Comparing downtown Delhi with downtown Shanghai is no comparison. I've lived an traveled in the Chinese countryside and that poverty is not even in the same ballpark as India.
Ideologically yes, but practically & subjectively it doesn't feel that way in large Indian cities (anecdotal, I visited India for 2 months years ago). Walking through the center of Delhi (and many other large Indian cities) you see the kind of poverty you never encounter first-hand in developed-world cities like those in Western Europe, North America, Japan, Singapore, etc.
It was definitely a shock for me at first & is not a pleasant way to live IMO.
The comparison with china is, IMHO, pretty much apples to oranges.
You are comparing industrialized portions of China with India's countryside (notwithstanding the forced removal of Beijing's slums for the Olympics http://olympics.scmp.com/Article.aspx?id=1419§ion=in...).
If you need to find fault with the slow pace of reforms, I give you democracy and cite US Health Reforms as an excuse - imagine if you had one billion rather than 300 million to work with.
As India's MoS-Small Scale Industries' Sachin Pilot once put it - "inclusive development vs growth".
Hoping that people will not cheat you at Bangkok's KhaoSan road is a bit too optimistic. Existence of ThornTree and Tripadvisor with their "Tourist Trap" sections is indeed because this is a human, not a regional phenomena.
I'm sad that you wont go back to India because of it - I really wish you had not stayed at Paharganj, but instead stayed somewhere inside Delhi.
I wish you had skipped Taj Mahal altogether and instead taken a walk to Hauz Khas Village, bang in the middle of New Delhi - which completely epitomises India's bohemian kitsch, shopping, food, music along with monuments that predate the Taj Mahal by atleast 300 years. Maybe you could have dropped in to have a cup of coffee at one of the cafe's there that operate on an honor system rather than a bill.
Your tourist trap experience, colored the rest of your viewpoints and I'm truly sad at that.
Why was he pointing that out? It wasn't in question: everyone involved in this conversation knows how poor Delhi is on a factual level, since it's literally in the article we all read. Half the Toronto post wasn't even about poverty, it was about how the author would go on dates to far away parts of the city so his family wouldn't find out he was gay.
Why wouldn't they be comparable? They can be compared easily. You're comparing them right now.
Chris, I've lived all around the world - I literally have not seen worse poverty than Indian slums (and yes, this includes multiple countries in Africa). From a marginal benefit perspective, the gains in India are enormous.
Delhi has a per capita annual income of 300,000 rupees ($4,615) - the highest in the country and three times the national average. But nearly half of the city’s population lives in slums without basic services and facilities like drinking water, garbage disposal or a proper drainage system.
And life goes on, and little change is made. Many nations are so unfortunate to live in a poor society, with not so many chances of getting better.
Yes the country is plainly less rich than Japan and the first world, and it shows in big cities. Even comparing big cities in China to India there is a big gap.
But here is what you are missing: as total wealth in India is growing there are indeed some places (which the casual tourist driving around will not see) centered in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi that are super rich. One way to spy on it is visit one of the "five star" hotels like JW Marriots etc -- they are numerous, massive, and full of quite rich people with loads of servants and fancy places to live.
By the way, you can find loads of disgustingly miserable poor places in the rich USA too. Maybe they all have sewers and electricity but that's about all that separates parts of the rural US (deep south) or bad urban poverty (right nearby me in NYC) and some villages in India.
Putting aside the absurd comparison of living costs in a 3rd world country vs 1st world...
India is filled with a ton of misery. It's the only country in the world where I saw dead people just lying in the gutter. The Mumbai slum was one of the worst places I've ever been and you want to hold that up as some sort of ideal? That people should just live down to that level instead of striving for better? If it wasn't for the Indian government welfare programs, that slum would be filled with rotting corpses.
This is a fairly honest unflinching piece.
A visit to India can induce severe "Cognitive Dissonance" in the unprepared. There is obscene display of super affluence right next to shocking Poverty. I see this every single day -
A beggar & her naked child begging at the window of an Audi R8.
The salesman in a high-end TV shop taking the bus to work.
The Marriot main-gate where super high priced cars drive out to be greeted by a forest of beggars.
Mumbai City simultaneously houses the most expensive residence in the world [1] and the largest slum in the world [2]
The leaders and the bureaucrats of the Govt. of India deserve to be shot in a public square for their sheer corruption and incompetence. They rob the country blind; feather their own nests and manage thru coercion to get elected (or posted to plum postings) over and over again.
