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India: The unshackled tiger bares its claws

New Delhi is a city teeming with ambition, chasing its dream.

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by JOSEPH OLWENY

Big-read13 January 2025 - 09:34
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In Summary


  • Day or night, the tempo is relentless.
  • With an enormous 34 million souls in 13 million cars, adrenaline sweeps stragglers off the bustling roads without a second thought.

Tuk-tuks at the train station in New Delhi / SCREENSHOT/ XINHUA

India is a vast, vibrant commonwealth in a dizzying hurry. New Delhi’s omnipresent green and gold tuk-tuk taxis slalom through traffic at the speed of light.

Day or night, the tempo is relentless. With an enormous 34 million souls in 13 million cars, adrenaline sweeps stragglers off the bustling roads without a second thought.

A handful of pushcarts labour along, but the gleaming middle-class Suzuki and Maruti sedans point to the future of a buzzing megacity, with eight million motorbikes hitting the road each day.

The hooting drives you crazy. For Delhite motorists, it’s music to their ears. New Delhi is a city teeming with ambition, chasing its dream. If honking is the heartbeat, tuk-tuk is the lifeblood.

Truck drivers emblazon radiant reminders in capital letters in the rumps of lorries: BLOW HORN/ SOUND HORN/HORN, PLEASE/ HORN OK, PLEASE — in garish orange, red and green.

Haste is in their DNA, that’s the truck drivers’ command to give way to motorists keen to overtake.

In Bangalore, the metropolis of computer geeks (population 14m) and home to some of the best grey matter India can muster, they temper the speeds with sharp-witted pun at traffic intersections: If impatient on the road, will be patient in the hospital.

Even the most inured Nairobi pedestrians, accustomed to rushing across roads with matatus hurtling down, will for sure need a refresher course.

And yet, even with the remarkable traffic numbers, collisions are so rare, you spend a week before seeing one.

Proud Bharat (Hindi for India) is chasing many dreams, and they have miles to go, to quote Robert Frost, before they sleep.

ECONOMIC AMBITIONS

Soft-spoken, trim and white-haired Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, scholar and author, is crystal clear that his country must overtake Japan and become the third-largest economy in the world by 2027.

The booming economy is growing at 8.2 per cent per year according to the World Bank, and trailing only China and Germany as the third-biggest exporter of apparels.

In the past 10 years alone, India has built 80 million homes for the poor, a challenge such a large population must present as it endeavours to lift millions out of poverty.

The upbeat outlook rides on IT services, drug manufacturing and business services, and the strategy for further exports will look into expanding electronics, footwear and textiles for emerging markets.

In India, everybody is in a rush. The service industry, one of the key pillars of the economy, is driven by fanatical zeal for success.

STIFF COMPETITION

There are only two careers for any ambitious Indian teenager: engineering or medicine. The rest is a consolation.

Since seats are limited, stiff competition has engendered a culture of examinations, a degree of toughness hard to find anywhere else in the world. Only China and South Korea might get close.

This has spawned an exam coaching industry valued at about $7.5 billion (Sh972 billion), which plays a key role in the education landscape.

The rate of acceptance into the jewel on the crown — the Indian Institute of Technology — is so tough, that it’s easier to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This year, 1.2 million students applied. A miniscule 20,000 will land the coveted admission letters.

Teen suicides after failing the notoriously challenging JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) into IITs is so disturbingly common, suicide prevention hotlines proliferate online.

Driving through Delhi is akin to passing through a labyrinth of exam coaching academies. The bright sparks are hardened and tempered in the forging furnaces of urban India.

Some 11km outside Delhi, on Mathura Road, a conspicuous static billboard screams about making prospective recruits master English in 75 days. Everywhere you turn, an academy billboard promising to turn students into geniuses stares at you.

The competition is cut-throat in every direction. College graduates looking to enter the prestigious Indian Administrative Service must write an exam that selects a paltry one percent of the 300,000 who apply.

Medical students must ace the NEET. Even a job in the Indian Railways Service requires an interviewee to write four essays and a fi nal faceto-face interview.

Such is the academic rigour that has given India, for long derided as a sleeping elephant, the chutzpah to stare down its nimble Asian neighbors with the confi dence of an uncaged tiger. The nation has ground to make haste.

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