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Swarovski, whatever that is

Next door, an old bungalow was recently torn down. Over several weeks, I have watched from my kitchen window as it crumbled under the hammers of a team of men. The lovely mosaic terrace disappeared first, its thick base resisting to the bitter end. The walls cracked as the men assaulted them from inside, then they simply pushed large sections over. Two enormous and rather grandiose stone pillars in front came apart into several large blocks that they told us would be reassembled for the building that is to rise here. More routine pillars and beams remained standing for a long time, their bricks slowly chipped away until they were no more than skeletal wireframes.

And still the men stood on them, dozens of feet off the ground, swinging long and heavy hammers from over their heads to smash some remaining bit of mortar. I watched them with a frightened awe. If they lost their balance, and I could not see why that didn't happen more often, they would fall long and heavy onto heaps of rubble and twisted metal. As they swung, their lives seemed only as secure as their footing, and that didn't look in the least secure.

So the bungalow vanished slowly, and the process did not pause until there was a gaping hole in the ground where the structure once was. Excavated by an enormous clawing machine, this would be the foundation for the new building that would rise here. I feel kind of sure it won't have a mosaic terrace.

Anyway, the pause lasted only a day or two. What happened next is a familiar sight at construction sites across India. A small army of families moved in, tiny dusty naked kids on the womens' hips. They set up home at the back of the site, strung clotheslines and brought out their cooking vessels. A small shed in a corner seems to be the communal bathroom.

These families are, of course, the labourers who will erect an 11-storey building on this plot. Migrant and in this case all Tamil speaking, they are the backs on which our high-rise buildings, our cities, are still built. They shuttle from construction site to construction site, their cheap but wiry muscles their lone selling point. And I watch from my kitchen window as they now scurry about the bottom of that huge pit, laying concrete, putting up new wireframes. The women do the carrying, their men the digging and laying and mixing.

And the tiny dusty naked kids? They roam everywhere, peering into the cement mixer, rolling in the piles of mud and sand, playing with the equipment. Just a familiar sight, that's all. Is that a matter for concern?

These days, the papers are full of the dotcom boom, even if they sometimes spell it "dot.com". New websites come at you from ads and hoardings all over the city. Tech companies are snapping up MBAs from the IIMs and other management colleges, some at dollar salaries. At the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute in Bombay, the average salary for a graduate this year is 450,000 rupees a year, which I shall compare for you to my first job offer, right out of college 19 years ago, of Rs 13,200 a year.

And infotech shares continue to go through the roof.

And I think, maybe perversely, that very roof was undoubtedly built by a gang of families much like the ones I see outside my kitchen window.

With all the liberalisations and reforms in the Indian economy, with all the new infatuation with the Internet and the overnight millionaires it is producing even in India, there is a large underbelly of the country that remains utterly untouched. Is that a matter for concern?

A couple of weeks ago in Bombay, I heard Mark Tully speak. Tully used to be the BBC correspondent in New Delhi. Not with the Beeb full-time any more, this confirmed Indophile still lives in New Delhi. And in fact that term -- Indophile -- is an inadequate description of the man. Few people know India, breathe India, as Tully does.

So Tully spoke that evening about many things Indian. One, in particular, is a theme he has written and spoken about before. India's reforms, he said, have been very good for the upper end of the market. The people who occupy that end have available to them today a never-before range of comforts, conveniences and things to buy. Presumably those Bajaj graduates will use some of their 450,000 rupees to buy one of the dozens of car models now available in India, or a Longines watch, or cellular phone service, audiophile stereo, clothes, ISPs, watches, on and on. Or Swarovski crystal, whatever that is.

Wherease at the low end of the market, Tully pointed out, things remain the same. Or get worse. Cycle rickshaws haven't changed in decades, not one tiny bit. Buses are essentially the same models that we rode in the '60s and '70s. In Bombay, some 80% of road commuters travel by public transport, but every change we see -- whether flyovers or the cars themselves -- is for the benefit of the small minority that travels by cars.

