believe colonization was some godsend).
Here are some counter examples to the cynical uproar, I have specifically chosen examples of entrepreneurship born in India (against ones re-imported from the US and elsewhere)
Successful companies that created products for the local market. All examples are from TamilNadu a southern Indian state. More such examples exist all over India. Such examples are not possible without having consumer interest at heart, Indian companies not respecting consumer interest is a myth in my opinion.
Yes, the Unilevers and the P&Gs of the world did a great job at understanding India and customizing their products. (And then Baba Ramdev came along with Patanjali!)
Incidentally was on a call with the CEO of Scripbox today who mentioned that he had to innovate his KYC/documentation process for the Indian market as people wanted the convenience of having it picked up vs. couriering it themselves.
However, getting back to the point - very few companies other than the FMCG space cater to non-English speaking/ local language users in India. Localization is key to India, but for some reason largely overlooked as of now.
Great picks. But notice how these are specifically in the FMCG domain. ParleG- an 8 cent biscuit out of India is the world's highest selling biscuit.
The article IMHO talks more of the mainstream digital Internet businesses which largely ignore the 200M non-english speaking people on the "Indian Internet".
Can't agree with you more! One Dr. Kalbag, a man I respected a lot but couldn't meet, created a curriculum for school dropouts. His school in the Pabal Village in Maharashtra showed what the genius in school drops could produce. The local manufacturing in India is massive. I do not agree with those who say India is a service economy only. However, the last of literature and knowledge in local languages limits many such genius.
India has 462M people who can access internet at home, among 1326M inhabitants. That is a less lot than what one would think at first.
Given that most companies reading HN are americans and some europeans. That brings the question of should we bother for the Indian market (early or at all)?
Cultural barriers + Language issues and translations + TimeZone + A market which may not be that big and be fragmented or inaccessible
The page I gave is for July 2016. It states that a "user" is someone who have access internet at home, at anytime of the day. No matter what device is used.
Your page is old and complaining that the number of 485M given in 2012-2013 was overinflated. That seems about right given that the last numbers are still a bit under that by now.
On a different topic. Ut looks like only 10-20% of connections are wired (e.g. broadband). The rest is wireless (probably mobile data)
That seems important to know if going for that market. (red: target phone, bad bandwidth, bad latency.)
Those numbers would grow as most users move to smart phones. Mobile would be their Internet enabled device.English would still be common language. Millions are using WhatsApp typing in Hinglish, kannglish etc(typing in local language kb is cumbersome)
Not quite - Swalekh is a local language + English keypad app with native and phonetic modes. You can type a Kannada word in English and have it translated to Kannada script. It also ensures you don't mis-spell and has a low footprint on mobile phones.
True. And that may be the reason the Indian digital space never took off - cause we had the luxury of that tiny market. In China, and elsewhere, markets in various services took off because they spoke Chinese, and that's likely in India as well.It's already happened in TV, in print, on Radio - even MTV speaks "Indian" :)
That was a painful read. The thoughts that I have in my mind everyday looking at the infrastructure while I ride my motorbike are just spilled everywhere in this article.
The problems are mainly with people electing poor leaders. We cannot become a first world country with a third world leadership such as the one we have now.
Our leaders are busy causing communal riots using stupid cows and caste systems , there is no way they are going to magically start working for the country. The Parliament is filled with 70% rapists and murderers. How will they work for the people.
Delhi seems to be doing good and the only hope I have is on that state. They are one of the smallest states but have the highest investing education among all states. That's the way to go. Nothing else will cure all this non sense going on.
Yeah His ways are looking silly but the amount of opposition they get from the central govt and how they perform against it is far far impressive. Let's all agree that we know what is going on and not pretend like there is no malicious intent from centre.
A lot of people in India can write in Hindi or English, but not the local language. They don't bother to learn how. For example my fiancée is a native Telugu speaker but she can't write a word in it. There's also a very significant amount of people who can't read or write in any language. It would make using the Internet very difficult.
Hindi is a local language. Those who can't write/read their own mother tongue are the product of the aforementioned linguistic apartheid where the city bred kids (I am one) attend a CBSE/ICSE curriculum that actively discourage non-Hindi/English languages.
Linguistic apartheid is a pretty loaded term, they aren't teaching one's mother tongue, which, to me is like any other subject. You can still learn it elsewhere.
It may be discrimination but apartheid is an exaggeration.
> Those who can't write/read their own mother tongue are the product of the aforementioned linguistic apartheid
You have two options:
a. Teach them a language they can use almost anywhere on the planet. A language that documents most of the planets knowledge.
b. Teach them a language they can use in their geographical district and almost nowhere else.
