India Has an Agency Problem

A few weeks ago I paid nine dollars for a golden milk latte in a café in San Francisco. Turmeric, oat milk, black pepper, a dusting of cinnamon, served by a barista who explained, gently, like she was letting me in on a big secret, that it has anti-inflammatory properties. The whole time I was thinking about my Dadi, who made this exact thing every time someone in the house had a cough — in a steel tumbler, for free — and which I refused to drink for the first eighteen years of my life because it was the boring medicine-drink that meant you were sick.

Why did it take an American woman in activewear to make me want haldi doodh? Something about where I’m willing to locate value shifted, and it took the drink crossing an ocean, getting rebranded, and coming back with a markup before I’d take it seriously. I think that’s a much bigger story than a latte. I think it’s India’s.

What is agency

Amartya Sen has a distinction I keep coming back to, from Development as Freedom and the Dewey Lectures.

He splits two things we usually fold together. One is your well-being — are you fed, healthy, comfortable. The other is your agency — your freedom to pursue what you’ve decided actually matters, judged against your own goals and not someone else’s idea of what’s good for you. You can have plenty of one and almost none of the other. You can be perfectly well-off and have no agency at all, if everything you’re chasing was handed to you.

Sen meant this about individuals. I want to stretch it to a country. India isn’t short on capability or history.

And it’s most definitely not short of motivation. India might actually be the most motivated place on earth — think the JEE, the 4 a.m. starts, the coaching factories of Kota, parents who haven’t taken a holiday in fifteen years. You can’t tell me this country lacks drive. That’s the trap, though. Motivation and agency aren’t the same resource and we keep confusing them. Motivation is energy — it’s the size of the engine. Agency is whether you get to point it in the direction you want.

But India has an enormous engine bolted to a wheel someone else has held for two hundred years. What it falls short on is the conviction that its own judgment about what is worth doing is enough, that something can count without a stamp from somewhere else. The “locus of evaluation” never came home.

Going back to Sen’s concept of well-being and agency, the obvious objection to focusing on agency is: well, India isn’t even well-off. Eight hundred million people on subsidized grain, per-capita income around $2,500. So who are you Saguna sitting in a café in San Francisco to lecture a poor country about self-actualization and confidence? Feed people first; agency is a luxury good.

Except what I find fascinating is that Sen’s whole point is that this runs backwards. Agency isn’t the reward you collect after development, it’s what produces development. His life’s work was famine, and the finding is brutally simple: famines basically don’t happen in functioning democracies with a free press. Not because democracies are richer, but because people with a vote and a voice don’t get quietly left to starve. The bread follows the agency, not the other way around.

To be clear, this is not the whole explanation. Capital matters. Distribution matters. purchasing power matters. State capacity matters. You cannot confidence your way into fabs, ports, laboratories, or globally trusted institutions. But agency explains a specific failure mode: what capable people choose to build when they do have options. A country that doesn’t trust its own judgment under-invests in its own problems because its best people are often off chasing validation in someone else’s market. The builders I’ll get to all generated enormous well-being — sight for millions, milk for a nation, jobs in villages the cities wrote off — because they backed their own read instead of waiting for permission. Agency came first and well-being was an output.

The underlying hubris dilemma

Indians seem to suffer from two opposite diseases at once.

There’s under-confident India: The engineer who can’t believe his code is good until someone in the SF office reviews it. The Indian startup that incorporated in Delaware before has a single paying customer, because that’s what real companies do. The “phoren-returned” tag in a marriage profile doing more work than any actual quality. The person who spends a few years in the Bay Area and comes home suddenly anointed, as if the wisdom was in the zip code.

And there’s over-confident India: which looks like the opposite and is the same thing in a different outfit. The AI India Summit was a “success” yet there is no generational AI product from India yet, the India that has decided, loudly, that it’s the next AI superpower, that the airplane and plastic surgery and the internet were all in the Vedas if you read them right. The WhatsApp forwards. The armies that descend on any foreign journalist who writes something unflattering.

For a long time I thought these were two distinct problems — the first one being a colonial inferiority complex and the second a recent nationalist overcorrection. But actually they might be stemming from the same thing. Both are ways of not being measured on your own terms, right now, by your own standards. Both are excuses to depart a room where the work is truly happening.

