The nightmare of rural and slum life in a high-tech interested economy
Myth and reality of Incredible India
Impressions during a ten-day trip through Rajasthan in February 2007 show India’s battle to fight rural and slum life to become an economic high-tech superpower.
Before our leaving for India everybody envied us by telling us what a lucky bunch of people we were and what an exciting and culturally rich country would be expecting us. For months we were prepared, influenced and brainwashed by India’s magnificent advertisements in relevant magazines and on TV describing the country as Incredible India.
And really incredible it is!
Our high expectations were fostered by the fact that India is considered to be one of the most imminent emerging countries that will certainly change completely and lose its originality.
After glimpses of old China in a beginning modernity we thought it a challenge to experience old India in its beginning modernity. So off we went to experience for ourselves the reality of the mouth-watering slogan Incredible India.
Very interesting, but also need to look at history and global context. In a globalised world it is difficult to analyse a country internally whilst comparing it to global standards.
Incredible India consists of happy looking and smiling people.
Incredible India offers plenty of opportunities to diligent and busy traders, stall keepers
and craftsmen.
Incredible India gives ample chances to industry and boasts of an enormous industrial
output.
Incredible India is an agriculturally rich country which produces huge crops of fruit and
vegetables in all colours.
Incredible India is abundant in beautiful and colourful flowers and bushes/shrubs.
Incredible India accommodates people who worship their gods and prophets in a very
devout way.
Incredible India cares for its sacred cows and all the other animals (pigs, dogs, camels etc.)
that live in the streets and also eat edible litter.
Incredible India starts to build roads, highways and state thoroughfares to improve traffic
and transportation.
Incredible India still has lots of bumpy roads used by quite a few risky (lorry) drivers
who hardly cause any accidents despite their hazardous driving and
overtaking.
Incredible India is – of course – besides China the second largest emerging nation.
BUT:
Incredible India still needs quite some time to catch up with other industrialized
Nations – catching up implies a single path to development and progress.
Incredible India probably now offers tourists the last chance for a visit before pollution
and environmental damages take over and unfortunately ruin a
wonderful countryside which has already lost its untouched beauty. But what role does tourism play in contributing to environmental damage and destruction of unspoilt nature and ‘authentic’ culture (which is what attracts tourists in the first place)?
Incredible India possesses beautiful palaces and temples that need care and
restoration before they will rot away.
Incredible India spills out black smokes from huge smoke stacks, e.g. brickworks.
Incredible India is incapable of teaching its rural population to throw away litter
properly instead of dropping it anywhere, even outside the rare
litter bins. What role do those who supply the consumer goods play in this education?
Incredible India consequently lacks untouched natural scenery, as bits and pieces of
wraps, plastics and other waste are to be found even in the remotest
parts of fields and other grounds.
Incredible India burns its waste including toxic materials such as plastic bottles.
Incredible India is more or less unwilling to collect the multitude of plastic bottles
consumed daily by the millions. Not necessarily unwilling but often got better things to do than collecting bottles because need to work and feed belly. At the same time often dependent on buying consumer goods due to lack of adequate access to clean water, inadequate sewage infrastructure and no waste collection.
Incredible India contains small rivers and lakes which smell ugly and look dirty
from floating waste and sewage.
Incredible India presents most of its public toilets in a hygienically intolerable way.
Incredible India wastes large amounts of water to wash lorries even in dry areas.
Incredible India has wonderful people who are uncaring and thus live in a totally
different world of environmental indifference. Why should they care if we haven’t cared for centuries? According to some Indians, it is now time for them to benefit from consuming the products that come from the North.
Incredible India allows a shockingly mindless and unsustainable mentality and
behaviour. Same as in London, to name one example.
Incredible India considers English as a lingua franca, but not even 1/3 of its
population understands, let alone speaks the basics of English.
Incredible India leaves most of its children uneducated, because there is no
exhaustive compulsory schooling, so those children’s intellectual and
creative potential is not channelled appropriately.
Incredible India allows children to work, such as sell or transport goods, dance or play
music at banquets or in front of historic monuments.
Incredible India tolerates child work to help them and their families to survive. Child labour is often a necessity due to chronic poverty.
Another reason for increasing child labour is that families have to find money to send their kids to school in the cities, or because the kids don’t have a school to go to.
One of the standard IMF-prescriptions is for poor countries to limit public spending to 10% of country budget. In many places (i.e. all those countries that get IMF-money) this means that thousands of teachers in rural schools lose their jobs because governments can’t fund them. In Africa, teachers (and nurses etc) move to South Africa for this reason.
Incredible India brings up lots of children who follow, haunt and harass tourists by
begging money and trying to sell them cheap things. A culture brought about by economic necessity.
