Every time I go to a country that used to be way behind India and is now way ahead, gloomy thoughts fill my head and as a responsible columnist I feel it my duty to share them with you. I write this week from Dubai. I first came here in the late Seventies when it was no more than a grubby, little smugglers’ outpost. I remember that the airport looked like a collection of tin sheds and the road to Abu Dhabi was a narrow highway that had the ominous feel of taking you forever into the seamless desert. In India, we were ahead in every sense. And, if our poorer citizens flocked here in droves it was because ‘socialist’ India created only a handful of government jobs. The Sheikhs of Dubai had many more on offer. They needed cheap labour to create a modern country out of the desert.

They succeeded. When on a balmy evening last week I landed at Dubai’s vast and very modern airport, two questions came to mind. How had Dubai managed to transform itself so rapidly and why does India continue to stagger towards 21st century standards of human existence at the pace of a bullock cart.

Some Indian airports have improved recently but we do not have one that measures up to today’s standards. And, everything takes so inexplicably long. Mumbai’s international airport has been under improvement for years but still looks very bad. Even when it is finished one distant day it will remain squashed between acres of slums that tell the foreign investor even before he touches down that he comes to a squalid land of desperate poverty. Why is it so hard to persuade those who live in unspeakable squalor to move to better accommodation? Why are we still discussing these things when it is clear that all of Mumbai will be a gigantic slum in twenty years unless urgent measures are taken now to halt urban decay? Why has that scheme named after poor old Jawaharlal Nehru failed to bring minimal change to India’s commercial capital? Why do all our cities look like slums?

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