"Welcome to Reliance" starring Tom Cruise as Vibhu Patel

Just to follow up on Will's post about Reliance Communications --

Our experience was highly resemblant of a Tom Cruise/Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi film. The campus is gorgeous and lush gardens and well-designed buildings welcome you in. Everyone is smiling and happy to be there. Quotes encouraging innovation, successful business strategies, and customer satisfaction adorn the streets. Everything is very organized, very user friendly, very scary. I was convinced our "hospitality guide" would actually reveal herself as one of the bad guys in the last third of the movie....

The cell center was by far the most insane part. We sat in a room with clear windows looking out onto hundreds of people sitting at phones with incoming customer calls. On a big screen above us was a spreadsheet of columns with each person's name, what sort of call they were on at that moment, how many seconds they had been on the phone, and as Will mentioned, whether they were on a break and if so, what kind of break it was (i.e. tea, lunch or bathroom) and how many seconds they had been on that break. When someone is on the phone for longer than 5 min, the supervisor calls over and checks in on the employee to see if he needs more info for the call. There were more categories, but I can't remember them. Anyway, that sort of monitoring is obviously highly efficient and will cause India to shoot past the US eventually as a superpower, but there is no way that sort of regulation would fly among independence-obsessed Americans.

Reliance Headquarters showed how many innovations India is developing and how much potential they have to really surpass other countries in technology. The technological advances they are designing reach every single possible industry (TV, health care, Internet, Phones, Banks/ATMS, rural areas/farming) and are all coordinated through a single source.

However, as soon as you exit Reliance's campus, you are reminded that you are still in India where the majority of people are living far far below the poverty level. The contrasts are really jarring and it was difficult for me to reconcile the extremes. However, I presume that most of the people in the tech industry believe that if India can establish itself in the global market and raise its status, the economic growth would "trickle down" to the rest of the country. Unfortunately, as a woman we met with yesterday who works in foreign investment for India admitted, unless concrete programs are established to truly address poverty/public health crises in India, the rich getting richer is not going to have much of an effect on the poor. Since I know I tend to be more of the pessimist, I'll admit that there is a growing middle class and the country is making progress.

Further, we have been told that India has grown immensenly in the last ten years in terms of societal development (e.g, in 2000 they mandated that the person in the front seat of a car where a seat belt & sanitation programs to clean up trash are increasing), so it will be fascinating to see how the country grows even further in the next 10 years...

Till then, Will and I will try to "enjoy" the experience of being without a toilet that flushes.