India Booming

Read about the percolation of the booming economy to smaller towns of India...

India's smaller cities are booming

India's Small Cities Transforming Rapidly
'India's Boom Spreads to Smaller Cities' (NYT article referenced here)
Small cities account for 65% of PC sales

Great sign, IMO. This is critical for India as a whole to move ahead and not just the top-4/5 cities. Perhaps it was inevitable and a matter of time..but the first 10 years all we heard about was the progress in cities like Bangalore, Bbay, Chennai and to some extent Hydbad & Pune...now it is the time for Lucknow, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Bhopal, Indore, and so on so forth...

If a general up-beat attitude about India's future was the overwhelming theme I felt around me (media, paper, talking to people) during my visit to India in 1998, this time, albeit a very short visit, I felt the focus has turned (aside from the short-term (irrational?) exuberance around the Sensex touching 10,000), to the booming small towns of India. Multinationals as well as local companies, fatigued with lack of infrastructure (and its not keeping pace with development in other areas) in the bigger metropolitan cities, are moving to small towns - not merely as a large market for their wares but also as a base for their operations. Attitude-wise, opportunity-wise, it is the time for the people in the traditionally deemed B-towns and C-towns, sotospeak.

Ofcourse, it is all relative... one cannot make the fallacy of comparing this with B-towns in the US. Compare it with what they had 10 years back..and imagine what it will be like for them 10 years from now. No 20-year period since independence saw such a change...it is like we were stuck in a rut and have now suddenly freed ourself..and for that..we should celebrate it as a great sign of progress...though moving around in Bombay or Pune and looking around with 'foreign' eyes, it is tough to see where there is progress, in a western world sense. The lack of infrastructure and the teeming millions who live in what can only be called as abject poverty is too striking to sometimes see through to see signs of progress.

Also, while in India, I saw (though didnt get to read) a recent India Today issue (with Dhoni and some other celebs from smaller towns of India on its cover), which celebrated the small-town attitude and power...

Also read: India, the most optimistic nation
Consumer confidence: India leads the way, again