http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/13/asia/letter.php
India's success isn't shared by most By Amelia Gentleman Tuesday, May 13, 2008 NEW DELHI: There is a kind woman who parks her car near my gate once a day to distribute parcels of rice, neatly wrapped in newspaper, to the wild and possibly rabid dogs who roam the quiet street in this rich part of central Delhi. She caresses them and addresses them by name. One mangy yellow, malevolent animal she calls Bruno. It is an act of generosity that I still find confusing. Around the corner, sitting by the traffic lights, is a family of four, which receives no rice parcels. The mother, Sayari, is bony thin, and the children's matted hair has a dull orange tint, a sign of the malnutrition affecting nearly half of all under-fives in India. Sayari, who goes by only one name, has spent most of her life selling flowers (bracelets made of jasmine, bunches of wilting roses) at this junction. Unable to make a living in his Rajasthan village, where there was neither work nor water, her father brought her here when she was a baby, about 25 years ago. Surviving in the capital has not been much easier. Three years ago she showed me the hole in the roadside tree where she hid a small plastic bag of lentils and a couple of onions from quick-fingered fellow street hawkers, and the scorched bricks by the pavement where she cooked her food. The quality of the evening meal she makes her husband and two sons depends on the quantity of flowers they sell, never more than about 150 rupees (under $4) worth. The amount the family eats has shrunk in recent months as rising food prices threaten to plunge her family ever deeper into poverty. >From her pavement spot, at about car wheel level, she has observed the rapid >transformation of the city around her. As the country's economy surges >forward, everything is changing for the rich people she watches driving by in >SUVs with tinted glass. For the poor, life seems very much the same. Delhi >remains a place where the underclasses, she feels, get a rougher deal than the >city's stray dogs. To the left of the traffic island, the capital's new metro is being extended. Cranes and diggers are pulling out the innards of the road, wheezing out gritty dust. The ever-thicker traffic is choked by the construction, but the Delhi network remains the emblem of everything that is good about modern India: a sleek and efficient piece of infrastructure, built on deadline without corruption. Sayari has never been on the metro, where tickets start at six rupees. To the right is Khan market, which is rapidly morphing from a rundown collection of local convenience stores and cheap Indian cafés into an elite shopping arcade, supplying Parisian lingerie, Swarovski crystal, flat-screen TVs and $20,000 necklaces to the capital's rich. Nearby, in a newly built white stucco mansion, lives one of India's most prominent billionaires, Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of the telecommunications company Airtel, made fabulously rich by the explosion in demand for mobile phones (more than seven million are sold here every month). Occasionally there are parties in the gardens of his mansion, lotus flowers floating on the shimmering, candlelit swimming pool, imported champagne served to his guests, the CEOs and entrepreneurs who have transformed India's economy over the last decade. His home is only a few seconds' walk from Sayari's stretch of pavement, but Delhi is a city where the rich walk nowhere. Their paths are unlikely to have crossed. Reporting from India presents a recurring dilemma, as these parallel images of a thriving and failing country compete for attention. Should the focus be on the extraordinary shift forward, or on the people who are left behind? Read the Indian newspapers and you learn little about the struggling majority. Instead they dwell on India's newly enhanced international standing, its developing friendship with the United States, on the opportunities created by three years of 8 percent growth and on the continuing economic transformation, which may or may not catapult India to a position rivaling that of China. The stories of ailing health care, no-hope government schools, illiteracy, hunger are too depressing and too familiar to compete with the palpable optimism that reigns in the cities. India has always been - in that well-worn phrase - a country of extremes, a nation of monumental poverty, with a tiny rich elite. After 16 years of reforms, the band of dollar billionaires has grown (India has 53, more than any other nation in Asia, and more than 100,000 millionaires). The middle class has expanded to somewhere around 200 million or 250 million people, but the majority remain either poor or very poor, with 700 million living on less than $2 a day. Poverty has decreased since reforms began, but slowly, dropping from about a third of the population who were estimated to be living on less than $1 a day in 1991, to around a quarter of the nation today. If the extremes have always been present, the gulf between the two Indias is growing visibly wider. Inclusive growth remains an aspiration that the government acknowledges it has yet to achieve. It is unclear whether an economic model in which two-thirds of the population do not yet share in many of the benefits of growth is sustainable. Organizations like Unicef warn that India cannot claim to be an international player with such high levels of malnutrition, and political scientists predict that the Maoist Naxalite violence simmering in the countryside will spread if inequalities are not addressed. Sayari does not feel any trickle-down effect from the new wealth splashing around the capital. She sees the outward signs of affluence, in the abundance of ever-more expensive cars on the road, whose occupants are rarely generous. But life for her family is becoming harder. Her shack home (which has no water and no electricity) has twice been destroyed by city authorities, who are working to remove these unwanted symbols of India's enduring poverty "The poor are being driven from Delhi; we are not wanted here. The government does nothing for us," she says. The cost of buying flowers at the market has gone up, but people will not pay more at the traffic lights, so her profits have shrunk. She can afford to send only one of two sons to school. Amid the rising wealth of New Delhi, the hungry figures at the traffic lights - refugees from the harsh, impoverished conditions of the countryside - are an uneasy reminder of India's excluded millions. Tap-tapping their fingernails on the window glass, they provide a sharp pinprick to the bubble of exuberance.
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