Fred De Sam Lazaro: Sizing up India -- both of them

As it makes its final approach into Bangalore, the city that symbolizes India's embrace of modernity, Gov. Tim Pawlenty's trade delegation might spot a large building that bears a prominent Minnesota symbol of pop culture, if not global trade. It is the headquarters of Target in India.

I wish I were there, for such a trip would have been unthinkable to me when I arrived from Bangalore in the late 1970s to attend college in Duluth. (I subsequently worked as a journalist in almost every corner of Minnesota, then across the world.)

Back in those days, the Mesabi iron mines were a competitive alternative to college; meatpackers were almost all white and could afford to send their children to college, and a governor who championed international trade was nicknamed Goofy. No one knew where Bangalore was, and India evoked images of hungry children -- images that parents used to coax their kids to eat their vegetables.

So much changed in so short a time.

Today it seems the best hope for sustaining an iron industry in Minnesota is a new ore and steel plant that probably will be owned by an India-based company.

However, it is in the record growth of Minnesota's Asian Indian community that the growing ties to Minnesota are most evident -- evident in the Minneapolis skyways on weekdays and in the aisles of Costco or Ikea on weekends. Asian Indians number perhaps 30,000 -- second among Minnesota's Asian populations behind the Hmong -- and, because they are cherry-picked from among India's most-skilled, they are first of any ethnic group in median household income. It is a group of earlier arrivals from this diaspora who urged the governor to make the trip to India, who will shepherd his entourage and who will manage the sensory overload for the first-timers.

Bangalore has seen explosive growth, but it is no Minneapolis or Shanghai. And the Target isn't a real Target, but rather a giant back office. Malls have arrived, and Wal-Mart is trying, but retailing is still largely the domain of small shopkeepers and street vendors.

India's new economy -- the raison d'être and the itinerary for the delegation -- is largely behind the walls of new office parks and on the campuses of global companies, including new Indian ones like Wipro and Infosys. They have transformed Bangalore beyond recognition from the sleepy leafy haven for retirees that was its reputation when I was a child.

Yet plenty is all too recognizable and impossible not to spot for the visitors.

So long a time, so little change.

Cities like Bangalore have become magnets for migrants from rural areas, where 72 percent of Indians live. As many as 800 million people must get by on less than $2 a day. The call-center operator may be India's mascot today, but the starving children have not gone away. There are more malnourished children in India than any other nation on Earth.

"There are two Indias," says S. Ram Krishnan of St Paul, borrowing from the slogan of presidential hopeful John Edwards. Krishnan grew up in Chennai (formerly Madras) and worked for Target early in a 30-year engineering career. Now he spends four months of each year in India, in places nowhere near the governor's itinerary. His passion is to bring clean water and sanitation to rural areas. And he's quick to point to countless other long-time Indian Minnesotans who've come -- or gone -- full circle.

There's retired Honeywell engineer Abul Sharah, who started a public-health clinic in his native Uttar Pradesh, or Franklin Gummadi, who has started microlending and self-help projects. On a larger scale, Bloomington entrepreneur Rajiv Tandon is using online learning to sell what he calls one of America's most exportable commodities: education and training. Of the 3 million graduates who emerge from Indian higher education each year, Tandon says only a tenth are up to world standards. He has contracted with Indian industries to deliver course work from such Minnesota institutions as Dakota County Technical College to India. They train not just information technology workers but also plumbers, welders and auto mechanics, the people you need to build a modern society. India's skills gap provides an enormous market for Minnesota, says Tandon.

It brings to mind another icon from my early Minnesota days. Bill Norris, the late CEO of the late Control Data Corp., promoted the idea that there were good business opportunities in serving the unmet needs of society. The question now is whether that notion can be reborn, like Bangalore, in modern form.

Fred de Sam Lazaro is a correspondent for PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" and director of the Project for Under-Told Stories at St. John's University, Collegeville.