The powers that they'd be better served by (a). You might think (b) would have been a better choice, but implying that (a) is akin to apartheid is ridiculous.
If I'm forced to use the word "apartheid" to label one of those, I'd point to (b). To teach the poor of india a language that handicaps them compared to humans of the planet who take path (a) is to limit their opportunities and keep them "in their place" in their little geographic corner of the world.
I can see this argument coming from someone who is privileged enough to move outside their ancestral domicile.
Most people, even those born in the richest country in the world, seldom move outside their state.
If I were to be treated like a second class citizen in my own place of birth because some languages give a small percentage of the population "world mobility", I would choose carefully.
With very low per capita income in India I think language issue is secondary. Even if customer service were better and native languages supported on internet based startups there would not be much opportunities or growth. To put things in perspective it is 5-7% of top income people who come under 'middle class' in India.
Startups in India are mostly rich kids hanging out with other rich kids and thinking wow seems like there are so many people like us who needs online commerce and services and so must be great business opportunity.
I agree customer service and infrastructure is in very bad shape but one thing many would not like to talk or admit is 95% of population is simply not in any state to pay even very little for better infrastructure. E.g Indians whine about poor telecom services while average revenue per user is like $2 per month. So it is quite unlikely to upgrade infrastructure / services to decent level.
Any infrastructure which once made available, accessible to all without price discrimination will remain in bad shape for very long time.
"With very low per capita income in India I think language issue is secondary"
Flip that around for a while. If the language issue was made primary, you could literally speak any language and have access to quality education and higher-paying jobs.
How would you make it primary? It would take a lot more resources to have services in multiple languages and resource are the big issue in first place.
From the article you linked:
> Apart from the language issue, the inability to apply knowledge to concepts is another reason why students fail.
I know it would be speculation but I think these kids were already below average when admitted.
The comments and debates are overwhelming. I do not disagree with the debates about teaching English and Hindi as a wider languages than one's mother tongue that limits one to their village or community. But, English is also a choice. With the choice being there, we still have many literates "not" in English. More than half kids who join schools, drop out before they complete primary education and yet, they are literate. If they study in English only, they do not reach a stage where they can be comfortable with the language. Whereas, if they are literate in their mother tongue, they read for the rest of their lives. They read newspapers, magazines and also sources that can satisfy their curiosity with knowledge. Language does help in trade. But, knowledge helps in creation. Innovators usually do not get limited by language but can easily get limited by lack of access to knowledge. Most non English countries (Japan, Russia, China, Germany, Taiwan and many others) do not have anything much in English and yet, do business with the rest of the world.
Very interesting article, thank you... Gandhi used to say: "To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them" [1], because "We ignorantly adhere to their cast-off systems" based on education and status.
That's so true. I am happy to see businessmen and businesswomen that are really starting to grasp the concept, without naming it.
See, homo economicuses don't care whether cultures or languages die; you can see this in the above "translation is not economically feasible .." sermons. While that may indeed be true, the thing though is that with such deep linguistic apartheid, the market and purchasing power in India will essentially be limited to the colonial class - with a mass of underlings bearing the currency and its inflationary forces.
Once the regime inflates itself out of existence for the sake of all those suckling on taxes, revolution comes and all the nuts the squirrel accumulates now will flee him. Like Mao's murdering mobs, that can bring great destruction.
The horizon of the homo economicus, I fear, is not quite as far ahead as some of us, nor is the French revolution as far behind.
It is what I learnt. They didn't really teach me. I may have got stuff wrong too. But, we have all sorts of cases with China. We have pretty bad products that do not last and we also have some of the best ones. Apple phones that the world trusts so much is manufactured in China. But, regardless of the manufacturing, the digital medium where quality is not usually shrouded by looks, China has created examples in India by overtaking some of the established Indian businesses.
This is clearly visible. You can take any area of business and you would find bad customer service everywhere. The very few cases where customers are being treated a bit better would fall into one of 2 categories:
1. The company is a foreign multinational.
2. The company is Indian, operating in an area of business which has foreign multinational competition.
Any field which does not have foreign players has businesses sitting on their asses, treating customers like crap and not innovating at all.
A big example is supermarkets. Big bazar, Reliance, More, etc are all homegrown supermarkets but they offer little over regular mom and pop stores or medium sized local supermarkets. Their prices are not significantly low. The service is crap. They suck up more of your time because they don't have enough cashiers. They refuse to innovate by introducing self-checkouts. Nothing. It is as if they are waiting for someone like walmart to swoop in and capture all the market and teach them how it's done.