Gondwana

 Austria drops all tarrifs with India

Shruthi introduced me to the concept of neti, basically, “not that.” It could be a slogan for India’s third way—unlike America, unlike China, not this, not that. I’m rooting for them. Unlike Europe’s third way, which seems to be to regulate, India’s third way wants to build in public. Halfway through the trip, we had a wonderful conversation with Pramod Varma, the architect of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It would be no exaggeration to say that UPI, which processes nearly half of the world’s real-time digital payments, has done more for financial inclusion than any technology in history. Most of us, from the West, pressed him late into the night on why the private sector couldn’t do what UPI did. Maybe there are just idiosyncratic things about India, and maybe the private sector could’ve done it. But the fact is UPI is a huge success, which, because I didn’t learn how to replicate it, I can only credit to the architect’s boundless optimism.