Barun Roy: It's the attitude, stupid!

ASIA FILE

It has taken nearly 14 years to complete a 3 km feeder road in Kolkata while the Chinese took just 5.5 years to complete the 1,956 km Qinghai-Tibet Railway over high mountains and permafrost.

Even a snail possibly would have moved faster. A three-kilometre feeder road in Kolkata, meant to ease up traffic in its southern neighbourhoods, has taken almost 14 years to complete. But hardly anybody was surprised. People had simply given up on it. Most of them had even forgotten about it and were happy that the project had come through after all.

Now, check that against the record of our unavoidable growth comparator, China. The 1,956 km long Qinghai-Tibet Railway, which came into operation in January, crosses a mountain pass 5,077 metres above sea level, and goes through a 550 km stretch of permafrost, took only five and a half years to build. In ten years, Pudong, Shanghai's eastern enclave, was transformed from a little-used farmland into a bustling modern city, complete with an international airport, a dazzling bouquet of high-rise buildings, and two spanking new bridges, the Nanpu and the Lupu, across the Huangpu River. Beijing's eight-lane, 65 km long Fourth Ring Road, known as the Olympic Boulevard and featuring 147 flyovers connecting it with major city roads, was done in three years, two years before schedule. In just four years, between 2001 and 2005, more than 700 km of new roads and 100 km of subways were created in the Beijing metropolitan region.

And China isn't the only example of high-speed development in Asia. It took no more than six years for Hong Kong's new international airport to emerge from the sea, lock, stock, and barrel. In 13 years, the entire network of Malaysia's 966 km North-South Expressway, including 75 interchanges and 65 toll plazas, was in place. Its 60 km central link, the main artery on the way to Kuala Lumpur International Airport, was done in less than two.

I know India has problems, as its defenders are always quick to point out. The biggest, of course, is the fact that we are a democracy and anything that goes on in the public domain is likely to be challenged, if not in court by interested groups or individuals (as was the case with the feeder road in Kolkata), then in the streets by political parties through bandhs, demonstrations, violent protests, even killings. Then there's an overburdened judiciary, lost in a timeless maze. There's the bureaucracy, whose only purpose is to hold up decision-making. And there are politicians and ministers, whose memory is usually so short that they forget even their own promises.

All this is true. What's surprising is that, while every attempt is made to seek excuses for inaction, little effort is made to try and overcome the obstacles. Through all the long years we've been independent and a democracy, our public systems have remained as fragile, lumbering, unfocussed, and self-defeating as ever. We want all-round growth but won't make all-round efforts. Our approach to everything remains ad hoc. Piecemeal is what we understand best. Totality is beyond our vision.

Again, the link road in Kolkata is a case in point. After declaring it open, the concerned minister said it would soon be four-laned. Which means more future diggings, more obstructions, and more inconvenience for the driving public. Why wasn't the job all done at once? But the question is meaningless. The minister surely can find his excuses. Besides, that's how things are done in India.

It's this one-track mental attitude, this inability to take a total view of things which cripples India's economic race with China, not their opposing political systems. While the Chinese are able to foresee and plan in advance for all aspects of any given situation, Indians respond to problems only when they arise. Is there in China a single all-knowing god, sitting in his heaven in Beijing, who conjures up all the vision for his country and then goes around to do the work on the ground himself? No. Yet everything gets done in China on time and in tandem. Pieces fall in place, as if countless visionary mini-gods are at work in the country at the same time and with the same goal at heart. Somebody is always taking care of the loose ends and missing links. It's like an orchestra playing, where everybody has an assigned role and nobody misses a note.

It's hard to imagine India ever becoming an orchestra. To us, it's not democratic to be led and fully so to differ, find fault, interfere, argue, resist, and go at each other's throat. It matters little that, even in a democracy, people have to be fed, jobs have to be created, services have to be provided, and things have to be done on time. The more files our systems can generate, the more delays they can cause, the more confusion and complications they can create, the happier we feel that our democracy is safe. Everything else is secondary.