Thread by @svembu

1/ I talked about the thought experiment of building Boeing 747 from scratch in Bihar.

Let me now talk about the other end: making nail clippers in a village.

Nail clipper, hair trimmer, cell phone charger - these are the kinds of products that are doable in small villages.

2/ Today an Indian village grows food and buys everything else from outside.

What they sell has low value compared to all the things they need to buy. That's a fancy way of saying the "terms of trade" are stacked against them.

3/ The village is "solving" that problem by sending it's children as migrant labour to cities. They get uprooted and stay at the margins of urban society.

My own parents came from small villages to Chennai and we were in the lower middle-class margins of Chennai.

4/ We cannot do this to another 500 million Indians. While our situation was better than the vastly poorer migrant labour that pour in to cities today, I still developed an intense dislike of cities as a child and that endures to this day.

Overcrowding does that to you.

5/ If we rule out extensive migration out of villages as a bad solution (and my personal experience as a child of migrants tells me it is unpleasant), we then have no option but to create jobs at the village level.

The obvious jobs are in making the hundreds of household goods.

6/ We can make these goods. A businessman I respect from the textile belt told me he had prepared a list of 500 goods of this nature.

To do this, first we must adopt a positive frame of mind. If we adopt negative thoughts about corruption and "Fear of China" we will fail.

7/ On Fear of China. I know China well and we have operated profitably for close to 20 years there. I have very good Chinese friends.

Fear of China is a monster businessmen build in their minds and we must get rid of that fear.

That fear prevents us from acting.

8/ In reality, China today - thanks to years of growth - has higher labour costs, higher real estate prices and Chinese businessmen also face a steep corruption tax.

Chinese small scale entrepreneurs succeed due to grit and tenacity. Indians can emulate them. Let us study them!

9/ I have always adopted the mindset "I am a humble student of business" and I study excellent companies, be it Chinese or Japanese or German or American or Indian and I try to learn the best from each of them.

I respect them but do not fear them. Get rid of fear!

10/ If we replace "Fear of China" with "Learn from the Chinese" we will find that we can create a lot of jobs.

Thanks to the internet, it is possible to connect the village industries virtually and discover markets and partners easily.