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 On a cold and rainy morning last week, I drove from Lahore to Islamabad on the best road on the Indian sub-continent. Pakistan’s first motorway is a breathtaking feat of engineering as it cuts dizzyingly through the Hindu Kush mountains. I found myself dreaming of the transformation that would happen if we are lucky enough to one day get a prime minister with the vision to build an access-controlled motorway from Delhi to Mumbai. Transformation is too small a word for the prosperity such a road would bring.

It has always been the humble opinion of this humble column that the way to win the war against poverty is to give the poor the tools to empower themselves. Of these the most important are roads and wherever they have been built they have brought visible change and prosperity. Sadly in India we have not built enough because in our battle against poverty we have preferred to take the charity approach. Under Atal Behari Vajpayee there was a brief moment when the approach changed and the highways that got built under the Golden Quadrilateral speak for themselves.

Dr Manmohan Singh’s government has taken us back to spreading expensive charity in the name of empowering the poor. As an economist, he must know in his heart that this approach does not work but he has to submit to the wishes of his boss and she likes to be seen as Lady Bountiful. Sonia Gandhi appears to believe that economic development is a form of charity, so with the collusion of a gang of jholawala economists she put her personal stamp of approval on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

As someone who said from day one that it would fail as similar schemes had failed in the past, I felt sadly vindicated when this newspaper reported last week that it has failed miserably. An audit by the Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) reveals that just 3.2 per cent of registered needy households in 200 of India’s poorest districts managed to get the guaranteed 100 days of work a year. The average employment the grandiose, very expensive scheme succeeded in providing was 18 days per needy household a year. The only achievement of the scheme has been to keep the desperately poor as desperately poor as ever at huge expense to the Indian taxpayer.

Will this make our profligate policy makers realise that the way forward is empowerment and not charity? Unlikely. The scheme is the Congress president’s only contribution to economic thought, so who would dare oppose it? Her son and heir announced shortly after becoming party general secretary that he wanted the scheme extended to every district in India. It will be and the poor will continue to remain poor because even if the promised hundred days of work are provided it works out to just over Rs 16 a day. Beggars in Mumbai and Delhi make more.

In the hope that there is someone up there listening, may I make a humble suggestion. Now that the CAG has declared it a failure the best way forward is for the scheme to be scrapped and replaced by smaller, more localised schemes that involve some skills training. India is desperately in need of masons, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, mechanics and other skilled workers required for the massive construction boom that has only just begun. If the government is serious about lifting people out of poverty and giving them half a chance at a better life then we have to move from charity to empowerment. There is no other way.

Every time I go to Pakistan I find myself irritated by the fact that there is much more visible poverty in India than in that country. This is absurd since we have a much stronger economy, so we must be doing something wrong. We are. We have wasted, and continue to waste, hundreds of thousands of crore rupees on poverty alleviation schemes that cannot work because they are so grandiose that they inevitably leak like sieves. We must stop throwing good money after bad or we will continue to lose the war against poverty.

In the old days, when we wore our poverty like a badge of honour — we are the poorest country in the world we liked to say — it did not matter that our poverty ‘alleviation’ schemes mostly failed. Times have changed and we are now proud of the number of Indian billionaires that get into international billionaire lists. Their billions mean nothing unless we succeed in winning the war against poverty. If we want every Indian to have access to a decent standard of living we have to begin by acknowledging that poverty does not need alleviation. It must be destroyed like some hideous virus.