A related cause is the unresponsiveness of our political system to the needs and rights of average Indians. In Ganjam, a group of young men visiting home from Surat, told me exactly what I hear across rural India: ‘We vote because we care about democracy, but we never expect politicians to deliver on their campaign promises’. So much for giving back to Ganjam’s hardworking migrants — who remit Rs 500 crore each year to Orissa — something of what they’ve contributed.

A final cause of rural India’s problems is our individual and collective indifference to the persistence of poverty. We ignore all the evidence that things are tragically wrong until an embarrassing crisis erupts, whether farmer suicides (Vidharbha), ‘Naxalites’ (Andhra, Chattisgarh, Orissa), ‘hunger’ deaths (Kalahandi), or AIDS (Ganjam). As a young IAS officer pointed out to me caustically, a shortage of shuttlecocks for the Indian badminton team leads to public outrage and prime-time TV coverage but the deadly annual shortage of HIV testing kits is ignored. Let’s face it: our misplaced priorities make each of us as much to blame as Rahul Gandhi, Jayalalithaa or Naveen Patnaik for the development failures afflicting their constituencies, and for the even greater wretchedness of non-VVIP areas.

Siddharth Dube is the author of ‘Words Like Freedom: The Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family, 1947-1997’