India is a long way away from Delhi

AL FRESCO

What an illusion, almost a delusion of India, the city of Delhi presents to outsiders. Recent comers are fascinated by the booming capital they see.

A businessman friend of Indian origin, visiting from Kenya after six years, cannot help lavishing praise "" the flyovers, the prosperous suburbs, the quality and variety of good food and all that high-voltage energy that new opportunities can radiate. "How much leaner the air is," he gushes, remembering earlier visits which he spent, stricken by pollution, mainly in bed.

Another friend, who has spent the past year working in Delhi, after a lifetime of being based in Mumbai and Kolkata, finds the change yet more bracing.

She now gets depressed at the idea of returning to Mumbai "" its crowds, congestion, squalor and interminable bumper-to-bumper commutes drive to claustrophobic distraction. Both friends are nurturing a secret plot "" if only they could, they would buy a place in the city.

Delhi , it is true, has acquired a swagger of self-assurance in recent years "" the transition from a string of villages cemented by the rule of babus to a megalopolis is borne out by high statistics of wealth and consumption, rapidly improving indicators on education, medicare, transport and property investment. But my friends' are also seduced by the proximity to power that the idea of Delhi suggests.

Implicit in their rosy portrait of the capital is the feeling that, if you hang out with the right people, you will get somewhere, possibly closer to the heart of India.

This is a common but wildly erroneous fantasy "" Delhi is not India. In fact the opposite premises "" Delhi's development in contrast to stark underdevelopment elsewhere "" is nearer to India's reality.

A recent newspaper account that followed the route of L K Advani's rath yatra of 1990, a quest that originally unfurled the banner of Hindutva and brought the BJP to power in Delhi, is an appalling chronicle of administrative malfunction and decay: no electricity in the government hospital in Samastipur, Bihar, but rampant kidnappings; soaring unemployment in Beawer, Rajasthan, and desperate scarcity of water; and zero development in Porbandar, Gujarat, altogether forgotten but for being Gandhi's birthplace.

More sobering is development economist Jean Dreze's taking the pulse of the nation this week. India's expenditure on health, as a ratio of GDP, is about 1 per cent "" among the lowest in the world. It is 40 per cent in East Asia, 50 per cent in Latin America and 75 per cent in Europe.

Quoting the National Family Health survey (1998-99), Dreze says, that half of all Indian children are undernourished and half of all adult women suffer from anaemia. In Uttar Pradesh, the rate of antenatal checkups and vaccinations is so low that "most women and children are left to their own devices as far as health is concerned."

The impression of well-being and wealth in a city like Delhi is fostered by the presence of national political parties, the national media and the Supreme Court that, being based in the capital, adopt the role of watchdogs and eager activists. Yet their collective activism does not extend beyond the frontiers of the National Capital Region.

In his piece on public health policy Prof. Dreze notes that in two separate years he monitored opinion articles in a major daily for a period of six months each. In the year 2000 he could not find one article on health matters.

In 2003 he found just one "" it related to the SARS scare. Part of complaint about the dumbing down of the national media concerns its growing distance and insulation from the rest of the country "" Delhi's self-absorbed metropolitan air is actually a ruthless bout of Delhi-centricity.

News, information, entertainment mainly concerns goings-on in the city "" if it's from outside it affects those who make the capital their base.

Delhi's heartlessness and political expediency has often been checked by the judiciary "" were it not for pressure by the Supreme Court the use of clean fuel would not be implemented.

But interventions by the Supreme Court that could have far-reaching effects "" for instance an order that creche-cum-medical facilities be provided in every settlement throughout the country "" have been ignored by the government.

India is a long way away from the self-contained and self-serving image of affluence and authority that Delhi presents to the world.