Outside-the-box thinking

India has, seemingly and finally, embarked on her late, late industrial revolution. This has occurred more than two centuries after Britain launched hers, and a century after Japan commenced the industrialization process. She is several decades behind Japan, South Korea, and China, three other important Asian economies, in this industrializing and economic growth catch-up process. But it is better to have commenced the process now than never to have commenced it at all. In every decade, an ideal business and economic model is proclaimed and held up as exemplary. Thus, the central planning model of Soviet industrialization and the American New Deal in the 1930s, the indicative planning model of the French variety in the 1960s, the German co-determination model in the 1970s, and the Japanese kanban system of the 1980s were given approbation. South Korea’s late industrialization model was the exemplar of the 1990s, and the Chinese model of the 2000s was to be the workshop of the world. Can India’s model of a late, late industrial revolution define the contours of business and economic discourse in the 2010s and beyond?

The answer to this question depends very much on India’s entrepreneurs. In this respect, my niece Dr. Aindri Raychaudhuri, popularly known as Mikku, who is a very successful young infertility specialist in Calcutta, described an interesting entrepreneurship case to me. Now renamed Kolkata, it was once Rudyard Kipling’s “city of dreadful night.” For many now, Calcutta is the city of joy. It was then, and it still is now, one of India’s largest and most vibrant cities. It has also emerged as the medical hub for eastern India. Mikku runs one of Calcutta’s thriving in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics. An IVF baby is a test-tube baby, and an IVF therapy program is used for couples who have not been able to conceive naturally. In Western societies, many couples engaged in same-sex relationships or marriages also use IVF to start a family of their own, since the natural processes of human biological reproduction are denied to them. The Calcutta IVF market may be somewhat socially different from that of the West at this point.