Laura Höflinger
It wouldn’t be the first time that the world order shifted with billionaire Nandan Nilekani playing playing a part in it.With his company, he experienced firsthand what a meteoric rise feels like. And if it were up to him, the miracle would happen again – but this time for his entire country. "I haven’t seen that kind of excitement for a long time."
Nilekani, 67, is sitting in the meeting room of his foundation in Bangalore. Inside, it is cool and quiet, while the streets outside are buzzing with mopeds and cars competing for road space. Within just 20 years, the population of this southern Indian metropolis has doubled to an estimated 13 million people. Almost every large tech company in the world has an office here, with shining buildings among the palm trees. Bangalore is the epitome of outsourcing and globalization. Hundreds of thousands of jobs at IT companies and call centers that left the United States and Europe in the 1990s have ended up in this city.
It was a process that made people like Nilekani wealthy. More than 40 years ago, he and a handful of colleagues founded Infosys, with an initial investment of $250. Today, the IT giant employs more than 340,000 people and generates annual revenues of $18 billion. One of the company’s founders is British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law.
New Delhi is watching the world’s shifting balance of power with no small amount of satisfaction. With Russia having launched a war of aggression in Ukraine and China flexing its muscles in the East, heads of state and senior company executives from across the globe are wooing India.
It is a change that has suddenly raised a number of important questions. Can India become the kind of driver of the global economy that China has been for years? Can it provide a real democratic alternative? Can this country, which is still home to extensive poverty, become wealthy? Might it become a superpower one day?
There are certainly a number of indications that the future is bright. Even as the global economy is stumbling, India has remained stable. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is projecting that India will contribute 15 percent of global growth in 2023.
On top of that, India replaced China on April 14 as the world’s most populace nation. The precise date is the product of forecasts produced by the United Nations, according to which the population of India on that day was 1,425,775,850. That is more than three times the number of people who live in the European Union and more than the total in North and South America combined. Close to every fifth person on the planet lives in India.
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