Incredible India does not teach and train most of its adolescents in a professional
and efficient way so that service is often poor and slow.
Incredible India assigns hard manual or physical work to women whereas
men - admittedly – perform specialized labour (e.g. carrying heavy
stones on the head versus building a wall with these stones).
Incredible India as a whole demonstrates a rather fatalistic mentality.
Incredible India accepts electricity failures in rural and semi-urban areas like
god-given facts.
Incredible India on the other hand can be proud of Delhi’s buses, tuk tuks and taxis
that run on eco-friendly CNG and thus reduce air pollution caused
by traffic.
Incredible India is equipped with a rather effective public transportation system
consisting of overland coaches and suburban services.
Incredible India reveals signs of innovation and technological progress in everyday
matters, such as LCD traffic lights near/in Delhi.
Incredible India boasts of 36 billionaires (according to Forbes) whereas 70% of its
population has difficulties in winning the daily fight to survive
decently.
Inequality of this kind is brought about by neoliberal policies, such as privatisation of absolutely everything, including education, health and water. There is increased evidence that such policies lead to the exclusion of those who can’t pay.
Also, the increase of power of large multinationals ensures that small-scale businesses can’t compete. Free (but not fair) trade rules ensure that Southern markets are swamped with cheap goods from the North that could be produced by the South more cheaply.
This is historical as our global trade system is structured to extract commodities from ex-colonies since colonialism so as to ensure the survival of the Empire. TNC’s are still very successful in extracting wealth from poor countries. The rich Indian elite that is today associated with TNCs are often related to those Indian rulers that were associated to colonial powers.
Incredible India and its press soothe the population by announcing with pride that
India surpasses Japan in number of billionaires as the combined
wealth of Indian billionaires swelled to the amount of $190 billions
which is equal to ¼ of India’s GDP.
Incredible India admits that 35 million homeless children need protection.
Incredible India points out that more than 40 % of its children are malnourished. Lack of food security, also affected by global trade structures and World Bank recommendations, such as to mass-grow crops for export to foreign markets as opposed to diversifying crops and growing for local consumption (which also contributes to global environmental degradation through transport of food).
Incredible India secures the freedom of its people and advocates human rights (like the US and UK for instance), but …
Incredible India has been a democracy for 60 years in 2007, but …
Incredible India pretends to be a democratic country, because each citizen from 18 on
has the right to vote, but …
Incredible India allows decisions to be taken by usually upper-class/caste educated
politicians who do not have any notion of the poverty a large portion of
the Indian population lives in. Incredible India gives the impression that its politicians do not really worry about its
poor and uneducated population.
Incredible India seems to have abolished the caste system, but in reality educated
people all the time stress the fact of their caste of origin.
Incredible India has not eradicated the caste system from people’s minds. The caste system was formalised during British colonialism. There is a good book about this called ‘Castes of Mind’.
Incredible India has not succeeded in abolishing corruption.
Incredible India tolerates and expects its people to accept money for any ordinary and
everyday minor service and triviality, especially if there is a tourist
in the vicinity.
Incredible India conveys the impression that its administrative and political bodies
its rich people and its industrialists do not have the least interest
and the intellectual power or will to educate the Indian people and
to change certain evils of/in society after 60 years of democratic
inertia of its political rulers/institutions since independence.
Incredible India is a country that tends to oversimplify life, is full of hubris,
overestimates its strength and ignores its manifold overall failures.
Incredible India is idealized and romanticized in the press, on TV and in its own
advertisement campaign.
CONCLUSION:
We have not seen all of Incredible India, but assume that Rajasthan is one of the provinces where most tourists travel to in order to see the historic monuments of Indian culture and its invaluable architecture.
We visited Incredible India in the dry season. Seeing the poor infrastructure and the state of streets and small roads next to the main highways in villages, small towns and in the countryside we ask ourselves how people can cope with life during the monsoon season. Will they sink into the mud and into their own waste? Most likely, but we don’t hear much about that in the news.
What really shocked us most during our journey was the fact that such a fascinating country with incredible and world renowned marvels of culture is being run down by its inefficient so-called democratic politicians and its uneducated population that makes Incredible India’s environment its own rubbish dump.
A 60-year-old democracy should be ashamed of its uncaring political incapacity and its unproductive and incompetent politicians who are only preoccupied with themselves
We urgently hope that the emerging capitalists/economists/industrial leaders of Incredible India will stop their unrealistic talks about economically colonizing the world and will start realistic sweeping in front of their own door by investing heavily into an ever increasing population of educated Indians and really emerging Indian infrastructure.
Meanwhile we are looking forward to our next journey to India, where we will hopefully experience the fulfilment of our optimistic expectations of a really Incredible India.
Harald Kredler
May 2007
