The advantage.

Makers.

Money.

Mood.

As I write this, on the 21st of April, 2023, the newspaper headline shouts that India has surpassed China as the most populous country in the world. A deeper read reveals that around 68% of people living here are under the age of 64.

Think about it for a second. We have a productive population that is 100X the entire population of most countries.

To feed a people this large, there simply needs to be ample 'work' for everyone to earn a living and grow individually and societally. Simply put, the number is so huge that the government or foreign enterprises setting up offices in India will not solve the unemployment problem.

Job creation at this scale has never been achieved by any government or organisation. The only way for India to find work is to Make goods and services, for themselves and the world.

Makers will be created not due to passion or inclinations. But due to necessity.

So why has this not happened until now? It's not like India's population suddenly turned younger.

The reason is a complicated mixture of policy making, unfortunate priority setting by governments and businesses and most importantly, access to capital. These three are the overarching reasons for the failure to become the 'factory of the world', and we can go on and on about it.

Talking about Money,

Post liberalisation in 1991, we started getting a taste of what our potential really is. Turning from the shy kid around the block to the teenage kid who could play reasonably well got India a place on the team. Slowly but steadily, for a painful phase of 25 years, we started dropping the weights that pulled us back due to ancient laws and systems, and started walking more freely.

It's 2023 and today the problems of middle class India is not to just earn to feed your family, but to up-skill, use technology to build products, manufacture with more precision and feed the world what it asks for.

Today's India is able to focus on new age problems because of availability of capital. This new Money is the result of accumulation which 25 years of groundwork made possible. Both, on an institutional and individual level. It took time, but we are relatively more freer to pursue 'making' and not just 'servicing'.

And the last advantage that encapsulates general direction and energy of a nation can be summed by our collective Mood.

We are in a Mood to make.

Historically, during the 'boring' laying of groundwork of new policies at a governance and corporate level, a general consensus was of pessimism and inertia. More because of the lack of action or knowledge of action in different fields. With technology and access to information on the fingertips of everyone in the country, the Mood has begun to shift towards optimism and action.

India today believes that the future is ours. The collective Mood is set as the sleeping elephant is awake and gaining momentum.

The advantages are huge.

Policy, Markets, Finance, Technology, Stability, Cost of Making, Access to International Markets, Youth and growing Supply Chains are all on our side.

It takes years to get such multidirectional support at the same time, for any economy. That, to me, is the biggest advantage for Indian businesses today.