Unlocking Opportunities - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 76

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Unlocking Opportunities
The 1991 reforms had an enormous impact, opening up possibilities that had not existed
for young Indians, and older ones too, to branch out into new lifestyles, entrepreneurial ad-
ventures and careers. Those already in the middle class, including women, were given job
opportunities and mobility of employment that was unimaginable in the economically re-
stricted and public sector-dominated India after independence. No longer was the security
of lifetime jobs in various parts of government and the public sector the epitome of success.
For many of those not yet in the middle class, there were opportunities for upward mobility
to be grasped.
There are thousands of stories of children of poor parents who have suddenly done well
in ways that would not have been possible earlier. Ram Lal, the son of a gardener who
worked for my family and the FT office in the 1980s, is now a well-paid driver and his
daughter is a qualified pharmacist in a government hospital. Dinesh Kumar, the 22-year-
old son of a poor farmer on India's border with Nepal, earns Rs 12,000 a month as a trainee
with Tarun Tahiliani, one of India's top fashion designers. He was a porter on Rs 2,500 a
month in the INA market, one of Delhi's main retail food markets, when he began to go
to a nearby night school run by Ritinjali, a voluntary organization. There he did a cutting
and tailoring course that led him to study graphic design at Delhi University with funds
provided by Ritinjali, and he graduated in 2010.
Slim, smart and smiling, with great yet modest self-confidence, Kumar told me that the
best he could have expected at the market was maybe to become a shop assistant. 1 'Now
I'm designing Western clothes and I want to go abroad and become a big designer,' he said.
He might move somewhere else in Delhi first, hoping to double his salary, but his target is
Australia because that is where Amar Nath, another Ritanjili student from the same bazaar,
is working as a management assistant for an electrical power company. I had interviewed
Nath in July 2005, when he was 17, for Fortune magazine. 2 He had never been to a conven-
tional school and had just begun to learn to read and write. He told me he had been inspired
by 'meeting high-class people' in the bazaar and realized that 'speaking their English was
a basic driving force'. He said he wanted to start his own hotel or restaurant and benefit
from India's growing consumerism. His horizons changed to Australia and he is regarded
as a role model by those now at Ritinjali.
Life Improves Near Panipat