Delhi (8 page)

In fact, India's much vaunted economic growth has largely been jobless. Employment creation remained more or less stagnant between 2005 and 2010. The formal sector—comprising those lucky few with legally recognized labour rights—has actually been shrinking over the last decade. China has become the workshop of the world. Even lucky Bangladesh has become its sweatshop. India has so far lagged behind, and policymakers are becoming quietly panicky as growth rates slow. Even its international standing as an outsourcing hub is threatened by rising wages and foreign resentment.

Into this gap steps the informal economy. It is often discussed as though it is a historical relic, rather quaint and soon for extinction, like crochet or the giant panda. Many migrants do wind up within it: Kamala and her husband, a driver, were both from Nepal. (Both of them hated Delhi.) The old stereotype suggests that raw-skinned rednecks arrive from their bumpkin villages or the poorer corners of the earth, and the informal economy catches them like a great benevolent net to ease the transition into the sophisticated ways of the
true
urban economy. But the formal economy has not expanded to receive them. The informal economy
is
the true economy.

This shadowy world contains a hugely diverse range of livelihoods and enterprises, most quite legal. Once I started looking, I saw the informally employed everywhere. This is the India that surrounds you in the lanes and bazaars, on the scrappy farms glimpsed from roads and railways and the little neighbourhood markets. Most people are effectively self-employed. The luckiest get a consistent wage; those less fortunate are paid by the hour or day or piece delivered and work multiple jobs.

There are the construction workers, much in demand in Delhi with its ceaseless striving for the new. These are not only the wiry male labourers who I often saw teetering up rickety wooden scaffolding, but also several million near-invisible women who bake and carry bricks. Other very visible individuals run small stalls, selling food or everyday goods or trinkets for ridiculously small profits. They colonize areas of the pavement, keeping an eye out for police, or push carts up and down the streets. Still other workers are artisans, crafting furniture and jewellery with skill to sell it in little specialized markets. Some parts of the country are renowned for clusters of them—Agra for shoes, for example, not just for sale but for international export.

Then there is the rubbish I managed to generate, even as the heat diminished my appetite and the rent my budget. It winds itself into a whole sophisticated economy of recyclers. They pick through the waste produced by urban lifestyles for valuable materials—paper for reprocessing, precious metals from phones—an essential service in a place where garbage collection services are virtually nonexistent.

Other invisible hands produce goods the West might expect to be produced in factories: clothing, pharmaceuticals, low-end electronics. Farming these out to dispersed individual home-based workers is even cheaper than factory labour. The homeworker can work late into the night or draft in the extra hands of relatives and children, without legal risk to the employer. Power cuts and machinery breakages fall upon the individual's head, not that of the transnational corporation.

Though many are left fluctuating in and out of poverty, not everyone in the informal economy is poor. Some earn far more than the national average income by running entire enterprises off the books, too small or too sketchy to be regulated by the state. In India the informal economy is officially called the ‘unorganized' sector, but it is far from chaotic. Many small and medium enterprises are protected by guilds and business associations, often drawn up on caste, religious or party-political lines. The boundaries between formal and informal, too, are blurred. Virtually all wealthy Indians are implicated indirectly, whether through employing maids off the books, dodging taxes on property transactions, or corruption. Larger industries, including some government corporations, operate with substantial informal workforces.

India's current economic slowdown looks somewhat different in this light. Urban middle-class India, corporate India, may be gloomy, but consumer demand in rural India continues to grow. The informal economy remains resilient; Credit Suisse suggests it contributes at least half of India's entire GDP. Commentators are rapidly recasting it as a bright spot, for all that it limits the state's tax base.

This shouldn't have taken me by surprise. The informal economy is a very modern phenomenon, and not one confined to the developing world. It approximates the economist's wet dream of a flexible labour market. Workers without the right to organize, strike, sue, age or get sick are a lot cheaper. India is simply cresting the wave of global fashion.

As if to confirm this fashionability, I started spotting business books that glorified the informal economy's creativity and adaptability. Its potential for low-cost innovation has got a lot of press as Western economic models appear to be ossifying. The French call it Système D, allegedly named after the resourceful and self-reliant
debrouillards
or hustlers of francophone Africa—or perhaps instead after those willing and able to
se démerder
, to remove themselves from the stultifying shit of bureaucracy. The celebrated Indian equivalent is
jugaad
, the art and science of muddling through. The subtitle of a recent book explains the promised benefits:
think frugal, be flexible, generate breakthrough growth
. Don't be fooled by the shiny malls. Look more closely at the little stores and service workers that dot moderately wealthy neighbourhoods. These little hairdressers, takeways, and cosmetics stores are the face of the new India too.

Check the pavements of Connaught Place, probably where you'd turn when, scratching your head, you tried to pinpoint some sort of geographic centre to the city. CP was designed as Delhi's central business district. The pricey office space still houses some big firms and iconic names, at the heart of three rings like a great skull-white bullseye. Its egotistical colonial architecture sits uneasily with the grubby signboards and perpetual digging. Between the columns hawkers hawk a fine selection of pirated non-fiction books on the very business practices they epitomize.

