Poor-Rich India

The first bombshell he dropped was to say that the five star deluxe hotel where his company had put him up was costing him, with company discount, around $400 a day, when the same company put up its visiting senior executives in an equally posh Geneva hotel for less than $300 a day, inclusive of the usual company discounts. He insisted that the Delhi hotel was good but par for the course, no better than first class hotels anywhere else in the world, and certainly not exceptional.

The second shock he gave me was to merely transmit the shocks he received while trying to rent a house. Quite early in his quest he gave up even trying to go near Vasant Vihar. But as he meandered around Panchsheel Park, Friends Colony and the like, he began to miss his four-bedroom flat in an upmarket neighbourhood of Geneva. The apartment block with its underground car park, full security and of course central heating, cost him close to $8,000 a month. Here, anything that he and his wife liked in the second rung Delhi colonies cost upwards of Rs 2 lakhs a month, and without many of the conveniences like central heating/air conditioning that you would take for granted elsewhere. All that we want, moaned his wife who was from France and hated the gloomy English weather, was a street that wasnt noisy and a flat that was well lighted and airy.

 

More disconcerting than the rents was the attitude of the landlords. Very few of them were willing to take all the rent above the counter and one landlord, who was otherwise very sweet, threw a fit when my friend insisted that he would deduct the part of the rent at source that was mandated by law. This, after the finance minister had already brought down the marginal tax rate to 30 per cent! The only time I found him smiling was when he picked up a couple of workmanlike Van Heusen shirts in a sale for $14 a piece.

My friends feelings were endorsed by another friend, much lower down the pecking order, who went job hunting to Singapore and came back with a somewhat similar tale. How costly Delhi was compared to Singapore, he exclaimed, for those earning average Indian salaries. A perfectly nice three-bedroom furnished housing board flat with an air-conditioner and fans would cost him Singapore $1,000 (Rs 25,000) and state funded childrens education, in English medium, was virtually free.

The greatest bonanza was public transport. He criss-crossed Singapore job hunting for a month and spent no more than Singapore $100 (Rs 2,500). In Delhi, on a three wheeler, he would have had to inhale tonnes of exhaust and spend much more.

What kind of India are we building? When will we be a little better off? We need not aspire to equal the Swiss, but why does Singapores paternal state deliver when Indias cannot?