The meeting was in the same city and not very far from the fervid, dusty Ramlila grounds where Baburao Hazare was gamely in the throes of an anti-corruption fast that convulsed the government, Parliament and the TV news channels. But the hushed, air-conditioned coolth of a five-star hotel, where the interview was all about the future of business education, was a world away from the capital-wide protests of a surging new middle class and the illusory efforts of the political class to address them.
Drive into the bustling, commercial hub of Gurgaon and the Team Anna versus Government face-off seemed even more remote, had it not been for the rowdy TV reportage. Here, where foreign direct investment and surging private initiative collide with the wilful absence of public infrastructure, is the best example of the dual speeds at which India operates.
Gurgaon accounts for more than half Haryana’s revenues but its denizens mostly consume basic services through private sector solutions, whether it is in the multi-storeyed towers with their power and water back-up or the slums where people pay middlemen to illegally commandeer these services. But Gurgaon, that early haven of the private realty boom, has been a trendsetter in this regard; almost no one anywhere in India today buys an apartment without these basic services, privately delivered, embedded in the deal, one reason real estate prices stay stubbornly high in India even during economic slowdowns.
Ironically, it is becoming easier to go for a walk inside those gigantic malls that now dot every self-respecting city (and some malls have even spotted an opportunity in organising morning walks for the elderly before business hours). They’re safer and cleaner – no potholes in which to twist your ankle, fewer miscreants to relieve you of your handbag and shopping – than the environment outside, the “eminent domain” that governments claim but decline to develop for the people who pay them the taxes to do so.
This is the paradox of the new India and never was it on better display than in the past 30 days, less than a month after the media celebrated 20 years of economic reform. The Hazare squall of mid August demonstrated one of the emerging tensions between the political class and private citizenry. The floods that paralyse Mumbai, which is proud to call itself India’s financial hub, each year and did so in Delhi last week demonstrated another.
Life for India’s burgeoning middle class has changed beyond recognition in almost every way. A young professional today can consider owning a house and several cars and accessing a range of goods and services that were conspicuously absent even a decade ago. But it is worth noting that these good things have been the result of private initiative — whether in real estate, hospitality, healthcare, education telecommunications or manufacturing.
All of these represent an India straining to surge ahead. Yet, the scenes in Parliament and the state Assemblies, which we are now privileged to witness on television, in government offices and public-facing institutions – municipal offices, police stations, courts, passport offices and public hospitals – remain depressingly pre-liberalisation in their ambience, outlook, efficiency and venality. It was this that drew the crowds to Hazare and garnered national sympathy despite the impracticability of his stance.
This two-speed India is creating equal and opposite forces. As long as politicians decline to enhance and improve the goods and services that lie in their domain, the private sector will continue to reap the benefits and the rent. But it is also true that the private sector can progress only that far without basic infrastructure that only government can provide on a large scale. Some enlightened politicians have understood this and tried to model themselves on private sector lines. There is, for instance, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who likes to label himself the state’s “chief executive”, enticing an eager business class to an industrial utopia. (It is another matter than he chooses to fall back on the politician’s ruse of fasting in protest against charges of inciting communal violence. No chief executive in the corporate world would do this; he would be more likely to hire lawyers to fight libel cases.)
But perhaps Bihar’s Nitish Kumar is more realistic. He’s keen to hire “chief executives” to head projects with measurable goals. But he claims no labels for himself and remains a politician in the old-fashioned sense, focused on delivering better services to the people to bring his state up to speed. Pity his example can’t be followed by more politicians elsewhere in India.
