Young India
India is the world's youngest country. Fifty percent of India's people are under the age of twenty - five. By 2015, there will be 550 million teenagers in India. Long after the populations of Europe, the United States, and even China have grown old, India will still be a young country, with no labor shortages and no lack of customers. India's information-technology industry and its role as a global services provider have given the country a boost. Manufacturing is booming in India, while its real economic engine, retail spending, is just beginning to warm up. Buoyed by strong economic growth and a new smorgasbord of consumer goods and entertainment options, India's youth is filled with fresh confidence, fueled by high expectations. They believe the future belongs to them.
The nation has been swept by a can-do spirit that has set India's imagination on fire. A slogan from low - cost Air Deccan, one of several new private airlines in India, certainly fits the mood : "Every time we take off, the whole economy looks up."
Gopal is a forty-eight-year-old taxi driver in Bangalore. He is very proud of his daughter, seventeen, who is a star student. He wants her to get a job in Bangalore's information-technology industry. He's been driving for a living for more than twenty years. He owns the car, which he drives six days a week, up to twelve hours per day to make a living. "What do you think about India's future?" I ask him on our third day together. "Very fine. India is going to be number one." He turns his head, breaking into a broad smile and scaring the hell out of me because he's no longer looking at the crowded road.
Durgavati Upadhyay, a nineteen-year-old college student in Bombay, tells me, "You see, America is coming down whereas India is moving up. You people will not like it. But it is there," she says, cocking her head in a move that is at once demure and defiant. She lives in one of Bombay's slums. Her father, a taxi driver, supported her desire to go to college over her mother's objections.
Bhavesh Bavishi sells auto parts in Akola, Maharashtra. The thirty-five-year-old husband and father says, "India is coming up. You can see it. We feel very proud. We have done very well. My son, he will do even better." His extended family all around nod their heads.
Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of leading Indian information-technology company Infosys, tells me in his office in Bangalore, "People are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Finally, we are going to break out of this trap. There's a sense that our future can be better for our children than for us. That has put us into problem solving mode."
Nilekani is a legendary figure in India's technology boom and an international celebrity thanks to his acknowledged role in giving Tom Friedman the idea for his blockbuster book The World Is Flat. Nilekani positively lights up when he begins talking about his company: "Infosys is symbolic of this moment of possibility for India. We have sixty-six thousand employees and the average age is twenty seven. It's about building a global brand. It's about achieving on merit. It's a company about the future, and not about the past."