India, Then and Now

"Many of the people one saw on the streets and in offices lived in a small space.  From small spaces, every morning, they came out fresh and clean and brisk.  Whole families, not slum-dwellers or pavement-dwellers, lived in one room; and they might live in the same room for a generation."  V.S. Naipaul: India; A Million Mutinies Now

India, a teeming mass of people speaking countless tongues, expressing the heritage of culture, ethnicity and religion, burgeoning at the seams of its provinces, all struggling to survive, living in intolerance of one another, born into castes from which they may never escape, eking a living out of impossible ends, bearing children and burying them, oppressing women and men alike, but women unlike men with little means of escape from their dire end.


The second most-populous country in the world with an immense number of its population living in squalid poverty and endemic disease, struggling to rise above the torment of mere existence, anxious to discover for themselves the nobility of life achieved through living beyond age 35, earning enough to send children in ragged garments, feet unshod, to school where charity may feed them a subsistence breakfast.  Or not.



India now is a country of brilliant entrepreneurs, university graduates, countless educated young people working at solving the computer, banking, utilities, educational problems of wealthy Westerners through outsourced overseas call centres.  Those bright young men and women incredulous when a supplicating voice from abroad seeks advice, moaning at the cost of services received, taxing the patience of the aspiring Indian.


India, a country where 40% of the population has no access to the power grid, living a grim existence without access to universal medicare where a baby whose parents cannot afford the few pennies to treat her will bury her instead, and it's no great loss since who needs a female child?  India, where more people defecate and urinate casually in public in the great outdoors than discreetly, in indoor facilities meant for those who can afford it.

"...we followed Anwar away from the lights and the smoke to an area of sudden smallness.  Narrow lanes opened into narrower, and they were lined with little low houses.  Some way off, Mohammed Ali Road glowed and roared; but the lights here were dim, the lanes were full of shadows, and the near noises were domestic and subdued.  We were not in unregulated slum.  The lanes were straight and paved, and - though the scale was very small- there was a regularity of lay-out and building that suggested an official housing project.  Anwar said that this was so; we were in a municipal settlement.

His house was a narrow section of a wire-netting and concrete row.  For two or three feet from the ground the walls of the front room were concrete; above that they were wire netting.  A white sheet stretched over the wire netting screened the front room of Anwar's house from his neighbour's on one side; the screen was on the neighbour's side of the wire netting.  Anwar's house, his section of the row, was perhaps no more than nine feet wide.  the wire netting and concrete were painted blue.  The front room might have been six feet deep.  It had a passageway on one side, with shoes and slippers on shelves built into the concrete wall.  This passageway led to the main, middle room. Beyond that, Anwar said, was the kitchen.

Somewhere in the upper space of the middle room was a sleeping loft.  The sleeping loft was important.  Without it houses like this wouldn't work, wouldn't be able to provide space for whole families.  This was the first I had heard of the Bombay sleeping loft.  I heard a good deal more about it in the days that followed; and I began to understand how large families - not always slum-dwellers, or pavement sleepers - managed to live in one small room.  At night all over Bombay sitting rooms changed their function; the various portions of a house like Anwar's (essentially that main middle room) became simply a place for sleeping in. A sleeping loft utilized to the full the space, the volume, of a room."  V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now

Bombay is now Mumbai, otherwise the delightfully spacious, private and luxurious accommodations representing civic public housing is the same.  India ranks 134th on the ease-of doing-business indicators, 119th on human development, 122nd on gender equality, 87th on corruption.  The world's average electrical usage is 2,400 kilowatt hours per capita.  India's per capita consumption is 700 kWh.


And this level of consumption leads to a burden on the capacity of India's electrical grid infrastructure.  There is a very casual, unpaid use of electricity, where illicitly people tap into the power grid.  It is enormously costly to the state, as is the break that many agricultural producers get with the use of the grid for irrigation purposes, overtaxing the system in the event of drought conditions.


India, the sleeping giant that has been busy awakening itself, looking around, evaluating all the opportunities at its fingertips.  India's bureaucrats, alas, have been rated the most inefficient in Asia, far below that of China, Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, for example.  And it is, of course, bureaucrats who operate much of India's electricity infrastructure.

Which led to the days-long massive power failure that halted its industry, transportation, cities, grinding it all to a halt, leaving people in the dark and incapable of functioning.  That huge power failure was a costly one, leading to an immense loss of income for the entire country.  Humbling and infuriating that a vast country like India with its countless resources, minus its horrendously troublesome problems, was left stumbling in the dark.

There is an earned impression of Indians having very fine minds, capable of grasping quite impressive intellectual leaps.  The Program for International Student Assessment published comparative national academic performances of 15-year-old students in math, science and English.  India came out second-last ahead only of Kyrgyzstan, of the 73 countries tested.  That is partially because 42% of Indian children are underweight, 59% suffer from stunting.

A recent global poll concluded that child marriage and de facto slavery along with infanticide makes India the worst country in the G20 to be a woman, along with its neighbour Afghanistan.  But India is not Afghanistan, that sad country that time and the tides have forsaken.  India stands on the cusp of becoming a super-power at some distant, but not-too distant date, as a populous, increasingly trade-wealthy and minerals-rich country.

Its production, marketing and trade will only become as robust as its ability to produce a working power grid, enabling the country to gather in greater wealth to enable it in turn to adequately house, feed and educate its strongest resource, its population.   The recent failure of its antiquated, inadequate power grid due to corruption, lack of attention and investment does not bode well for its future.