Last week this newspaper got two of the government’s economic advisors to write a ‘very, very happy Diwali’ piece and it was hard not to be more than slightly cheered up at the end of reading it. Listen to this. In a single recent month two million mobile phones were added to the Indian market. We are currently building 11 kilometres of road a day as opposed to the 11 kilometres a year we built for more than forty years. Exports of automobiles and automobile components have doubled in the past three years. Our ports are twice as efficient now as they used to be and when you add all this to our stupendous success in the software sector and a visibly more purposeful approach to economic reform we can safely conclude that India is doing better than ever before.

There is a tangible optimism in the air that goes beyond Diwali festivities and the best monsoon in years. As someone who spends much time travelling in the ‘real India’ may I say that it is thrilling to see work on the Prime Minister’s dream highway project continuing late into the night in rural parts that have never seen a proper road. Equally thrilling to travel down the highways that have already been built and notice that in villages along the route the 21st century has arrived skipping a couple of centuries in between. Where there was, till not so long ago, human habitation of the most primitive kind — dung heaps, flies, dirty drains and underfed children — there are now signs of dramatic change.

You notice in the clean uniforms and red ribbons of schoolgirls, in the manner in which farmers discuss government policies, in the awareness of political issues and in the consumer goods that now flood village shops that till ten years ago did not even sell soap. If Atal Behari Vajpayee is remembered for nothing else, he will be remembered for the roads he built.

This is what empowerment is about. Even the most ordinary people when provided with the tools of development can do the rest for themselves. Give them the roads, the railways, public transport, electricity and drinking water and they will do the rest.

My grouse against Nehruvian socialism is that this is precisely what it did not do. Instead of building the tools of empowerment it crippled the average Indian by teaching him to believe that all he needed to do was sit back and be a good boy (by voting Congress) and the state would take care of all his needs. This led to an entire generation of Indians growing up to believe that the state had a broom and a magic wand that would provide him with shelter, food and prosperity. In pursuit of this mad dream we continue to spend more than Rs 30,000 crore a year on rural development programmes that have mostly been named after members of the Nehru dynasty. Indira Awas Yojana, Rajiv Gandhi Schools and the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, to mention only three. It is wrong to use taxpayers money as if it were a family trust but it accurately illustrates the family’s approach to development.

Mercifully, the Vajpayee government has changed course but not enough. If the Prime Minister showed more of the foresight and courage that built the roads he would make a few more drastic but essential changes. The rural development programmes need to be abolished. They help mainly officials so they would not be even missed. The money saved could then be used in a process of decentralisation that would put more development money into the hands of village panchayats so that the average voter could watch more easily where it was being spent. The argument against doing this is that village headmen can be as corrupt as anyone else. True. But in most villages everyone knows when he is corrupt and get rid of him as fast as the next election comes along.

The power sector is another area in which we have not yet seen a sufficient change of course. Instead of forcing people to rely on the inefficient, corrupt services of bankrupt state electricity boards why not open production and distribution up completely so that villages and towns could produce and sell their own power.

Anyone who thinks that the rural poor will complain needs to travel in the villages to see how many people are already complaining about being charged for electricity that they get for no more than a couple of uncertain hours. Wherever I have gone I have heard people say that they are prepared to pay for electricity if regular, reliable supplies are guaranteed.

The railways, the average Indian’s main means of travel, also need drastic change. We must be the only country left in the world where railway toilets continue to be a hole in the floor. And, we must be the only country left where railway stations look like slums and airports like second class railway waiting rooms. No country aspiring to claim 21st century as its moment of glory can get there on public transport as rickety as this.

We cannot hope to go much further either as long as we cling to ‘socialist’ urban land ceiling laws that have turned our cities into slums. If Mumbai and Kolkata resemble expensive shanty towns it is because real estate developers continue to be condemned as evil ‘builders’ who are the enemies of poor. The truth is that if the thirty per cent of our population that lives below the poverty line has one real enemy, it is the state. It is only the poor who still miss out on a ‘very, very happy diwali’.