On the very day last week that I learned that a property in a leafy avenue in Lutyens Delhi had sold for more than Rs 100 crore, I happened to visit a minister in his home. He was late so I had time to look around and time to reflect on when we are going to realise that we cannot afford to allow our ministers, elected representatives and bureaucrats to live like princes. Not any more. For those of you who may not have seen one let me describe for you an average ministerial bungalow in Delhi.

It is usually set in between one and five acres of land with one acre costing more than Rs 100 crore at current prices. The bungalow itself consists of several large, high-ceilinged rooms and my own estimate is that each of these rooms would accommodate 10 tenements from a Mumbai shanty. In our old socialist days these ministerial bungalows used to be sparsely furnished with badly made PWD (Public Works Department) furniture. This has changed. You see expensive furniture and carpets, bathrooms fitted with modern plumbing and Mantriji spares no effort in getting himself the latest in televisions and computers. The only other people in India who can afford to live as well as our rulers are big industrialists, and in Mumbai many of them live in flats that would fit into two rooms of a ministerial bungalow in Delhi.

Is this fair when half of Mumbai’s citizens live in one-room shacks in the filthiest shanties in the world? In Delhi the situation is not quite so bad but around 20 per cent of its citizens are believed to live in similarly abysmal conditions, and the same is true of other Indian cities. Living standards are no higher in rural India. A windowless hovel is home for our poorer villagers and the 300 million Indian citizens who live below the poverty line would be lucky to get even that. It is estimated that in these wretched homes there are 60 million children who do not get two meals a day.

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