How did we get here

The colonial project on the mind wasn’t subtext, it was the specification. Macaulay wrote it down in his 1835 Minute on Indian Education, openly: the goal was to manufacture “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” He had not, by his own admission, read a single Sanskrit or Arabic book; he just knew “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” It was the genesis of the brown sahib.

And up until now, seventy-eight years later, we were still largely aiming all that motivation outward. At the foreign degree. The H-1B. The FAANG offer. The high rank at companies abroad. I am hoping and beginning to see glimmers of a world where the best young Indians no longer dream in green cards.

Bichitr, Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings (c. 1615–18), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian. The Mughal emperor turns toward a Sufi holy man and away from the Ottoman sultan and King James I of England below him representing a hierarchy that places his own authority at the top of the frame.

What we make, and what we don’t

Look at what India actually produces.

We’re spectacular at digital infrastructure at scale. UPI is the largest real-time payments system in the world, handling nearly half of all real-time payment transactions on the planet. We make a huge share of the planet’s vaccines and generic medicine, and we run the back office of global technology e.g. TCS, Infosys, the services economy that executes other people’s specs. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft. Sundar Pichai runs Google. Shantanu Narayen runs Adobe. We don’t just staff the modern digital world, we run the West’s flagship companies. We just haven’t built India’s.

Now look at the products. Flipkart, Zepto, Zerodha - these are real companies that have genuinely killed it. But look at what they won on: logistics, distribution, regulatory navigation, the sheer operational grind of serving India. That’s the hardest game there is here, and they cracked it. What none of them are, though, is beautiful. India has yet to ship a single product the world reaches for because it’s a joy to use — high-taste, meticulously crafted, the way people reach for the iPhone or Spotify. We are extraordinary at operations. We have not yet made the beloved thing in the digital sphere.

And it’s not that the taste isn’t there. It’s that almost every Indian who’s made something beautiful made it inside a Western company, on a Western team, for a Western user. The craft travels; it just hasn’t been done here. Which tells you the gap was never ability. It’s that building a beloved product takes conviction in your own read of what should exist — the nerve to make it before anyone’s signed off — and that’s the one thing our rooms don’t pay for. They pay for reliability, execution, and scale. Beauty asks for the opposite.

What it looks like when we hold the wheel

In 1999, a venture capitalist told Sridhar Vembu he was thinking too small. Vembu said no, never took a rupee of outside money, and built Zoho, now a billion-dollar company taking on Salesforce, all built from a town in rural Tamil Nadu, hiring kids without degrees and training them himself.

In 1955, dairy scientists worldwide agreed you couldn’t make milk powder from buffalo milk. When Verghese Kurien asked Nestlé to try, they told him Indians couldn’t handle the technology. An Indian engineer, H.M. Dalaya, did it anyway, and Amul went on to beat Nestlé at the thing it had called impossible. Most of the milk Indians drink runs from that one refusal to let a Western consensus have the last word.

Seventy years apart but it’s the same play: notice that the people saying it can’t be done are mostly defending their own map, and back yourself anyway. The maddening thing is how rarely we do it.

And now the excuse is about to run out

For most of our history there was a real excuse, and it was access. The capital, the institutions, the labs — all of it sat somewhere else, and we were locked out on purpose. “We couldn’t” was just true. That’s the part that’s rapidly changing: the creative and coding tools are here now, the same ones everyone else has. Which means the interesting question is no longer what were we denied. It’s the one I keep circling and can’t answer cleanly: why do we make beautiful digital things everywhere except at home?

I don’t have the answer. I have the pattern — the same person, dependable here and inspired there — and a suspicion that it has less to do with talent than with whose gaze we’re building under without noticing. So when you make something, ask whose eyes you’re checking it against. Whose approval decides, in the quiet second before you ship, whether it’s any good - is it a room in San Francisco, a former boss, some imagined arbiter who was never going to show up?

And I don’t actually think this is only an Indian problem. India is just where I can see it most clearly, because the gaze we defer to has a colonial address. But the deferral itself is everyone’s. Agency isn’t a thing you resolve once and own; it’s a muscle you use in the small moments — the feature you build because it should exist versus the one you build because it’ll read well, the work you trust versus the work you wait to have approved. You get more of it the same way you get more of anything: by noticing when you’ve handed it away, and, more often than is comfortable, taking it back.

Thanks to Ria Mirchandani, Sushant Goel and Anna Gat for edits and encouragements