In a country as chaotic and unpredictable as India, narratives about the country moving in a particular direction for any given length of time are bound to be misleading, if not immediately disproven. Sweeping statements about the subcontinent are for fable weavers: For every gleaming tech-hub such as Bangalore, there is a muddy mess such as Meerut. For every glamorous restaurant in Mumbai, there is a ragged crowd of Muslims displaced by religious violence someplace else.
That's why two recent events are so intriguing to compare, even if doing so treads close to land-of-contrast clichés. One represents the hopeful narrative that many – including India's prime minister – are trying to tell the world about this rapidly changing country, while another represents the darkest, most crushingly persistent problems in Indian society.
The first event of note was the announcement from the Taiwanese corporation Foxconn – known for assembling iPhones in massive facilities in China – that it wants to open a dozen factories in India by 2020, creating roughly one million desperately needed manufacturing jobs. This is exactly the deal Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoped for after launching a campaign to convince global companies to "make in India."
Though it is getting richer, India still has no large-scale manufacturing sector that could power a prosperous middle class. A thin slice of the population is employed in finance, engineering, government and outsourced research and call-centre jobs, but the vast majority toil in the informal sector as day labourers, servants, hawkers and drivers, or in unproductive agriculture.
In China, a broad-based manufacturing boom over the decades has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, but Mr. Modi's quest to create more manufacturing jobs has been mired in the India's daily grind – from poor roads and corruption to unpredictable state-level regulation.
The Foxconn deal, if it comes to fruition, could have the effect of a flare-gun shot: A recognizable corporation deciding to revive and double down on India's role in its highly competitive global supply chain (Foxconn has operated facilities there previously). It would put substance behind Mr. Modi's rhetoric, which has struck many in India as far from genuine, since he has largely eschewed big-ticket reforms for incremental tinkering.
But is the Foxconn deal really indicative that India is on track, and rolling forward?
In the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, it's clear things are still rotten. Roughly 2,000 people have been arrested in a long-running corruption case involving a state-level examination board that took bribes as it doled out government jobs and highly sought-after spots in medical schools. Shockingly, at least two dozen people connected with the case have died. On July 4, TV journalist Akshay Singh was interviewing the family of a student who had died mysteriously when he sipped from a cup of tea – and reportedly began foaming at the mouth. He later died.
Investigation into the wide-ranging, so-called Vyapam scam (known after the Hindi acronym of the examination board) has since been shifted from the state's law enforcement to India's elite national police force, the Central Bureau of Investigation.
Unfortunately, this lack of faith in local law enforcement is not that unusual: There have been other questionable cases involving poorly paid, barely educated Indian police officers in recent years – particularly near New Delhi, whose populous, city-like suburbs Noida and Gurgaon actually fall within the police jurisdiction of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. India, of course, is not the only country dealing with corruption in its local law enforcement agencies, and cleaning this up is hardly a precursor of a successful manufacturing industry – just look at China, where an enormously successful industrial boom has actually created new and unprecedented opportunities for graft.
But in India, as elsewhere, underdevelopment and corruption go hand in hand.
Business people in India are too smart to set up shop in some lawless part of Bihar, and so industry has tended to cluster in areas either with bold local leaders who woo businesses without taking bribes, such as in Gujarat or Hyderabad, or in areas with considerably higher literacy rates, such as the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Attracting industry by itself, in other words, is not going to solve India's most pressing problems; that will require more leadership and anti-corruption efforts by Mr. Modi and other Indian leaders, and would actually have the effect of bringing jobs to areas that truly need them.