India Puppies and Consumer Boomers

By EDWARD W. DESMOND NEW DELHI

| Someone is knocking at India's door. No one special, just Ravi Khanna, a well-dressed young man who works hard and talks fast. But that unprepossessing exterior masks an agent of revolution, a force committed to arousing passions that are transforming India's tottering socialist order. "Good morning, Mrs. Bedi," Ravi says. "May I come in to show you the new Mitey-Vac? Is the man of the house in?"

Before Mrs. Bedi knows it, Ravi is inside her small New Delhi apartment, demonstrating his wonder contraption. "Can it do cobwebs, spiders and lizards?" asks a wide-eyed Mrs. Bedi. "Anything," Ravi boasts. Mr. Bedi, however, is not impressed by the $200 price tag -- more than two weeks' wages for a senior-grade civil servant such as himself. "The cost is too much," he says. Ravi, sweating now, promises training, service, lifetime devotion. "For me," he says, "the customer is like a god." Mrs. Bedi looks expectantly at her husband, who walks out of the room muttering, "It's your choice."

Ravi and Mrs. Bedi are only drops in the ocean of India's 835 million people, but they are part of a wave that has brought unprecedented change to India's economy and society over the past decade, and especially during the five years of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's government. The participants in this social revolution are the members of India's middle class. A hardworking group with rupees to spare, they constitute a marketer's dream of as many as 200 million people, and are expanding rapidly. Ten years from now, predicts V.A. Pai Panandiker, director of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research, "about 300 million ((Indians)) will be members of the middle class."

In India social position used to be equated with an English education and a job in the Indian Administrative Service. Today it is money that increasingly defines status, giving rise to a middle class that cuts across caste and region. The rush to acquire has affected such sensitive traditions as arranged marriages and has allowed middle-class women to emerge in the work force. It is no longer regarded as shameful to covet the good life and to seek an even better life for one's children. "Indians always accepted drudgery as what life had in store for them," says Mohammed Khan, chairman of Enterprise Advertising in Bombay. "Today self-gratification is no longer a dirty word."

The urge to splurge has been fueled by several interlocking forces. Limited economic liberalizations instituted by Gandhi have freed the private sector to . step up production. A wealth of consumer items now jam once poorly stocked shelves. Even those who cannot afford to buy the goodies are affected by the alluring images produced by India's upstart advertising industry and transmitted into the homes of the country's estimated 180 million television viewers -- about 130 million more than five years ago. Those images, in turn, deepen middle-class dissatisfaction with the socialist restrictions that remain. "This is a greedy class, a demanding class," says Abid Hussain, a member of the Planning Commission in New Delhi. "It is crying out against the tyranny of the small inspector and the bureaucrat."

But the capitalist outlook is still so new to India that no mainstream leader is quite ready to renounce socialism for the C word. Even Gandhi, who godfathered the middle-class surge, fears the fallout when less fortunate voters go to the polls later this month for parliamentary elections. For the past six months, he has turned his attention to promoting vast poverty relief and local rule schemes. Still, Gandhi's advisers say that if the Prime Minister is returned to power, he will push forward with deregulation and other reforms. If Gandhi is defeated, his successor may have little choice but to do the same. Says Surjit Bhalla, an economist with the Policy Group, a New Delhi think tank: "After what has happened in the past five years in the global economy, Indian policymakers have finally realized that socialism has failed to deliver the goods."

Indian leftists counter that Gandhi is leaving India's vast numbers of poor people in the lurch. They argue that government resources are being diverted to help the well-off minority, who in turn are frittering away vital funds on luxury goods. Rajni Kothari, a widely respected social scientist, is worried that the middle class is dangerously insensitive to the desperately poor. Says he: "There is a disturbing decline in compassion, in charity, in pity."

The consumer big bang was detonated in 1982 with the advent of color TV, but really took off in 1984 when Doordarshan, the monopoly state television company, began allowing advertisers to sponsor shows. Over the next five years, the advertising revenues at Doordarshan jumped more than tenfold. Top- rated shows exposed tens of millions of slum dwellers and villagers, as well as civil servants and professionals, to the blandishments of housewives, models and children. A surge in foreign travel and the arrival of the video revolution further whetted appetites for consumer goods.

As a result, domestic manufacturing is soaring. From 1982 to 1988, color television production jumped from 70,000 units a year to 1.3 million, while the output of black-and-white sets increased almost eightfold, to 4.4 million. Refrigerator and car production has also mushroomed, softening Indian resistance to borrowing. That means boom times ahead for a fledgling consumer finance business that, according to J. Rao, Citibank's chief executive officer in India, has skyrocketed from zero to $1 billion in just three years.

The rush to buy is rooted in the new middle class's love of ostentation. Many Indians consider those Punjabis who are most at home in Delhi to be particularly brash entrepreneurs and deride the type as the "puppy," for "prosperous urban Punjabi who is young." But where the consumer itch is involved, even ordinary Indians are not above one-upmanship. Onida, a television manufacturer, runs a national ad campaign with the slogan, "Neighbor's envy, owner's pride."

The pursuit of a middle-class life-style is swiftly altering Indian society. While most marriages are still arranged, restrictions of caste compatibility are giving way to considerations of money. Marriage advertisements in newspapers often contain the phrase "caste no bar." Even more dramatic is the emergence of the working wife, once regarded by the middle class as a sign that her husband could not support his family. Today, says Medha Damle, manager of a Bombay matrimonial bureau, "99% of the men who apply want working girls. Most prefer girls with bank jobs, so ((they)) can get loans."

Like their yuppie cousins in the West, Indian puppy couples are finding that the dual-income household can prove costly. Headlines in the newsmagazine India Today document the challenges: THE INDIAN MALE: MID-LIFE BLUES; MARRIED WOMEN: CHANGING SEXUALITY; DIVORCE: GETTING COMMON. The last reflects the clash of expectations in marriages in which the woman is now educated, assertive and independent. While a typical middle-class man wants a well- educated mate who works, he still expects his wife to run the house, look after the children and cater to his needs -- all without benefit of servants, who have become too expensive. Not unexpectedly, women find such demands unreasonable, and their quiet revolt is boosting the divorce rate.

Middle-class angst, however, pales beside the miseries of India's poor. Free marketers argue that if economic growth reaches 7% or more, the "trickle down" will benefit the poor far faster than did four decades of socialist central planning. In the meantime, India remains divided between the barely subsisting poor and the consumer-happy middle class.

An enormous national effort is necessary to reconcile those two worlds. The challenge for New Delhi is to provide education, health care and job opportunities to the poor, so they too can participate in India's revolution before resentment erupts among the have-nots. "You can view these changes as a great success," says an economist close to the Prime Minister's office, "or as the seed of a tremendous explosion." He adds, "I see both."

With reporting by Anita Pratap/New Delhi and Amrita Shah/Bombay