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 The squalour of India always shocks me for the first few days after returning from some foreign land but this time, because Bangalore was the first Indian city I visited, the shock sent me reeling. Who cares if the government in Karnataka stays or goes if our most ‘buzzing’ city looks like something between a neglected construction site and a fetid slum?

I flew in almost direct from New York, where India’s finest officials and corporate rajas have been trying to convince American investors that ‘Incredible India’ is sexy at sixty. As someone who takes pride in India being a country as old as time, I thought the idea of celebrating the sixtieth birthday of a country that is a few thousand years old silly and meaningless.

But by the time I arrived at Infosys after an hour’s drive at bullock cart pace down the Hosur Road I realised it was worse. Campaigns to sell India abroad are deluded and dishonest and must stop because we are in danger of deluding ourselves into believing that because the economy is growing at more than nine per cent, we have arrived.

If it takes ten years to build one of the most important roads in the country, then we most certainly have not. If the city we think of as the symbol of post-socialist India looks the way Bangalore does, we have not.

When I first drove down the Hosur Road four years ago, it already looked bad. It was crowded, chaotic, dirty and inadequate. I remember talking about this with Bangalore’s more enlightened citizens and they said it was a matter of time before a new road was ready. Well, the new road is being built but it looks as if it is being built brick by brick, by hand.

Meanwhile, the old road has huge trenches in the middle of it shielded in the old fashioned Indian way with filthy walls of corrugated metal. The builders of the new road make no effort to ease the flow of traffic, so it takes even longer to get to Electronics City.

By the time I got to the glittering campus that Infosys has created as its private oasis I had ample time to study the squalid conditions in which people live in our most happening city.

We must stop fooling ourselves. The only real change since economic reform began fifteen years ago is that the license-quota-permit raj has ended for businessmen. This has speeded up economic growth and created a huge and growing middle class and all of this is good, but it’s time we paid attention to the things that have not happened.

Infrastructure, both physical and social, has not happened. There is a lot of talk about the need to improve our airports, ports and roads but there is more talk than action and no visible sign of urgency. We are running out of time and nobody up there seems to notice.

In the area of social infrastructure, everyone agrees that with the largest young population in the world the most important thing is to improve mass education. But, again all we have is talk and a Knowledge Commission.

Everyone agrees that massive private investment in schools is urgently needed but the licence-quota-permit raj still operates in education, so setting up a school is such a lengthy, bureaucratic process that only those with deep pockets and connections in high places even attempt it.

This would change tomorrow if the prime minister announced that he wanted change, but he says nothing and his boss says nothing either. They are busy persuading their Marxist supporters to continue lending the government their ‘outside’ support, but surely even the Marxists could find nothing objectionable about radical improvements in our education system?

Aha, I speak too soon! It must be jet lag or something, but for a moment I forgot that the Marxists object to all private investment. This is why nothing can happen even if Rahul Gandhi has himself supported the idea of foreign investment in education.

Nothing can happen in terms of labour reform either and nothing can happen by way of privatisation because these are things that make ideological hackles rise into hammers and sickles.

From Bangalore I flew to Mumbai, our commercial capital, and gazed with gathering gloom at the acres and acres of slums that are the first thing you see of the city from the air. For fifteen years (or is it twenty?) we have been told about a slum redevelopment programme. A huge bureaucracy runs this out of fine offices in high buildings, but on the ground, real change is not evident.

‘Incredible India’ is running out of time and you notice this most painfully when you return from some foreign land.