‘The next decade belongs to India’: Meet the winners of rising power’s economic boom

By Jessie Yeung, Priti Gupta and Esha Mitra, CNN
Photographs by Noemi Cassanelli, CNN

Mumbai, India (CNN) — As Indians head to the polls in a massive ongoing nationwide election, much attention has focused on the country’s explosive growth under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership.

During his past decade in office, India’s fast-growing economy has become the world’s fifth largest as the country woos foreign investors and embarks on a massive infrastructure transformation, spending billions on new highways, ports, airports and railways.

While not everyone has benefited and income inequality has deepened — millions still live in sprawling slums and youth unemployment has soared — Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are widely expected to win another five-year term and push forward that economic expansion.

That’s partly because many in the world’s most populous country, especially among the younger generation, share a common belief: India is on the rise.

More than 40% of India’s 1.4 billion people is under 25: a massive, tech-savvy and mostly English-speaking labor force, with their eyes set on the future.

Like millions of migrants from across the country, many of them are drawn to the country’s financial capital Mumbai, full of aspiration and ambition. And it’s stories like these that inspire them.

The tech developer

As a kid, Javed Khatri loved going to the train station. Not to catch a ride or watch the endless flow of people – but to stand near the ticket booth and glimpse the mainframe computers behind the counter.

Growing up poor in the slums of Mumbai, he’d never used a smartphone or computer. The screens and machines at the train station fascinated Khatri, the son of a carpenter and a housewife.

“In the region where I used to stay, one of the best things that one could think of was just to complete 10th grade, and then work at a call center or sell vegetables or work at a garage or do some kind of odd jobs,” says Khatri, now 30. “That was our topmost ambition.”

But he was lucky, he says. Unlike many children in the slums, his parents encouraged him to focus on education rather than start working young to help support the family.

He completed 10th grade – the first person in four generations of his family to do so – then studied computer science at an engineering college. But it was a shock to the system.

On his first day, the class was given tasks that Khatri’s more privileged peers sailed through easily. Meanwhile, he was trying to figure out how to use a mouse and type on a keyboard.

“That’s where people started mocking me, they started making fun of me,” he tells CNN from the high-rise building where he now works. “I considered quitting engineering at one point in time because it was becoming unbearable.”

He sank into a six-month depression — but it was also a transformative period. He threw himself into learning everything he could. Online, he befriended people from around the world on forums, and took entrepreneurship courses. He was so fixated he often only slept four or five hours a night.

“That was the hunger to learn back then,” he says. “I got introduced to a whole new world altogether.”

He started building apps and small businesses with his classmates, who began seeking out his company after noticing his improved skills. After graduating, he decided to start a mobile app developer with two co-founders and only 20,000 rupees (about $240) to his name.

He was under pressure, with his parents and two younger siblings depending on his success. But his company forged ahead, and after several years he sold it for $2 million.

He is now building a new online platform to connect tech firms with engineers, and says his success has changed the trajectory of his family. He moved them all out of the slum, and he supports his parents’ early retirement. Both his siblings went to college and pursued their own careers.

None of this would have been possible a generation ago, he says.

“Over the last 10 years, people have got access to the right kind of information with the help of the internet,” he says. Now, the government is encouraging more startups, with growing awareness around entrepreneurship thanks to business reality shows like “Shark Tank,” and its Indian spin-off.

Among India’s large cohort of young people, “more and more people are opting for entrepreneurship and creating more opportunities for the world and the country itself,” he says. “This itself is a big sign that the next decade belongs to India.”

The influencer

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, college student Apoorva Mukhija moved back home with her parents — and hated it immediately.

In their small township, “everybody knew everybody, everybody talked about each other,” she says. Without good friends nearby, she turned to Instagram and started posting comedy videos.

“Content was my only escape, it kept me sane,” she says. “I was genuinely really desperate to talk to somebody, and so the camera was my friend.”

It felt like a natural step; Mukhija had always been the class clown, she says. But with much of the world confined to their homes, there was an unprecedented demand for online entertainment – and creators like her.

She kept posting videos as she finished her computer science degree, on topics ranging from boredom in class to being reprimanded by parents, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers.

But she hadn’t planned to be a content creator, so after graduation she took a job with a tech firm in Bangalore, the southern city known as “India’s Silicon Valley.”

“Then one day I just woke up, realized … (my job) just didn’t pay as well as content did, and I hated living in that city,” Mukhija, 22, tells CNN from a pastel-pink couch at her new apartment in Mumbai, which she says is her “dream city.”

Her career has thrived, winning her recognition from local media and amassing 1.3 million Instagram followers, many of whom regularly stop her in the street for a selfie.

The internet holds a wealth of opportunity for young Indians, Mukhija says.

The country’s influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth more than $281 million in 2024, and $405 million by 2026, according to an April report by consultancy EY India.

