India is Changing Faster Than Many of Us in the West Realize

India has over-promised and under-delivered on so many fronts over the decades.
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Home of the world’s largest and, despite its young age and huge diversity, still thriving democracy, it has promised growth to rival China. Apart from brief bursts of activity, it has generally failed to live up to its plaudits expectations.
One reason often cited, apart from chromic infrastructure and the legacy of a British love of bureaucracy, is endemic corruption.
Graft had become so deeply engrained in Indian business culture that many had written the country off from delivering sustainable long-term growth for its hundreds of millions of poor. The relatively very few rich got richer while the miserably small middle class grew so painfully slowly compared to China that many thought India would never haul itself out of its emerging-market status.
But critics had not factored in Narendra Modi. While not everyone would support his Hindu-biased populism, he has brought immense progress to India, overcoming entrenched interests with a politically astute skill and dynamism.
There is still a long way to go, but a recent Economist article describes how he has taken the fight to the ruling business elites in a blitzkrieg campaign to dismantle tycoons’ practices of personalizing gains and socializing losses.
Founding shareholders of Indian companies have long made use of a loophole of Indian corporate law that prevents banks from seizing companies in default on their loans, so owners of companies can run their organizations badly or, worse, suck out funds for personal gain with little fear of losing their money-making enterprise.
The system has actively perpetuated this system with a bunged up judicial system that takes months, if not years, to hear cases and state banks’ lending to firms on the basis of personal connections rather than sound business-lending principles. This cronyism was almost encouraged by officials not wanting banks to post losses, such that state banks are kept afloat by the government yet are carrying massive debts which will never be repaid.
Modi’s government new bankruptcy code came into force in May 2016. After almost two years of preparation, the first big cases have hit the headlines last month, The Economist reports. The fate of 12 troubled large concerns amounting to 2.2 trillion rupees ($33.4 billion) of non-performing debts is due to be settled within weeks. Another 28 cases worth a further 2 trillion rupees are set to be resolved by September. Between them, these firms account for about 40% of loans that banks themselves think are unlikely to be ever be repaid. In total some 1,500 companies are said to be insolvent, according to The Economist.
A new set of dedicated courts, backed by a cadre of insolvency professionals, is on hand to help banks seize assets and sell them to fresh owners, the article states. To focus the minds of both bankers and borrowers, if no deal can be cut within nine months the firm is shut down and its equipment sold for scrap.
As a result, those looking for cheap, distressed assets are already circling for pickings from the current 12 and 28. Such turmoil on this scale will create a short-term drop in investment as firms hold off to see what becomes available. In the longer term, the process of death and renewal will probably be highly dynamic for the economy.
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It will also focus the minds of today’s Indian tycoons on running their businesses better and courting political favor less. Indian business is shifting focus from “who you know” to “what you know,” which is definitely a good thing for the health of the country in the future.