There are few things that leave me feeling more pessimistic about India’s future than taking a flight from Mumbai’s international airport to Bangkok’s international airport. Having made this short journey just before writing this piece, the differences between the two airports are still fresh in my mind and I am going to list them here to emphasise why I believe India is never going to catch up with even a small country like Thailand on the infrastructure front.

I arrived at Mumbai airport more than an hour and a half before I was due to take my flight and it’s just as well that I gave myself that much time because I barely made it. At immigration the queues were long because the immigration officers read every passport cover to cover with moments off in between to throw belligerent looks at the departing passenger. After this came an ordeal of waiting endlessly to get past security for the simple reason that there were too few metal detectors. The ordeal did not end after crossing security. I continued to stand in a queue of tired, increasingly irate passengers because, inexplicably, there is only one escalator that takes you down to the departure gates. At the bottom of this single escalator are a sad, little collection of shops that reek of our socialist days.

At Bangkok airport, moving sidewalks took me to the immigration desk in less than five minutes. The immigration officer took less than a minute to examine my visa, my bag arrived within minutes of my arriving at the carousel and I was out of the airport in less than fifteen minutes. And guess what? When I first came to Bangkok in the late seventies, this airport was more dilapidated and decrepit than our airports in Delhi and Mumbai. In 30 years it has been so transformed that it counts among the most modern airports in the world while our airports remain in a state of ‘renovation’ so dodgy that it took one rain storm for the roof to fly off Delhi’s brand, new, privately managed airport.

... contd.