The Dark Reality Behind India's Promising Growth
In the centre of Delhi, one of the world's biggest, dirtiest, noisiest cities, is an island of calm. Here, government ministers live in vast, state-owned villas; judges, generals and senior bureaucrats walk their dogs across well-watered lawns as servants scrub their government cars; top politicians confer in compounds and the wives of unimaginably wealthy industrialists hold lunch parties catered by top chefs. You live here and visit India.
Last week, India visited this island in the shape of a giant power cut.
Such outages are a daily occurrence for the rest of the population – or at least the two-thirds of India's 1.2bn inhabitants who actually have any electricity supply. But they are not for India's elite. For the latter, power guarantees power. The bureaucrats in charge of Delhi's grids switch off the supply to hospitals before they plunge the homes of top politicians into darkness. But this time the lights did go off. And so the residents of the most upmarket parts of the city – so confident of their power supplies that they do not have generators – had to sit in the fetid monsoon temperatures of 35 degrees like everyone else.
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But it is increasingly difficult to reconcile the optimism surrounding India with the reality. In a recent book surveying the developing world, analyst and investment banker Ruchir Sharma says that India has, at best, only a 50% chance of becoming what he calls "a break-out nation". A reversal of recent fortunes is also a possibility, he argues. Other countries have suffered decline after a period of rapid growth. But this thought barely appears to have occurred to western policymakers. Few stop to interrogate the narrative of inevitable, inexorable Indian success. Take, for example, the famous Indian "middle class". If defined in western terms, as people with salaried jobs, a car, the odd overseas holiday and an apartment or even house, then Indians fitting this category cannot number more than a couple of per cent of the population at best. A local definition, given to me by a young man in a cheap restaurant, are those who can afford an 11p cup of coffee. The cappuccino-sippers are infinitesimally few, albeit more numerous every year.
Or take the vision of what a fully developed India might look like. This is imagined as a vague mixture of Rajasthani forts, new campuses packed with elite IT specialists and picturesque traditional villages.In fact, the new India being created by economic growth and urbanisation consists largely of thousands of square miles of bad quality apartment blocks sprawling around almost every major city.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-dark-reality-behind-indias-promising-growth-2012-8
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