I have one word to say after completing my trip to India (the first after completing my business school) - "irrational exuberance".
I saw irrational exuberance all over the place. I saw it in real estate. A view of Hyderabad area from the air exemplifies it. All you see from the flight when you are landing in
Begumpet airport is squares and squares of land. Every empty piece of land you can see is fortified with walls of bricks around the plot to fend off people
forcefully claiming the land. My native place, a village in south
India is well known for its rice produce, farming has been the occupation of 99% of the people in that area for generations. Now, farming land (err ... real estate) is being treated like a stock market. Land which has been in one hand (the farmer) for decades has changed more than half a dozen hands in the last 2 years. You visit any land in the place and you will be swarmed with real estate brokers all over you !.
Here's one more - The AP government announced some land in
Anantapur district as a
SEZ (Special Economic Zone) and the land basically is acres and acres of desert with no water or infrastructure. The next day, you can see dozens of
Sumos and
Innovas (the latest Toyota van which you can see all over the place now) filled with real estate brokers trying to buy the land at exorbitant prices.
There is irrational exuberance in the stock market. My brother owns a small stock brokerage (the only one for about 50 villages around), It was
dumbstruck to see people who are farmers, probably have stopped their studies at 10
th grade (I have known some of them for years) talk about puts and calls. No wonder, the
BSE has been going up like crazy, almost 5 times up since July 03.
I saw irrational exuberance in the students there. One of my
friends in
Tirupati (the town that I live, probably the second tier city in my state) was trying to recruit students with ASP and flash knowledge from about a dozen local
MCA (Master of Computer Applications) schools and he would not get a response when he posted 10K rs salary per month. I visited
IIT Bombay's research wing for half a day, talking to professors and students. Granted the graduate students there are from second tier schools in India but the research going on there is sub par to the second tier schools in US.
The power cuts have gone worse. I never saw power cuts in the month of December and January in AP, I experienced power cuts for
at least couple of hours a day in
Visakapatnam and
Tirupati. The roads have gotten much better though.
My gut feeling is that India is going towards a hard landing. Granted, I visited there for one month and I visited only couple of states. Granted I am not following all the major economic indicators in India and the underlying currents. Personally, I am scared to death to invest any money in India now. Personally, I am scared that India will remain a BPO center and will fall apart like a pack of cards if something happens to the foreign capital inflow.