Ubiquitous smartphones and social media are fueling this growth. There is expected to be 740 million active smartphone users in India by 2030, according to EY India. That’s still less than half the population – underscoring the room for growth.

And there’s money to be made. Influencer marketing firm Kofluence estimated in a report this year that Indian influencers with more than 1 million Instagram followers can earn anywhere from 300,000 to 1,500,000 rupees (about $3,600 to $18,000) monthly depending on the size of their audience. That’s a handsome sum in a country where the annual gross domestic product per capita is still around $2,400, according to the World Bank.

This new, exciting space has opened doors for young creators like Mukhija, who just completed filming in her first acting role. Filmmakers are increasingly seeking out influencers to attract their fanbase, she says, adding: “I don’t go for auditions, auditions come to me.”

And, more significantly, she’s been able to share her success with her parents, a civil servant and an English teacher.

Though she’d grown up with privileges like private school and domestic family holidays, it was thanks to her parents’ sacrifices, she says. Her father had driven the same car for 16 years despite its frequent breakdowns, and they had never traveled outside India before.

So in late 2022, she surprised her family with tickets to Dubai, their first international trip. The video, posted on Instagram, shows her younger brother gleefully jumping on the bed, and her mother wiping her eyes before pulling Mukhija into a hug.

“My dad comes from nothing, he has built himself up,” she tells CNN. “So it’s just nice that they’ve given me so much and maybe I can give a fraction of it back to them.”

She’s dreaming bigger for herself, too. She has applied to MBA programs in London and California, which wouldn’t have been possible without her content creation income.

And with so many people across the country tuning in on their phones, that rise isn’t slowing anytime soon.

“Everybody’s a content creator today,” Mukhija says. “And with this much population, you ought to have an audience, no matter what kind of content you’re making … In India, it’s so easy to just find somebody to watch your content.”

The shoemaker

Jameel Shah caught the Bollywood bug as a teenage runaway, fascinated by the sight of movie stars plastered on billboards in India’s capital.

“I wanted to see them, and someone told me I would not find Bollywood stars in Delhi, but in Mumbai,” he says.

At age 13, Shah ran away from his village in Bihar, India’s poorest state, where his father wasn’t earning enough from farming to send the kids to school. Seeking work, he ran off to Delhi without telling anyone — but was soon on his way to Mumbai, the birthplace of Hindi cinema.

But once in Mumbai, he was scammed out of his savings by a friend who disappeared after making false promises to introduce him to Bollywood stars. He followed the scammer to Bangalore before he ran out of money and became stranded.

That proved to be a turning point.

Shah started working as a security guard at a building that housed a dance studio, where he watched people whirl and stomp across the floor with wide-eyed intrigue – until the studio owner agreed to let him learn for free.

Dancing with female partners was foreign and shocking. “Where I came from, one cannot be at such close proximity with women,” says Shah, 40. “There was a shortage of men in the class, so I was given two women to dance with, which made me very happy.”

By the time he returned to Mumbai as an 18-year-old, his passion for dance had taken root and he continued learning for free under a Bollywood choreographer while working odd jobs.

Every week, he would walk from his home in Dharavi, Asia’s biggest slum, to dance classes in an affluent nearby district of tall office buildings, upscale hotels and foreign consulates.

Seeing all this, “I still wanted to do something better in life,” Shah says.

Finally, he saw his opportunity in the expensive imported dance shoes required for class.

“I wanted to make similar shoes that were printed with ‘Made in India,’” Shah says.

He took two samples back to the narrow alleys of Dharavi, a long-established hub for leather and textile manufacturers. With their expertise, and his own experience working in bag and wallet factories, Shah began experimenting.

After four years of trial and error, Shah Shoes was born.

The business grew, attracting stylists and choreographers who redistributed the shoes to dance studios. And they even made it onto the big screen.

“I have made shoes for a lot of Bollywood stars like Priyanka Chopra and Katrina Kaif. Many times I am not aware that these actors have used my shoes; it’s only when I see them dancing (in movies) I realize that they were made by me because of their unique cut, design and style,” Shah says.

One career highlight was when a choreographer introduced him to Kylie Minogue. “She loved my shoes and bought eight pairs,” he says, excitedly showing CNN a photo of himself with the Australian pop star.

Some 17 years on, Shah Shoes has helped support his family back in Bihar, including six siblings. He’s bought a house for his parents, and started an education center in his home village teaching literacy to those who can’t afford school.

“I never imagined I would reach such an important stage in my life as my only obsession was to meet Bollywood stars. But today I make these wonderful shoes,” he says.

A key tool was the rise of social media, particularly Facebook, helping him find customers – which Shah credited to Prime Minister Modi’s push for a “digital India.”

And, he added, “my business will just keep growing with the kind of economic growth we see in India.”

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