If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being honest with you and wants nothing from you. These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes, nonetheless.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of the ancillary ones.
First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a garbage dump. Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all to common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter was common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere, littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight. Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it is. People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads. The only two cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey were Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know why this is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will cut into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will hobble India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)
The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories: roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The electrical grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. With out regular electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke. Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized world of container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like. Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be considered decent in Thailand, much less Western Europe or America. And I covered fully two thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage way roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of, and if there are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A drive that should take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older.Everyone in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system. Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance now, leaving travelers stranded with little option except to take the decrepit and dangerous buses. At least fifty million people use the trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that waitlists of 500 or more people are common now. The rails are affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded and what with budget airlines popping up in India like Sadhus in an ashram the middle and lowers classes are left to deal with the overutilized rails and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit. Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian government really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I guess.
The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into two parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption. It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied with customer service. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a single mistake on the form back you go to the end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India. The government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners, too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way shape or form. Take the trash for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job. Rural hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in the cities instead.
I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a society to want to change in any way. Mumbai, India’s financial capital is about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats I have ever seen were in Medan!
One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this word, backwardness, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel Laureates, nuclear physicists, imminent economists and entrepreneurs. But India has all these things and what have they brought back to India with them? Nothing. The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do the dirty work and so the country remains in stasis. It’s a shame. Indians and India have many wonderful things to offer the world, but I’m far from sanguine that India will amount to much in my lifetime.
Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West and all that. But remember, I’ve been there. I’ve done it. And I’ve seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, have as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does. And the bottom line is, I don’t think India really cares. Too complacent and too conservative.
I have not returned toIndia since I wrote this in 2009–I hope to return in 2014 or 2015.That’s four years and a lot can change. That being said, things change slowly in India. I remember visiting a village in China in1999 and then returning in 2003. Vastly different place. And thenthere was my first visit to Delhi in 2003, my second in 2005 and mythird in 2009. Not much had changed, except parts of the subway wereopen. So, take my criticism with a grain of salt, as it might verywell be dated. Although I would bet money that Delhi is still just asfilthy as it ever was.
Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley certainly did, and he called India right way back in 2007. On a visit to Bombay he noted that the infrastructure was horrid and would at some point become a serious bottleneck to economic growth to the country. How did he come up with such a fanciful economic prediction? Did he run a quantitative model on the country? Did he look at its current account deficit and extrapolate out? Did investment banking friends of his tell him that at some point they’d simply stopped lending to India because of some hidden fundamentals they’d uncovered and didn’t like?
None of those actually–and probably all of them at a later date. At the time he made this prediction, however, based on a lot of his own personal experience in the developing world and one critical observation he had while on the trip. He was on India’s sole north to south superhighway (only four lanes total at the time) and his car almost his a cow.
Here were are in late 2013 and his prediction has pretty much come true. Economic growth in India has been cut in half–actually more than half from its peak after the “reforms” of the 1990s. The main problem is that there is no manufacturing–and if there were, as I clearly said back in 2009 it couldn’t get to port because of India’s shitty infrastructure. Therefore, there is very little employment growth. Yet, the extraction economy continues and India, by some measures, has actually gotten worse.
Let’s recount just where India now stands in 2013:
All of the following stats were gleaned from and/or directly quoted from the above-linked Mishra story, so read it.
One hundred people in India are worth $300 billion, 25% of the nation’s GDP.
Brazil grew by only 1% between 1993 and 2005 but reduced poverty twice as quickly as India.
Bangladesh, which is half as rich as India on a per capita basis, has a longer life expectancy, better child mortality and immunization rates than India.
The 2011 census of India revealed that half of Indian households practiced open defecation. For those of you who are daft, this statistic means that one of every two people in the country takes a shit in public. I don’t like to euphemize. No toilets, so men just unzip their trousers or women hike up their saris, squat down and shit. In public.
Good enough visual for you?
“Almost half of Indian children are underweight,” compared to 25% in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Calorie and protein intake among the poor has actually dropped” in India since the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 60s.
Mishra writes: “The skies are polluted. The rivers are dead or dying. Waters tables are falling. Forests are disappearing.”
The man who very well may be the next Prime Minister of India—Narendra Modi—was barred from traveling in the United States for his alleged complicity in communal violence—also known as incitement to race or religion based mass murder—in Gujurat in 2002 that left 1,000 Muslims dead.
Overall, says Pankaj Mishra, “India’s economy grew at about 5% in the 80s, ran up to nearly 10% and recently has slowed to less than half that rate in recent months.”
Yes, there is a middle class in India with pent up consumer demand, which likes Western and global brands. They are gobbling up as much as they can. This middle class finds its incomes in real estate, IT, telecom and banking. When the offshoring play runs out IT and telecom will go bust. That will leave banking and real estate to pick up the slack, because there is little to no manufacturing in India. In fact, there is more in next door Bangladesh.
Then again, because of global warming Bangladesh will be underwater, so maybe India can help the Bangladeshis move their manufacturing base uphill.
Oh, and on my pet infrastructure project: the railways? Absolutely no money has been put into them to modernize them. Yes, you can buy a ticket online now, but tell me, how does a farmer who has to shit in public afford the internet?
