There was also the hope that since we had a Prime Minister who was an economist he understood the reasons why so many Indians continue to live in hideous poverty. He has often drawn attention to the neglect of social infrastructure as an important reason. This is why I am disappointed that half way into this government’s term we see no sign of improvements in education, healthcare, public hygiene or sanitation.

These problems are as important as national security because as long as millions of Indians continue to subsist in semi-human conditions we remain as vulnerable as a country if we did not have the army to protect our borders. A recent article in The Herald Tribune by Ifzal Ali, chief economist of the Asian Development Bank, came as a reminder of how grim the situation is. ‘‘Almost half of all Indian children below the age of five are underweight. Infant and child mortality rates are higher than in Bangladesh and Nepal. More surprisingly, India’s level of child malnutrition is higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa.’’

This is shameful. Just as it is shameful that while our infant mortality rate is 60 per thousand live births, tiny Vietnam, only just emerged from decades of war, has an infant mortality rate of 19. While 87 out of 1,000 Indian children die before the age of five, the figure for Vietnam is 23 and for Sri Lanka it is 15.

This disgraceful state of affairs is not because of a shortage of money, although it would help if the Rs 50,000 crore that we have lost on delayed infrastructure projects, as this newspaper pointed out last week, were made available. The problem is that no Indian prime minister to date has found the time to examine what is wrong with the grandiose anti-poverty schemes despite Rajiv Gandhi having pointed out 20 years ago that only 15 paise in a rupee reached beneficiaries.

Government midday meal schemes fail due to pilferage but become instantly successful when an NGO like Akshay Patra starts implementing them. Private Indian healthcare is today as good as the best in the world. So good that the Health Minister boasts of plans to lure millions of medical tourists but corruption and neglect have reduced public healthcare to a farce. Huge expenditure has been made on hospitals that have neither patients nor doctors because the objective of building them was for some politician to line his pockets out of building contracts.

The biggest cause of rural indebtedness is sickness. Everyone knows this but Dr Manmohan Singh’s Health Minister seems more concerned with playing politics at AIIMS.

Things are equally bad when it comes to education. Despite the vaunted Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, government schools are in a terrible state. Recent studies show that children who are supposedly literate cannot write their names or do simple sums. Yet, Dr Manmohan Singh has not found time to appoint a full time Education Minister. Arjun Singh is a dangerously poor substitute and in any case only interested in the low of caste.

Worse still, the Delhi government is currently busy demolishing schools in residential areas. If schools are not going to be in residential areas where should they be? In a country where the shortage of schools is so serious that three-year-old children have to suffer the trauma of admission tests it is lunacy to destroy schools even if they violate building byelaws.

Where sanitation and public hygiene are concerned there are relatively simple solutions as a Dalit sarpanch called Chhaya Kamble has proven in the Maharashtrian village of Malwadi, but to implement them at a national level we need a Leader in Delhi. What we have is a caboodle of ciphers and a non-executive chairman.