Jugaad
can indeed be brilliant. Early in my stay, a friend had a printer toner cartridge to deal with. We belted it over the undulating Outer Ring Road to one of the capitals of informality and
jugaad
, southeast Delhi's Nehru Place. Not too far away from C.R. (Chittaranjan) Park, where Bengalis self-ghettoize to hang out buying fish, the Place proper is flanked by large dirty grey buildings, dark eyeless windows looking out onto a bustling plaza full of little stores and courtyard merchants.

We grabbed a hot almond
badam
milk, marzipan delicious with a little caramelized skin on top. I looked around.

The atmosphere was oddly festive, with a brand of all-male restless optimism. Nehru Place is famous as a technology bazaar. No computer is ever entirely broken or useless: someone here can fix it. The merchants sell quasi-legal and pirated computer accessories of all kinds. Software, cables, batteries, monitors, motherboards, hard drives, Chinese-made USB sticks with giant erratic memories—they're all here, if you haggle. More impressively, so are the formal stores, from a host of banks to Microsoft itself. Here the informal economy has all but vanquished its formal enemy. Forget Linux:
this
is real open source innovation.

The skinny cartridge man, smart in a crisp white shirt, squatted down. His hands were ink-stained and prematurely wrinkled but swift as he surveyed the cartridge, prying open shelves and hatches. He smoothed out a couple of sheets of newspaper and set to work. He upended the cartridge. With a swift set of taps, he sent the old ink tumbling out, weirdly powdery onto the runic lines of upside-down Hindi. A few swipes with a cloth to clean it out, and then he carefully refilled it from a nearby container and sealed it neatly. All for a fraction of the price of a new cartridge. Nehru Place murmured approvingly below.

This is the opposite of getting a PhD: it's gutsy, self-taught, spontaneous and cheap. The PhD student famously knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. The
jugaad
ad-libber instead does more with less. The do-it-yourself nation will inherit the Earth, so the tale goes, and Indians are particularly good at improvisation. They are the jazz musicians of management strategy, cobbling together a (relatively) successful economy with spit and duct tape. Where the West is fat and complacently addicted to the advice of experts, Indians flourish in adversity. As the protagonist—self-proclaimed ‘thinking man' and ‘self-taught entrepreneur'—of Aravind Adiga's
The White Tiger
(2008) advises, China leads India on all metrics,

except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality,
does
have entrepreneurs.

The cartridge man was just such a businessperson, plugged into twenty-first-century technology but offering a service much more cheaply than the titanic American originals. Forget the Protestant work ethic. In the twenty-first century, to be an entrepreneur against all the odds is to be Indian.

It seemed my lack of
jugaad
get-up-and-go was obvious to more than just Kamala and me.

Being the only academic at a titanic corporate networking event is like being a leper at a children's party. The venue, a glossy luxury hotel, was certainly decked out as if for a celebration. The streets leading there were decked in banners, the auditorium swaddled in decorations beneath its chandeliers, the waiters immaculately servile behind tureens of food. Yes, it was that highlight of the jet set's social calendar: the 7th Asia Gas Partnership Summit. (Over breakfast, I casually eyeballed the programme one final time—and nearly coughed out my dubious masala toast. I had managed to miss the headline event: a speech by the prime minister. This boded slightly ill.)

The other speakers were even more glamorous than the prime minister, himself an impressively impassive man (one cartoon shows his turbaned visage seamlessly morphing into an onion). Brits sweating in loud ties, a US State Department official with the helium voice of Bill Gates, a Turkmen with a sinisterly Gothic PowerPoint, a Gazprom chief who held the audience with a featherlight killer's grip and dead fish eyes, a Pakistani minister promising peace and harmony in a sarcastic tone. And in the final session, the real power players: some of India's own most influential energy politicians and technocrats, their state-fuelled power indicated by their casually crumpled shirts.

There was one snag. Everyone wore affiliation tags, marks of social status dangling at navel level on unmissable scarlet lanyards, and scanned those of strangers with avid snobbery. My own scarlet letter, unfortunately, screamed that I was not a CEO, or even a humble consultant, but a researcher. This was the equivalent of ringing a bell to announce my hunchbacked presence (though at least the 99 percent male population stared a little lower than usual). People backed away in horror, crossing themselves. My only hope was to seize a business card from the runts of the herd before they recognised my affliction.

At one point I thought I might finally have made a friend, a sweet Gujarati man called Abhinav. Most of the other conference attendees instantly dropped to sleep, smartphones glued to their hands with the devotion of teenage girls. But Abhinav followed all the conference talks with open-mouthed awe and giant Bambi eyes. There was something pleasantly herbivorous about him. I could tell he was relatively junior: his suit was crisply tailored, and his moustache—that Samson-like indication of seniority—still limp and sparse.

We shook hands, his fist pumping enthusiastically. He smiled with genuine warmth, and barely flinched when he found out I was a note-taking subhuman. We made small talk—power grids, gas markets, the open access provisions of the Electricity Act 2003—and he introduced me to some bigger moustaches. We sat together for the following session. I felt positively jolly.