Restart

Restart tells the story of India’s almost-leadership of the world’s economy, showing why and how it instead succumbed to problems from the past, how those problems still hold it back today, and what the country might do about them.

If you’ve been to a major Indian city, you know that traffic jams are no joke. In Delhi, even with a new bridge meant to ease traffic, the bumper-to-bumper traffic persists. Why? Because city planners built the original road knowing that it wouldn’t be big enough.

It might sound crazy, but it’s true. So why did they go forward with it? Because in Indian culture, things that are bigger and complex are often seen as a waste of time and resources. India was used to shortages; having too much is generally frowned upon.

This mindset is also rooted in Gandhi, the influential Indian leader. He was known to travel only in third-class train carriages.

This way of thinking has had devastating consequences for the economy. For instance, it’s tough for manufacturers to get their orders out on time because of the insufficient infrastructure. A truck driver spends only about 40 percent of his time driving and the other 60 percent waiting in traffic and lines for tax checkpoints.

All of this wasted time coats manufacturer’s money. Crazy enough, it is actually cheaper to send something from Bangalore, India, to Hyderabad by sending it to Europe first, then Hyderabad.

In wealthy countries, people end to think countries with weaker economies need a larger workforce. But with a population of 1.3 billion, there is obviously no shortage of potential workers.

One of the problems for the Indian economy is that there aren’t enough farmers anymore. With shrinking farms and higher production costs, the wages are so low that no one wants to get into farming anymore. The available farmland is only half of what it was in 1970.

And while half of all employed people in India are working on farms, it only accounts for 15 percent of its GDP

Overall, these smaller farms don’t produce as much, meaning the farmers don’t make as much.

The people who don’t want to work on farms often look for factory jobs. But unfortunately, these are hard to come by. Most factories want to keep as few employees as possible.

Why? It is because of government regulations. Making it almost impossible to fire employees. So, if employers get unproductive employees, they can’t replace them with better ones.

Government inspectors target companies that have more than 99 employees. If they don’t receive any bribe money, they will report them even for the smallest violations.