Have now been back in India for just over a week and the transition has not been particularly smooth   – jetlag, combined with baseball withdrawals, is still kicking my ass. Despite this, it is a very interesting time to be in India as the economic and political landscape of the country continues to change rapidly.

For the last decade, the India growth story has been mostly inspiring as the rising tides of the country’s businesses and infrastructure were supposed to help in lifting millions out of poverty. In the last few days, reports peg India’s recent GDP growth well below expectations while strikes due to outrage over fuel prices (Bharat Bandh) have effectively ground cities to a halt. The country also faces other serious issues that signal a significant deferment of India’s 21st century dream.

This article (it appears to be from way back in ‘06), which I saw first on Hacker News, laments a lack of IT talent brought on more or less by a lack of passion for what is being worked on. The resonant point for me was his discussion of the poor worker treatment and dispiriting working conditions in many of India’s large companies (primarily in consulting).

While I can’t speak to the the level of actual talent in the country, I have witnessed the ridiculous restrictions placed on young, incoming workers by large firms. It essentially amounts to indentured servitude for the large part of one’s early career.

Our company primarily hires young people fresh out of college and often competes with major companies when trying to recruit and retain these people. These competitors offer strong salaries and  a prestigious name that students (and their parents) strive for all the way from grade school. Unfortunately, this is coupled with a HUGE deposit that is generally considered a “training expense”. I have seen the amount of this deposit go as high as 6 months of one’s salary! And once the person begins with the company, he or she is required to stay with the company for 2 or 3 years or risk losing the deposit.

In my first job out of school, our only barrier to leaving was that we would have to repay our initial signing bonus if we took off within one year. I have to imagine it is very difficult to motivate a workforce to create strong products or offer solid service when there are these kinds of restrictions hanging over the heads of such a large part of the skilled workforce.

If the economy continues to slow and the career paths for new employees remains so restricted, I can certainly envision an increase in the political turmoil that has been witnessed in the country recently.  One, maybe two, generations of people has grown up with the rosy, up and to the right, Indian growth story that is now being fundamentally challenged from many angles. While I remain bullish on the country as a whole reforms should be a top priority in numerous arenas if India hopes to remain competitive with China and not fall too far behind other emerging behemoths like Brazil and Turkey.

Interesting article from a few days ago in the New York Times about the children of US immigrants leaving to find jobs and start companies in different countries. There have been a lot of articles similar to this in the past few years and as someone in my Twitter feed pointed out, they would all benefit and be more powerful if they were to include a bit more hard data. Nonetheless, it is something to keep an eye on and the stories are pretty neat.

It seems like this trend has been inevitable for almost a decade, especially during the pits of the financial crisis. We have been inundated with articles and news reports about the acceleration of the economy in BRIC-like countries and the likely end of the U.S. as the financial superpower. Now it is beginning to look like both extremes may be a little overstated, as the U.S. economy has rebounded stronger than expected (despite recent shakiness) and China and India have started to decelerate a bit.

This may bode well for job seekers in the US but doesn’t significantly diminish the prospects for people looking to take an international step in their careers. Regions with developing economies offer so many positive things (along with frustrating obstacles, trivial and otherwise) to young professionals. More responsibility, high degrees of uncertainty, and steep cultural and business learning curves all combine to make the experience enriching if not always easy or fun. With the ability to communicate easily from anywhere and the relatively low cost of travel, now is the perfect time for a person contemplating a move to give an overseas assignment a shot.

The term “pain point” is thrown around quite often among people looking to start companies or innovate and expand upon their existing offerings. Although quite abundant in developed parts of the world, large-scale pain points are often either difficult to identify or, if they have been discovered, already being worked on by incredibly smart teams. This makes the market for succeeding in solving peoples’ problems a very competitive one.

During my 3 months in India, I seem to encounter new and different pain points every single day. Many of these problems, like traffic, pollution, and overcrowding, can really only be solved by a coherent combination of government initiatives, innovative private enterprises, and a cultural willingness to accept the new way of life. In India, bringing those three bodies together successfully seems nearly impossible. With this realization, it is easy for someone new to the culture to quickly become accepting of the pessimistic reality of the situation. “This is India”, or TII, is the term I’ve often heard people use to defeatedly explain this.

Fortunately, not every issue facing developing societies has to be solved by unwilling, disorganized, and generally corrupt beurocratic entities. As a daily buyer of things, which I assume most people not living off the grid are, one pain point I am exposed to daily is outdated and inefficient Point of Sale equipment and software. This issue is magnified and multiplied 20x in a place like India, where the systems used to track inventory and execute sales seem to significantly trail the exploding levels of consumer demand. A modern economy needs modern tools and retailers, retaurants, and the like here in India are playing catchup.

My weekend consisted of going out shopping for a few things to bring the level of livability in my apartment up to a 5 out of 10. At then end of the day, I came away with a coffee maker, speakers, and an iron which in sum cost me less than $300. This is what it took to complete the transaction:

• 12 sales associates doing far more to distract from the sale than they were to facilitate it
• 30 minutes of product testing since few stores offer any sort of a return program
• Credit card payment – This required the person at the register to go across the store to a different counter (about 10 minutes wasted waiting). Upon his return, I was made to sign 3 different pieces of paper (and take home about 5 receipts) to complete the transaction.
• Move to another counter to pay for my plastic bags in cash…With this, the store made a total of rs. 3, or around $0.06

My time in the store should have, in total, taken about 20 minutes. It ended up taking almost an hour. This is incredibly frustrating when life here already requires a significant amount of wasted-time just waiting in traffic on the way to the store.

Globally, consumers are forced to deal with these issues daily and the number of people affected will continue to grow as more economies move away from paper money as the sole source of payment. Getting payments right doesn’t seem like it should be all that difficult…but it is. It is very hard to coordinate multiple stores and thousands of SKUs while properly gathering and maintaining customer data. Most business-owners around the world do not have the capital (both monetary and intellectual), let alone the time, to develop any kind of effective system for dealing with these problems.

The massive number of people affected by these problems is what makes a company like Square so important and exciting. Providng low-cost, intuitive tools for commerce may be the “Feed the Children” of our generation. Business ownership equals empowerment for third-world citizens and anything that can help bring more people into the entrepreneurial fold has hugely positive implications for the quality of life in these places.

At this point, Square only runs on iOS and Android devices, meaning that many consumers and proprietors in developing regions are shut out of taking advantage of the benefits. This, however, should be a short-lived issue as smart phones and web access become available to thousands of new people every single day and people in developing nations make up the majority of global smartphone users. The great thing about innovation today is that despite huge remaining inequalities in quality of life across the globe, the gap in access to technology has never been narrower.

So far, products like Square have been relased to much love by the tech blogs and early adopters in places like the US and Europe where people like sticking it to the establishment a bit (lower transaction fees). The most important application of these technologies will come when they can be deployed where there is no establishment. Africa, India, and South America don’t have the decades-long corporate infrastructure that self-preservingly slows certain innovation (most notably financial and health-related).

The story of the success or failure of the world’s aspirational countries will hinge upon whether or not they properly identfy and implement the technologies that will allow them to win small victories over the current systems they have in place. While new roads are imperative, changing the way people and businesses manage their finances will be just as important.