In defiance of the stereotypes trotted out by yesterday’s pundits, modern India’s rise is both unusual and unexpected. It is unusual because some of the sharpest economic improvements are being observed in those sections of India society which were thought to be the most disadvantaged e.g. women from the oppressed castes. It is unexpected because the widespread view until a couple of years ago was that India’s democratic construct was inferior to China’s single party state.
In ‘Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India’, Saurabh Mukherjea & Nandita Rajhansa provide a gripping picture of how 1.5 billion Indians are combining to spectacular effect to create a range of social and economic outcomes which have no precedent in any emerging economy. For example, India today has as many chess Grandmasters today as the United States and the virtuosity of its scientists have guided India’s space modules to the dark side of the moon, a feat no other country has achieved.
Furthermore, the book explains how peninsular India has become the fastest growing region in the world thanks to knowledge-intensive manufacturing (the latest iPhone’s launch version was ‘Made in India’) combined with 1600 Global Capability Centres which provided not just IT Services but pretty much everything else that giant Western multinationals need such as sales, marketing, HR, finance, audit and accounting.
In this zeitgeist-defining book, the authors have also explored through pathbreaking research, why the vast majority of India’s companies are struggling to grow their profits even as a small minority of Indian companies go on to build globe-girdling franchises worth tens of billions of dollars.
Written across two years in which the authors criss-crossed India hundreds of times and interviewed over fifty of India’s leading minds in business, policymaking, media and academia, ‘Behold the Leviathan’ has been hailed by the cognoscenti as ‘a firecracker of a read’ which will ‘will challenge decision-makers, policymakers, and opinion leaders to reevaluate their long-standing perceptions of India’s development.’
