Getting Somewhere Fast: India Embraces High-Speed Rail, Global-Scale Metropolises ‘Will Result’

#India embraces #HSR; 7 corridors envisaged, including Delhi-Amritsar + Ahmedabad-Mumbai-Pune; megacities 'target' http://t.co/ONcJ74fO

— ッ MEDIOLANA® EDU (@Mediolana) June 1, 2012

Mind the Infrastructure Gap: Indian Cities Battle Polio; Equivalent Chinese Cities Vaunt Metro Systems

A recent piece by the evergreen Jason Burke near the front of The Guardian’s main section (Immunisation push propels India towards victory in war against polio, 3rd January 2012) attracted this blogger’s attention as it was filed from an exotic place that Mediolana’s blogger-in-chief has had the opportunity to visit: Moradabad, a moderately dystopian city located a little over one hundred miles from India’s political capital, New Delhi. The article noted the recent inroads made against polio in one of Uttar Pradesh’s least salubrious corners, with an immunisation drive expected to culminate in Moradabad being declared polio-free at some point later this year.

Indeed, in the story of Moradabad lies a very Indian paradox: it is a settlement that is slightly reminiscent of a mini-Chongqing in that despite being host to nearly five million people, few people outside of northern India are aware of its existence;  yet notwithstanding its size and considerable industrial output – the city is known as a global manufacturing hub for brass products – it features in a news item chronicling the eradication of a disease that blights only some of the very poorest and/or most chaotic countries on Earth, including Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While not wishing to sound hyperbolic, this is a patently insane state of affairs. India’s status as a potential world superpower – a country of over one billion people with English as its lingua franca and culture of valuing education should logically fare well in the first half of the twenty-first century – will always be compromised so long as so many of its citizens are living in needless squalor; provision of the basics, from sewage to transportation, are all too absent in the lives of many Indians. Even India’s financial nexus of Mumbai – a global metropolis with a population of over twenty million people – is not scheduled to get its first underground railway line until November this year, leaving the Delhi network as the sole reminder that even outstanding urban transformation projects are not beyond South Asia’s capabilities.

By way of comparison, cities of comparable size to Moradabad in India’s neighbour and major competitor, China, are building or expanding state-of-the-art metro systems, with some, such as Kunming, soon to enjoy the benefits of being on a high-speed rail network.  Though to some degree the infrastructure gap between the giant Asian rivals is perhaps down to the tenuous nature of the rule of law in the PRC, with the Chinese government able to metaphorically and literally bulldoze any obstacles to its development plans, this by itself is not enough to explain the chasm; while Chinese city dwellers can board Maglev trains, too many Indians still fantasise about a life free from diseases which in most of the rest of the world are either rare or of historical interest only.

Not So New Delhi: India’s Capital 100 Not Out!

https://twitter.com/#!/Mediolana/status/146372000405917696

India Against Corruption: The Beginning of the Dialogue

While the Arab Spring has understandably thus far dominated the world’s news agenda in 2011, momentous developments of an analogous nature have also been happening in the emerging superpower that is India. On 24th February 2011, this blog pointed to the pronounced oligarchic trend within contemporary Indian capitalism and alluded to the systemic corruption that permeates the country; spring 2011 has seen an extraordinary flowering of unprecedented anti-corruption protests. Leading personalities involved in the protests include the renowned social activist and environmental pioneer Anna Hazare and the maverick yoga guru Swami Ramdev; the anti-corruption movements seeks, amongst other goals, the institution of an anti-graft citizen ombudsman via the passage of the Jan Lokpal Bill and the repatriation of ‘black money’ – estimated to be in the trillions of US dollars – held by Indian citizens in foreign banks, particularly those institutions based in Switzerland.

This movement has clearly chimed with the country at large, and rattled the Indian authorities: Bollywood luminaries such as A. R. Rahman, Amitabh Bachchan and Shabana Azmi have voiced and/or tweeted their support for Anna Hazare’s cause, and the India Against Corruption Facebook page vaunts over 226,000 ‘likes’ at the time of writing; by contrast, in the early hours of 5th June 2011 the Delhi Police stormed a non-violent mass fast at Ramlila Maidan in India’s capital, teargassing and charging peaceful protestors.

At this stage, it is still unclear what the eventual outcome of these developments will be. But it appears that India is at last having a meaningful national dialogue about the elephant in the room that continues to cast a shadow over the lives of so many of its citizens.