Opinion Incredible India?
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.....
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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 Dubais 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 todays standards. And,everything takes so inexplicably long. Mumbais 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 Indias commercial capital? Why do all our cities look like slums?
As I drove out of Dubai airport into a wondrously clean cityscape of glittering buildings and fine modern mosques,more gloomy thoughts filled my head. The dominant one was why is India so filthy? It is not just our cities that seem hopelessly incapable of disposing of waste,our villages are just as bad. Why? Simple. The problem really is a failure of governance that gets worse at the municipal and panchayat level because of a pernicious trickle down effect. Can we do nothing about this?
In our bad,old socialist days when everything in India was makeshift and second rate,the excuse our mighty mandarins always gave when questioned about Indias shabbiness was that there was no money. That excuse is no longer valid. So now they tell us that improvement takes time. Really? Then,why does it not take time in other countries?
Maybe the problem lies with us. Why do we not demand better public services? Why do we not insist that the streets in which we live are at least as clean as the ones in which our politicians live? In a recent incident in Delhi or Mumbai angry citizens picked up rotting,uncollected garbage from their street and dumped it on the desks of municipal officials. I am not recommending such extreme measures but I would be lying if I said I wholly disapproved.
Whenever I return from my travels and share my gloomy thoughts from abroad with friends in high office,I hear one thing and one thing alone. You cannot compare India with other countries. You cannot compare India with Singapore or Dubai because they are city-states and India is almost a continent. You cannot compare India to Thailand because it is just a tiny country. You cannot compare India to China because India is a democracy and China is a totalitarian autocracy. You cannot compare India to developed Western countries because they got rich by building empires and we did not.
Incomparable,incredible India! Well,its time we demanded more than empty slogans. Its time we demanded at the very,very least that if they cannot improve living standards for us then we can no longer offer officials their pristine VVIP enclaves. When was the last time anyone saw rotting garbage or stinking toilets in the streets in which our ministers live? If this column argues constantly for the need to end the practice of providing our officials with accommodation at taxpayers expense,it is because I believe public services will not improve otherwise. It is because of VIP enclaves that those in charge of governance never notice how bad India looks. It looks very,very bad.
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