Shashank Mani’s 5,000-Mile Paths To Prosperity

It seems India is on everyone’s manufacturing short list. Apple’s India-produced iPhone exports ramped to nearly $13 billion in 2024. Firms from Tesla to Intel are considering the country for production. Rumors of India-US trade deals percolate.

Interest in India’s manufacturing potential transcends cheap labor. The world’s most populace country also offers deep tech knowledge and a new universe of customers.

Unlike China before, however, India’s rise will likely not be primarily an export-driven story. While China achieved rapid development from the early 1980s onward by becoming “factory to the world,” internal consumption lagged, creating challenges the country faces today.

Successful development going forward requires new paths, because the technologies driving change fundamentally differ from those of the past.

It’s 2025_— Not 1985.

Industrial age technologies biased companies toward large-scale production and standardization in locations with abundant cheap labor, often locating factories thousands of miles from ultimate demand. This approach also relied on a stable world trading system, largely provided by Pax Americana of the past 80 years.

Unfortunately, such optimized global supply chains prove vulnerable, even brittle, in the face of geopolitical tensions, trade wars and severe climate events. Digital Age technologies offer solutions and enable—require—an alternative development model.

Due to all things digital, India has the transformative opportunity to encourage internal consumption in parallel with seeking export markets. This parallel path to prosperity offers an emerging development model for the coming decades. Companies and countries that understand the pivotal distinctions between Industrial Age and Digital Age technologies are far more likely to win.

By Indians, For Indians: Prosperity Via Proximity

In April I had the opportunity (thanks to Hari Sripathi) to join a private dinner with Shashank Mani, a new member of India’s parliament and a former top executive with PWC India. We gathered in New York with a dozen investors and prominent members of the Indian diaspora to learn about his vision for India’s future.

As Mr. Mani describes in his bestseller, Middle of Diamond India: National Renaissance Through Participation and Enterprise, most development in India has centered on tier-one cities like financial capital Mumbai and technology hubs like Bangalore and Pune. Yet hundreds of millions of Indians live in second and third tier cities and surrounding areas. Mani argues that “if India fails to bring the vast middle into the future, then India itself fails.”

In addition to supporting tech entrepreneurs, the country must catalyze home-grown businesses responsive to local needs. Enabling people to start businesses serving local communities and regional customers provides a sustainable development engine less vulnerable to geopolitical challenges and the whims of overseas consumers.

The great news is that digital technologies drive value creation ever closer to the moment of demand, a trend known as proximity. They enable more sophisticated kinds of businesses to thrive anywhere.

India’s outsized success with IT outsourcing offers hope; however, it also reflects the old model of services export reliant on highly educated cheap labor–and it’s at great risk due to AI. New technologies can bring other types of value creation closer to home.

India Leapfrogs The West

Consider healthcare. Over the past four years, cancer care startup Karkinos–acquired in 2024 by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries–has created 80 centers across 12 Indian states, having so far screened over 3 million people for cancer. Many of those receiving care live in remote villages, heretofore without access to such diagnostics and treatment.

As described by entrepreneur and technology visionary Vivek Wadhwa, Karkinos’s “digital backbone ensures every patient’s journey is mapped and monitored, closing the gaps that typically plague cancer care in low-resource settings. The entire experience is laid out—like an Uber for cancer care—with everything digitized and coordinated seamlessly.”

Karkinos exemplifies how we can do things we could never have done before, and do so even in remote, resource constrained environments. Just the sort of model to bring prosperity to India’s Diamond Middle—or even here at home in the USA.

Imagine this model of proximate value creation across all industries and the world. I’ve visited communities powered by small-scale solar in Bangladesh and witnessed rapid drone delivery of medical supplies across Rwanda. These examples foreshadow this emerging path of development, distinct from the Industrial Age model of cheap-labor, high-scale manufacturing for export.

Toward A Banyan Revolution

Mani advocates that India must shift its mindset “from the bottom of the pyramid to the middle of the diamond.”

Rather than viewing India chiefly as a poor nation in need of lift from above, it’s time to unleash the expanding middle class nationwide. By awakening their entrepreneurial vitality, India can create “millions of success stories.”

His proposed “Banyan Revolution” envisions entrepreneurial networks spreading across the country, much like the far-reaching roots of a banyan tree. Companies producing products and services for local and regional consumption, enabled by technology.

Mani’s vision centers on udyamita, a concept that describes an entrepreneurial spirit wider than the usual notion of entrepreneurship. Udyamita resonates with the startup energy I’ve witnessed in India’s technology hubs like Bangalore and Hyderabad, but additionally emphasizes shared prosperity and community commitment.

To help catalyze this vision, Mani founded Jagriti Yatra in 2008. The non-profit takes young aspiring entrepreneurs on a 15-day, nearly 5,000-mile circumnavigation of India via train. Participants are known as “Yatris” (travelers) and join a community of over 9,000 program alumni from India and beyond.

India’s Path Forward

Replicating China’s path to development would be a pivotal mistake. Automation and robotics mean factories require fewer workers. Consumers increasingly seek personalized products.

A home market of 1.4 billion people with a fast-expanding middle class can create enormous demand for everything from housing and mobility to smartphones and healthcare. Meeting this demand with domestic production will not only boost GDP, but also has the potential to encourage globally competitive companies. As Mani suggests, a “new modernity” can emerge, one that is technologically advanced and sustainable, yet aligned with India’s culture and context.

For all of India’s strides, bureaucratic inertia and corruption often stifle innovation and enterprise. Navigating permits and approvals can be painfully slow. Mani asserts, “government must become an enabler rather than a constraint.” Everyone at our recent dinner agreed that India has much work to do in this regard.

Nonetheless, hopeful conditions converge: a demographic dividend, a reform-minded, growth-oriented government, a globe-spanning diaspora. If visions like Mani’s, Wadhwa’s and others manifest, expect to witness new paths to prosperity within the most populous country in history.