The India I See

I grew up in Odisha, a state that is not typically featured in the stories about India's emergence. When I read about India's rise in international publications, or sit in rooms where investors and founders talk about the opportunity, the India they describe is recognizable but partial — mostly coastal, mostly metropolitan, mostly the India that already looks like somewhere a Western reader would expect to find growth.

There is another India that I see more clearly, because I grew up inside it.

The India of institutions being built

What I see most clearly is institution-building in slow motion. The kind of thing that does not make headlines because it is not dramatic — a district administration that has improved its land records and made them digitally accessible, a state education department that has figured out something that works for teacher retention, a municipal body that has managed to execute a water supply project without the typical cost overruns.

These things are happening. They are happening at greater velocity than they were a decade ago, and at greater scale than they were two decades ago. The institutions are not where they need to be — they are often not where they should be for a country with India's ambitions — but the direction of movement is real, and the people driving it are doing difficult work in difficult conditions with much less recognition than they deserve.

I am skeptical of both the enthusiasts who see India as uniformly rising and the critics who see it as perpetually dysfunctional. Both are describing something real. The question is about direction and velocity, and on those dimensions, the institution-building story — gradual, uneven, contested, real — is more important than either narrative acknowledges.

The India of ambition in unexpected places

I see ambition in the places people do not go looking for it.

A first-generation college student in a tier-3 city, working on a startup idea in the gap between his engineering degree and a software job, because he has absorbed the message that this is a moment when such things can happen. A woman in a semi-urban district building a logistics business serving the farmers around her, because the combination of smartphone access, payment infrastructure, and genuine demand has created an opening that did not exist ten years ago. A young engineer from a small town who went to a decent state college, got a job at a mid-tier tech company, and is now three years into building something genuinely useful for a market no one is paying attention to.

These people exist everywhere in India, in numbers that dwarf the visible startup ecosystem. Most of them will not build unicorns. But they are building something — businesses, skills, institutions, reputations — and they are doing it with a level of seriousness and sophistication that the systemic disadvantages they face make remarkable.

The India of accumulated losses

I also see the India of what did not happen — the accumulated weight of opportunities missed, investments not made, institutions that degraded rather than built.

The child in a government school who is in eighth grade and cannot read at a third-grade level — not because she lacks capability, but because a system that was supposed to develop that capability failed her. The small entrepreneur who could have scaled but couldn't because capital and markets were inaccessible in the form she needed them. The talent that left because the local environment did not have the density and support to make staying viable.

This is not a counsel of pessimism. It is honesty about what is at stake in the decisions being made now. India's development potential is extraordinary. Whether it is realized depends on choices being made in institutions at every level — schools, hospitals, infrastructure ministries, regulatory bodies — where the outcomes will take years to manifest and the feedback loops are slow enough that it is easy to defer the hard work.

What I actually believe

I believe India is becoming something important, and that the most important parts of that process are happening in places and among people who are not part of the visible story.

I believe the next two decades will produce more significant institution-building, more economic transformation, more genuine human development than the previous two — not because the trajectory is guaranteed, but because the inputs are in place in ways they were not before: connectivity, a middle class large enough to support domestic markets, a technical and managerial class that is increasingly sophisticated, political and social energy that, channeled well, can produce real change.

And I believe that the India I grew up in — the tier-3 India, the Odisha India, the first-generation India — is not peripheral to this story. It is the story. The outcome depends on whether it gets included.