11th January, 08 was a day I felt very happy. TATA - an Indian conglomerate which also make cars - launched the cheepest car in the world named Nano. It is as costly as the DVD player of Lexus.
As I see India, it can be broadly divided into three class of people: rich, middle class and poor.It is the middle class where the line of divide is growing weaker as more and more people are jumping into the rich bracket, which is again forcing rich to become super rich.
India has a lot of disparities which is also growing at a very fast rate. One can see the glitz of the Hilton and the Taj's and yet on the roadside you would see people begging for alms. So there I was on the eve of New Year standing in a queue outside Rock Bottom - a popular disc in bombay. I shelled out some 2500INR ~ 75USD to stand in a queue which was half a km long and it gave me a feeling that I was not privilidged enough. Even after spending this much of money I was sweating in the heat outside. As I was swelting the heat I saw these poor people - mothers with small kids in their laps begging for money .5 INR or 1INR or 5INR(if they are lucky), small kids with no clothes on wondering why their is a queue outside this place. It is not a temple and there is no Ganesh Pooja going on. Such is the disparity, where at the same place I am shelling out 2.5 grands for 4 hrs to enjoy the best music, wine and cuisine, there were people begging for a rupee or two.
Let us take a look at the growing middle class in India. I can safely divide the middle class into upper middle class and lower middle class. IT has brought a revolution in India and today we can see more and more people earning salaries which their previous generation might not have imagined in their entire tenure. This upper middle class which has its root in the IT is fast spreading them in the not so forbidden category now - the rich class. The class of people which remains untouched by this IT revolution remains the lower middle class. Obviosuly their is more to it than written.
It is the growing divide between the upper and lower middle class that is a cause of concern for India today and I am confident that Nano is there to bridge it. Let's contemplate how.
There are three types of customers for Nano:
1. Rich who wants to buy it for the sake of fun
2. Upper middle class; where college going kids, housewives might buy as an extra option
3. The lower middle class which until now was thriving on scooters or motorcycles.
It is the 3rd type of customers that interests me. Millions of people in India belong to the scooter clan which is pictured as this in the words of the man himself who made it possible - Ratan Tata, "I observe families riding on two wheelers - the father driving, his kid standing in front, his wife seated behind him holding a baby" Owning a car is still a distant dream for them. Imagine when these set of people think of buying a car that is just double the price of the scooter that they buy, gives them the comfort of 4 wheeler, a brand called TATA and a bloated social self esteem of having a car what will happen. In my thinking India will prosper as Nano will try to bridge the growing disparity between the upper and the lower middle class. For the poor class, I still don't see an option as they lack even the basic necessities but that is a separate issue altogether.