Speaking of transport, I went to Bandra station to catch a train to town this morning. The platforms were already packed with people when I got there, and I could tell something was wrong. The first train arrived after 15 minutes -- 15 minutes at the height of rush hour is a long time indeed -- by which time the crowd had grown, and grown restive too. Chaos ensued. People fought to get out of the train as the rest of us struggled to get in. Men clambered on top, in between the carriages, hung from the windows. I didn't have the strength to fight my way in, nor the desire to hang from a window, so I let this train go.

Ten minutes passed, by which time the crowd had built up again. The same violent scenes were repeated with the next train. And the next, another ten minutes later. At that point, I gave up and came home to finish this article.

And I couldn't help thinking: indeed, in India you can now buy yourself anything ranging from a Maruti 800 to a Mercedes 300 ESL, from a McDonald's Maharajah Mac to Swarovski crystal, whatever that is. But for millions, taking the train to work has never been as brutal an exercise as it is today. The truly frightening thing is, it will be even more brutal tomorrow. We have fancy cars, but we do nothing to address the daily hardships of the enormous majority of Indians who will never own a car: whether by moving government offices to more accessible parts of the city or by giving buses priority on our roads.

And transport is just one aspect of these hardships.

As a result of this obsession with the market's high end, the unmentioned underbelly of our reforms is that the poor have got poorer. The rich are richer, no doubt. But the poor -- and they number in the hundreds of millions -- are poorer. Is that a matter for concern?

Is a reform process that ignores tiny dusty naked kids -- for that's what it does -- acceptable? Sustainable? Is it truly reforming anything? Is a country that ignores its tiny dusty naked kids going to last long? I ask these questions as a followup to my last column that criticised the massive defence budget increase. The responses I got followed more or less the same themes: defence is the country's highest priority and some things -- like tackling illiteracy and poverty -- have to be sacrificed in the "larger national interest". You know.

Is it in the larger national interest to keep huge sections of Indians poor? To make them poorer than ever? To pursue policies that only a few Indians benefit from, or even understand?

Some things, no doubt, are changing in India. But what are those things, when so much is still the same?

Tailpiece

Even knowing Pritish Nandy's current political proclivities -- his membership in the Shiv Sena -- Double Jeopardy is an absurd and untruthful column. There is much in it that's ridiculous, but I'll pick just this one statement:

Muslims in India have grown manifold and, if you include the illegal immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh who have over-run many of our states and whose actual numbers far exceed what the census reveals, the Muslim population has almost touched 30 per cent.

Whatever the census reveals, this is a bald lie.

India's population is just about 1 billion today. 30 per cent of that is 300 million. In 1981 (the only figures I have immediately handy), the census showed India had 75.5 million Muslims. For that to have increased to 300 million in 19 years, Muslims would have had to multiply at a rate of 7.5 per cent a year, which is simply absurd. No population in the world grows at that rate. Annual growth rates of populations are typically 2 or 3 per cent.

Ah, but those illegal immigrants, you're saying? If we assume that Muslims were unusually fecund in these 19 years and multiplied at 3%, that would put them at about 132 million today. So Nandy is saying there have been 168 million illegal immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh into India. Pakistan's own population is about 130 million, Bangladesh's about 120 million. (World Bank World Development Report, 1997). According to Nandy, more Muslims have entered India from Pakistan and Bangladesh than either of those countries actually contain; in fact, he would have you believe that 2/3rds of those countries' combined populations have infiltrated India.

My friend Ashwin Mahesh pointed out to me that Nandy actually exposes himself by something else he says later on in his article:

Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world. India is second.

But Indonesia's population is 193 million (WDR, 1997). Nandy has just claimed India has 300 million Muslims. Who's first? Who's second? Who's lying?

Islamic fundamentalism may or may not be a vast threat to the world, I don't know. What I do know is that when its critics, like Nandy, must resort to lies to make their case, there's no reason to take anything they say seriously.

Dilip D'Souza