In the Asia-expat community, I think most of us have accurate rankings in our heads. Right now, there is a 999 reading for Delhi on aqicn, but this could be PM 10 (and I check, it is, still PM2.5 is bad at 400+). India is definitely behind China as a low-middle income country, but China is middle-high income, it isn't in the same class as India.
I think we just expected more from China especially when companies were trying to convince us that we didn't need hardship pay to work in China while it is still provided in India (the US embassy/consulates had to reinstate hardship pay in China after 2010, international recruitment at other companies is way down). China was supposed to lack the negative features of a least developed country, but that wasn't really the case when air pollution was considered; it really does effect your lifestyle (you can't go for nightly walks anymore, you are a slave to aqi readings, "don't forget to wear your face mask honey!" as my wife would say).
BTW, if I was going to work in India, I would choose Bangalore. The air seemed OK enough compared to Delhi and Mumbai.
It's hard to be sympathetic when walking through Paharganj in Delhi and have hundreds of con artists just outright lying and trying to scam well meaning tourists. I won't go back to India because of it. It's one thing to pay a guy to take pictures of you at Taj, it's another to have someone be helpful then demand a tip for it.
China has a billion people too, but life there is far less horrid, dirty and bureaucratic. While the Chinese government is pretty deplorable, something is going right there, compared to India.
Another problem with India is the mind-numbing Colonial-era bureaucracy -- to start a small business in India it takes months of paperwork just to get a business license. You have to get papers signed, resigned, rubber stamped by ten different offices and then pay crazy expensive bribes to everyone along the way. The problem is the government. It's an obsession with administivia at the expense of entrepreneurs.
I only mentioned the 8 cities on that list which I've spent enough time in to form an opinion.
As for the one I gave a negative opinion about, a big part of my dislike for Delhi is due to the lack of density - it's more suburb than city. Going from where I work/live (Pitampura) to the fun parts of town (South Delhi) takes 1-1.5 hours and the metro shuts off at ~11pm. (Other things I dislike are pollution, oily food, and the difficulty in finding a date.)
India almost certainly will be better off after people escape rural poverty and enter the middle class living in the cities. This process is happening rapidly and the results are good.
That doesn’t equate to “developing country” like living standards as the OP was suggesting. There is a distinction. As someone who actually was born and raised in India, this is not even remotely the same thing. It is like saying traffic jams in NYC are like Mumbai, therefore NYC is like a developing country
I studied at an IIT in India for quite some time (loved the institution and the student body). I’ve seen more than most people I guess (from Ladakh to Mumbai to Varanasi).
In places without tourists people were generally honest. The street vendor living off a few rupees each day for bananas would not take a rupee too much. I wish I could believe the “the dumb tourist tax is helping the needy and poor” - but it only fills the pockets of the (relatively) wealthy. It’s their sense of “entitlement to the money of these wasteful Westerners”.
India and China (lived there for > 1 yr) were pretty much the same 25 yrs ago in terms of GDP and population. That was long after any British influence - yet both developed very differently.
If I had to make a guess, it would be: how people treat family and society. As a foreigner, it seemed to me that Indians never care about society or anybody except their own family. In China, people are very focused on society and less on family. In India, people were mainly interested in their own immediate gain - in China they had some “boundaries” at least.
Cleanliness is not “we can’t afford better” it is “people genuinely don’t care when it’s outside their house”. The slums in Mumbai were among the best organized and cleanest places I found in India. People cared because they had to and wanted to - not because they could afford.
In India whenever I asked an official (police) for help or advice, they would sell me off to some relative. In China I never experienced that.
I can’t generalize a couple of years abroad in different countries, but I would kind a take the guess that if you worked on actually “trying go make society work beyond immediate personal gain” things might look different in India.
I have a complex relationship with India - because of many positive and negative experiences. As you continue to rip us foreigners and tourists off - we will stop spending money in your country. I’m tired of being accused to “be too dumb to inform myself” when the police and society are just rigged to steal from me because I am white and “look rich”. I am tired of being accused that the entire world is just taking advantage of Indians when the trading balance tells otherwise and it’s Indian people that care so little about each other.
It was really sad and heartbreaking to see how in China pollution gets less and less whereas India really became “totally unbearable” in the recent years.
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