But, this is our way. In the name of fighting poverty, we continue to create cumbersome, unwieldy schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, with loopholes for corruption built into them. Schemes of this kind have succeeded mostly in keeping the poor living in extreme poverty while making a lot of officials very rich.

Smaller, localised schemes are what we need because they can be more easily monitored. The big money should be spent on providing roads, clean water and electricity, because these are tools of empowerment and not mere palliatives.

What saddened me in New York last week was to see the best of corporate India wasting time, effort and money on selling ‘Incredible India’ when they could be playing a far more important role by helping the government of India, and our state governments, reinvent their anti-poverty schemes.

As the Clinton Global Initiative has shown, philanthropy works best when it uses the systems and methods of the corporate world and when everybody profits. If the Indian businessmen and bureaucrats who were in New York last week learned only this from their jaunt, the effort would have been worthwhile. There are few areas in which the public-private partnership is more vitally needed.

Meanwhile, I jogged in Central Park and marvelled at its beauty and the fact that this incredible 843-acre park is 150 years old. We do not have a single Indian city that has a park like this and we will not until we confront our problems of urbanisation and poverty. Grim though they seem, there are easy solutions. What we need to do is look for them.