Ruchir Sharma famously once said, “India consistently disappoints the optimists and the pessimists”. The fundamental question remains - Which India are we talking about?
Ever Since
built a strong narrative around his India 1,2,3 framework - building on Kishore Biyani’s "It Happened in India”- to showcase how India contains both Mexico and Sub-Saharan Africa in its belly (speaking in per-capita incomes), India 1, India 2, India 3 have largely become everyday lexicon for many of us who work in the startup ecosystem.India is large. It contains multitudes.
How to understand these divergent Indias?
Should we drop the limiting binary markers of rural-vs-urban India and replace them with India 1-2-3?
I had great fun exploring these questions in great depth with
, product manager leader of a considerable repute in Indian product/tech circles. (Today happens to be his birthday:) Happy Birthday Mithun!!)Mithun is also a popular writer of The Indian Pivot newsletter where he has been writing extensively on understanding the non-English speaking Indian rural consumer segment.
This conversation, replete with many interesting digressions, including a political battle of Rajini fandom and random movie vignettes to make a socioeconomic point about India 1 during the 90s, was special for two reasons:
It helped me paint a particularly idiosyncratic sociological view of Indian consumer behaviour from a product builder’s mindset
It helped me articulate a rough sketch of the time-evolution theory that could connect India 1,2,3 and its evolutionary dynamics.
Aside:
Is there a linear arrow-of-time theory that could help us connect India 1’s past with India 2’s present and hopefully extrapolate India3’s future?
After all, you could argue that what was reality for India1 during the nineties, is now becoming reality for smaller pockets of India2 and will hopefully become true for India3 soon.
When my wife’s parents were living in Baroda during the nineties, it was quite common to have a local credit account with the neighbourhood grocer. Today, my wife’s parents don’t have a credit account. Likewise, between 2019 and 2024, India2 stopped credit purchases, especially in the sale of agri-inputs, leading to an expansion of cash and carry in rural retail. India 3, in contrast, is likely to still have a credit account now in 2024 as we speak.
By categorizing India3 as ‘unmonetizable users’, based on consumption metrics, are we disparaging the economic potential of rural India, once we address the infrastructural gap they are trying to navigate through to make a good livelihood?
When I asked Sajith this question, he responded,
1) India3 != Rural. There is an India1 in rural Andhra, TN, Kerala, Punjab etc and there is an India3 in Mumbai and Delhi.
2) My lens of India3 not easy to monetise is from a startup perspective. Unilever etc sees a lot of potential in rural areas and India3 separately.
Here are a few intriguing questions we probed in this conversation:
What are the unintended consequences of the sachetization boom of the nineties, which was marked through frames such as “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”?
Is India-1-2-3 a better frame than a pyramid because we are not assuming here that somebody has to move from 3 to 1 or 2 to 1?
Why is it that language (and not income) remains the biggest differentiation between India 1 and India 2?
Why does India 1 live atomised lives while India 2 thrives and lives communally?
Should we drop the limiting binary markers of rural-vs-urban and replace them with India 1-2-3?
Why is agriculture no longer a differentiation marker when defining customer behavioural segments in India?
How do we make sense of the aspirations of India 1 operating in single-player mode vis-a-vis India 2 operating in a multi-player mode?
Is India 1 now rediscovering algorithm-mediated sociality to cope with its atomisation?
Is there a differentiation in social network structures of India 1 vis-a-vis India 2? Can we understand the network structure by mapping the migratory patterns?
How does trust evolve in India 1 vis-a-vis India 2? How does a consumer acquire status in India 1 vis-a-vis India 2?
I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did:)
India 2 Startups and Links Referred in the conversation
Stage Content
Sharechat Social Network
Apna Jobs Platform
Meesho Horizontal E-Commerce
Bhavin Turakhia’s tweet on the purpose of B2C products
Pop culture references in the conversation
Alaipayuthey scene showcasing India 1’s credit behaviour
Swades projector scene
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