What I learned from the Chinese about our Indian online market
reverieinc.com
reverieinc.com
This is clearly visible. You can take any area of business and you would find bad customer service everywhere. The very few cases where customers are being treated a bit better would fall into one of 2 categories:
1. The company is a foreign multinational.
2. The company is Indian, operating in an area of business which has foreign multinational competition.
Any field which does not have foreign players has businesses sitting on their asses, treating customers like crap and not innovating at all.
A big example is supermarkets. Big bazar, Reliance, More, etc are all homegrown supermarkets but they offer little over regular mom and pop stores or medium sized local supermarkets. Their prices are not significantly low. The service is crap. They suck up more of your time because they don't have enough cashiers. They refuse to innovate by introducing self-checkouts. Nothing. It is as if they are waiting for someone like walmart to swoop in and capture all the market and teach them how it's done.
Case in point: Furlenco
On supermarkets only 1 player seems to get it right as of now - Hypercity. Maybe Amazon will kill it in the next 5-10 years
> Access to higher education in India is available only in English ... this creates a general differentiation, an unwritten apartheid.
I couldn't agree more. Have always felt this without being able to fully articulate what it was until now.
I've always felt having so many languages has hurt India more. I can validate that Chinese people in the west can still think about heading back to China and living in a place like Shanghai, without causing a dent to their standard of living or salary expectations. It's nowhere near true for Indian expats. At least not yet. I would argue (but can't confirm) this was part of the reason why Punit Soni went back to US (https://www.linkedin.com/in/punitsoni).
Imagine some group that could decide to take about 15,000 hectare of land and decide to build a city[1], from the ground up, with current building standards and codes. They would have to start with a way to power the city. So building infrastructure to bring fuel to power plants and assuming a modern city of 2 million souls, call it 1.5GW of reliable power (so closer to 2GW of capacity so that plants can be off line for maintenance and you still have power). You'll also need to develop a water source, and water treatment facility. You can go the Israeli route and desalinate water for this city (constrains locations) or pump it to it (adds to the power budget). At this point it would be easiest to add a subway system (you can do it by digging trenches and then covering them up, easier than boring tunnels under existing buildings) which means you also have to have some of the basics of what your city is going to look like laid out, residential areas, industrial areas, high tech areas etc. Since you have the benefit of looking at problems in other cities, you focus on making travel within the city as "car free" as possible so that individuals can either walk or take transit. You maximize people space. Now you build an airport, something which can handle both cargo and passenger traffic at the same time. To start bringing in people and materials while the rail system and a connection to the highway system is built.
Anyway, you can follow this along and realize you'll probably need a couple of trillion dollars worth of GDP to go from bare ground to "modern" city, and it will still take years. There are examples you can look at in China of cities built from the ground up. There are probably things you can learn from that. Someone more logistically astute than I am could come up with a "molting" approach where you first cover the area with tents, then as you build things you remove the previous layer and replace it with a more improved layer. You might be able to go through several re-development cycles to get to the final product.
Or you can try to take an existing place and go over it from the ground up and make it into something awesome. That latter path takes a lot longer, decades.
[1] That is a bit more land than is available in San Francisco
But they're lost because they've outlived their usefulness. Language is about communication. A language with which you can only communicate with a tiny minority of the humans on the planet is nowhere near as useful as a global one.
I'm not sure how I feel about linguists and historians who want to preserve a language in place. This gives them joy, but handicaps the children who have to allocate limited resources to learning a language that is pretty much useless outside of their villages or districts. You basically handicap children who were already born into poverty just so you can say you preserved a language.
Marie Smith, last speaker of the Eyak language. http://www.economist.com/node/10640514
Well, he was politely 'fired' for going gung-ho on the stupid idea of mobile only frontend for Flipkart. All the senior people who championed the idea have been silently moved out (founder included), but in a way so that none suffers an obvious loss of face.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116787
A language without economic value dies eventually. It's likely that the complement of the set is poor enough to not be of consequence (India's median income is the lowest of the BRICS - ~ $600 per-capita).
India: you have bigger problems than the efficient milking of the population - you need to feed the cow first. Irony of ironies, the country is apparently a "socialist republic". It'd be interesting to know about the kind of "intellectuals" sucking off of the Indian state's (imaginably fat) tits - Chomsky mentions somewhere how post-modernism (the new religion in the humanities), rids a population of desperately needed leaders.
Others: No India is not going to beat China economically, nor will Africa. The former will probably produce enough clones and ship them your way for cheap (profit!); the latter will continue in ignominy as its land gets stolen from underneath.
(Update: Here come the downvotes!)
India doesn't have a language which you can be guaranteed nearly everyone will speak. English is the closest thing for the classes that are being targeted for ecommerce.
