On a cold and rainy morning last week, I drove from Lahore to Islamabad on the best road on the Indian sub-continent. Pakistan’s first motorway is a breathtaking feat of engineering as it cuts dizzyingly through the Hindu Kush mountains. I found myself dreaming of the transformation that would happen if we are lucky enough to one day get a prime minister with the vision to build an access-controlled motorway from Delhi to Mumbai. Transformation is too small a word for the prosperity such a road would bring.

It has always been the humble opinion of this humble column that the way to win the war against poverty is to give the poor the tools to empower themselves. Of these the most important are roads and wherever they have been built they have brought visible change and prosperity. Sadly in India we have not built enough because in our battle against poverty we have preferred to take the charity approach. Under Atal Behari Vajpayee there was a brief moment when the approach changed and the highways that got built under the Golden Quadrilateral speak for themselves.

Dr Manmohan Singh’s government has taken us back to spreading expensive charity in the name of empowering the poor. As an economist, he must know in his heart that this approach does not work but he has to submit to the wishes of his boss and she likes to be seen as Lady Bountiful. Sonia Gandhi appears to believe that economic development is a form of charity, so with the collusion of a gang of jholawala economists she put her personal stamp of approval on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

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