Nearly five centuries ago, Agra was the commercial nerve centre of a flourishing Mughal empire. Thanks to the monuments that were built by the kings and emperors, including the Taj Mahal, this Uttar Pradesh city was just little more than a tourist stopover.
But, almost unnoticed, Agra has come to illustrate another economic revolution. It has, despite its dilapidated state and creaking civic infrastructure, become a hub of new opportunities in the service sector. Such has been the impact of these opportunities that, by the end of 2004 until when data is available, more than six of 10 people here, are now self-employed, up from just five years earlier.
Agra is only symptomatic of a new breed of second-rung Indian cities, beyond the metros of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata, that have begun to savour benefits of India’s 8%-plus economic growth of the last four years.
A comprehensive government survey, conducted every five years, puts Agra right behind Varanasi as the city with the most self-employed, followed by Bhopal, Indore and Patna. A few years back, Agra was not in this picture with Varanasi, Patna, Pune, Lucknow and Kolkata among the top five cities in terms of self-employed males.
As a result, apart from the 40% of population that depends largely on agriculture, and some who still rely on the traditional leather and footwear business and iron foundries, most people in Agra now work in new professions as “self-employed” persons.
According to the National Sample Survey Organization, in 1999-2000, 431 of every 1,000 employed males were self-employed in the city. This has climbed to 603 per 1,000 in 2004-05. Nationally, the number of self-employed persons has also grown, but from 368 to 395 per 1,000, nowhere close to the trend in Agra and a host of similar cities.
New whizz-kids
Chalk it up to people such as 21-year-old Yatendra Singh. When he graduated from the local university in 2005, he never imagined that in little under three years he would be co-owner of two Internet cafés. “The Internet had started taking off in Agra. I would have survived otherwise, but maybe not run an independent business,” he says.
The Internet boom came a little later to Agra than Delhi or Mumbai, but is now within arm’s distance of Singh’s small basement set-up on the Bodhla-Sawan road, as you enter Agra from Sikandra. It marks the spot where Mughal emperor Akbar lies buried. The area around has been developed afresh to meet demand for housing. “At least eight cyber cafés, big or small, have sprung up since 2004 in this area,” Singh points out. So have dyers and dry cleaners, public telephone call providers, real-estate brokers, and courier-delivery shops, all cheek-by-jowl around busy old streets, crammed with scooters and cycle rickshaws.