Aside from that... looking at your comment history, you seem to really hate India. Any particular reason?
India, like China, however was a historic center (天竺 - heaven axis they called it) unlike most in the global south. To see it brought to the same level as sub-saharan Africa is painful; to realize there are deep structural issues that will keep it that way is even more so. Hate, yes, for the fat maggots feeding on the dying corpses - but that too is a distraction, for it's not the maggots' fault.
Rhetorical devices of the form "ah, but that's the our only way towards progress", will not be answered to. I'm tired of worn narrative, you lot bombard me with.
As for the caste system, yes, it has had a lot of evils. But then almost all populations around the world have some notion of "class" that is loosely defined, with its own set of evils. I fail to see how this is unique to India, see for instance the topic of ghettos in medieval history. In modern times, the "class" is usually based on financial wealth.
Furthermore, in the sense of classification based on profession (the idealistic interpretation of caste), this certainly exists across the world (merchant guilds, high concentrations of a single occupation like Harley St, London, etc).
Finally, as for viewing the past through rose-coloured lenses, every historian has his/her own set of biases in terms of coverage and emphasis. There are some who are honest about the reality of this, such as Howard Zinn who mentions it in his preface to "A People's History of the United States", but many delude themselves into thinking that they somehow are magically "unbiased".
With respect to works of fiction, the same applies. In the case of Tolkien, the treatment of the orcs is an example, we never see an orc perspective or pov. In the case of the Song of Ice and Fire, there is arguably little treatment of the common population. Military engagements are reduced to the standard historical style focusing on the leaders and "important" entities involved. As for the Mahabharatha, similar issues arise. Nevertheless, it has a surprising amount of depth and complexity in many respects (e.g morally grey characters and a bittersweet ending).
Offtopic, but this is false. There's a whole chapter of orcish perspective at the end of book IV.
Stable and mature underground economy's for example operate based on reputation not just tribe. As allegiance to even arbitrary tribes (crips vs bloods) limits commerce. Nation states are arbitrary and transitory, however when larger groups of people limit us vs. them to those outside the nation the internal economy's has fewer self imposed barriers.
PS: China demonstrates other failure points, but as a very non western culture they still show the same trends.
Actually I have greater hopes for Africa, considering that nothing on the likes of,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonising_the_Mind
has emerged out of the sub-continent.
Edit: This has an excerpt,
The number of native speakers for top five major languages as of 2001 are:
Hindi (and dialects) 422 mil
Bengali 83 mil
Telugu 74 mil
Marathi 72 mil
Tamil 61 mil
It's easier to think of India the way you think of EU: an aggregation of peoples and cultures under a political umbrella. As an example, sure many people in germany speak english, but would you really try to seriously gain entry into the german market without localizing into german?
There's a lot of markets which get left out when a company expands to "the EU" - which often means Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and maybe one or two other countries.
In Maharashtra, virtually every middle class person speaks English and Hindi in addition to Marathi. Auto drivers or street vendors will speak only Hindi and Marathi. Of the people I've encountered who don't speak Hindi, most were cooks/maids/similar.
A peripherally related question: is it worth translating your software into Dutch? 90% of the Netherlands speaks English and by having English you've also covered the UK. So it's probably not worth it.
Now lets compare the Netherlands to Maharashtra. The GDP of the Netherlands is $850B (16M people). The GDP of Maharashtra is about $400B (for 110M people). Half that GDP is just Mumbai (about 20M people) and Mumbai is disproportionately a place where English and Hindi work well.
If you are very forward thinking (10+ years), it might be worthwhile gambling that gaining a foothold in regional languages today might pay off when those regions grow. But that's a very long play.
As for the south, in my limited experience the same is true. English works fine in Bangalore if you restrict your conversations to upper middle class people with good internet and money to spend.
About a 100M people in India know English out of a population of 1.3 Billion. It is only the MNC service sector wherein know-english-have-money holds true. The larger chunk of India's income is generated by people who do not know English or Hindi(~800 Million people fall into this bucket).
You appear to be a reasonably educated person, so I guess your use of the word 'other' above is a kind of oversight (because last that I knew, India was in Asia, and not in Africa).
> you need to feed the cow first...
I am sure the government - and all the citizens - of India will forever remain indebted to you for generously contributing and sharing this piece of infinite wisdom - whoever could have even thought of this otherwise?
Re: language. There's plenty of strong linguistic identity in the south, East and West of India. The north has a weaker cultural identity, but the rest take great pride in their language and culture.
Like China does or better than it?
China, like most nations, may aspire towards Western nations, but K-pop/Internet/TV inspired fads are no match for such awesome structures enforces under the threat of violence.
As outsiders, it's likely to be difficult to appreciate this - I recommend Naipaul (although he tends to believe colonization was some godsend).
Absolutely disagree. Some data-points in this regard: - Rural FMCG share is already greater than Urban. - While rural markets grew by 16%, urban did 12%. - For many like Dabur India, 50 per cent of their domestic sales comes from rural markets.
> No India is not going to beat China economically, nor will Africa.
I wonder why you'd think that monetisation via Internet is the only thing that adds value to a society. In developing nations, Internet trickles democracy down like nothing else. The kind of equality and voice that the Internet gives, is especially required for people who don't have a high SEC category.
Another important pillar of long term economic growth to a nation is- productivity growth. Internet inclusion drives that.
http://www.ibef.org/industry/indian-rural-market.aspx http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/with-urba... http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/fmcg-firm...
Successful companies that created products for the local market. All examples are from TamilNadu a southern Indian state. More such examples exist all over India. Such examples are not possible without having consumer interest at heart, Indian companies not respecting consumer interest is a myth in my opinion.
http://www.slideshare.net/SuganPragasam/chick-shampoo-case-s...
http://www.slideshare.net/Rushabh93/cavin-kare-and-chik-sham...
https://yourstory.com/2013/09/entrepreneurship-r-ramaraj-seq...
The article IMHO talks more of the mainstream digital Internet businesses which largely ignore the 200M non-english speaking people on the "Indian Internet".
Incidentally was on a call with the CEO of Scripbox today who mentioned that he had to innovate his KYC/documentation process for the Indian market as people wanted the convenience of having it picked up vs. couriering it themselves.
However, getting back to the point - very few companies other than the FMCG space cater to non-English speaking/ local language users in India. Localization is key to India, but for some reason largely overlooked as of now.
India has 462M people who can access internet at home, among 1326M inhabitants. That is a less lot than what one would think at first.
Given that most companies reading HN are americans and some europeans. That brings the question of should we bother for the Indian market (early or at all)?
Cultural barriers + Language issues and translations + TimeZone + A market which may not be that big and be fragmented or inaccessible
Your page is old and complaining that the number of 485M given in 2012-2013 was overinflated. That seems about right given that the last numbers are still a bit under that by now.
On a different topic. Ut looks like only 10-20% of connections are wired (e.g. broadband). The rest is wireless (probably mobile data)
That seems important to know if going for that market. (red: target phone, bad bandwidth, bad latency.)
Delhi seems to be doing good and the only hope I have is on that state. They are one of the smallest states but have the highest investing education among all states. That's the way to go. Nothing else will cure all this non sense going on.
It may be discrimination but apartheid is an exaggeration.
You have two options:
a. Teach them a language they can use almost anywhere on the planet. A language that documents most of the planets knowledge.
b. Teach them a language they can use in their geographical district and almost nowhere else.
The powers that they'd be better served by (a). You might think (b) would have been a better choice, but implying that (a) is akin to apartheid is ridiculous.
If I'm forced to use the word "apartheid" to label one of those, I'd point to (b). To teach the poor of india a language that handicaps them compared to humans of the planet who take path (a) is to limit their opportunities and keep them "in their place" in their little geographic corner of the world.
Most people, even those born in the richest country in the world, seldom move outside their state.
If I were to be treated like a second class citizen in my own place of birth because some languages give a small percentage of the population "world mobility", I would choose carefully.
Startups in India are mostly rich kids hanging out with other rich kids and thinking wow seems like there are so many people like us who needs online commerce and services and so must be great business opportunity.
I agree customer service and infrastructure is in very bad shape but one thing many would not like to talk or admit is 95% of population is simply not in any state to pay even very little for better infrastructure. E.g Indians whine about poor telecom services while average revenue per user is like $2 per month. So it is quite unlikely to upgrade infrastructure / services to decent level.
Any infrastructure which once made available, accessible to all without price discrimination will remain in bad shape for very long time.
Flip that around for a while. If the language issue was made primary, you could literally speak any language and have access to quality education and higher-paying jobs.
Just read an article yesterday that said that 60 students were expelled from the IITs - one of the major reasons being that they could not cope with English as the medium of instruction: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/educat...
From the article you linked:
> Apart from the language issue, the inability to apply knowledge to concepts is another reason why students fail.
I know it would be speculation but I think these kids were already below average when admitted.
That's so true. I am happy to see businessmen and businesswomen that are really starting to grasp the concept, without naming it.
Once the regime inflates itself out of existence for the sake of all those suckling on taxes, revolution comes and all the nuts the squirrel accumulates now will flee him. Like Mao's murdering mobs, that can bring great destruction.
The horizon of the homo economicus, I fear, is not quite as far ahead as some of us, nor is the French revolution as far behind.
Stopped reading just about here. If this is what you China taught you, my guess is you are good at making up lessons.