'Mile by Mile, India paves a Smoother Road...'
…Goddess versus man, superstition versus progress, the people versus the state ––– mile by mile, India is struggling to modernize its national highway system, in the process, itself.
The Indian government has begun a 15-year project to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow decrepit national highway with the first leg budgeted at $6.25, to be largely complete by next year. It amounts to the most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and the British building of the subcontinent's railway network the century before…
…The real start came in 1991, when India began dismantling its state-run economy andng its markets to foreign imports and investment. While that reform process has been fitful, leaving the country trailing its neighbor and rival, China, India has turned a corner. Its economy grew 6.9 percent in the fiscal year ending in March. India has a new identity, thanks to outsourcing, as back office to the world…
…To grasp that transformation, and India's transition, a New York Times reporter and photographer spent a month this year driving the first stage of the highway project, which has been dubbed, in awkward but bullish coinage, the Golden Quadrilateral. More jagged than geometric, the four and six-lane quadrilateral's 3,625 miles run through 13 states and India's four largest cities: New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai, formerly Bombay. The journey along the highway offered a before-and-after snapshot of India, of the challenges of developing the world's largest democracy, and of how westernization is reshaping Indian society.
––– Dec. 4, 2005
'On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger'
…India has at least 5.1 million people living with H.I.V., the second highest number after South Africa. It is, by all accounts, at a critical stage: it can either prevent the further spread of infection, or watch a more generalized epidemic take hold. Global experts worry that India is both underspending on AIDS and undercounting its H.I.V. cases.
Its national highways are a conduit for the virus, passed by prostitutes and the truckers, migrants and locals who pay them, and brought home to unsuspecting wives in towns or villages. In its largest infrastructure project since independence, India is in the process of widening and upgrading those highways into a true interstate system. The effort will allow the roads to carry more traffic and freight than ever before. But some things are better left uncarried.
India's entry into the global economy over the past 15 years may also be furthering the spread of AIDS. With rising incomes, men have more money for sex; poor women see selling sex as their only access to the new prosperity. Western influences are liberalizing Indian sexual mores. In response, cultural protectionists are refusing to allow even the national conversation about AIDS to reflect this changing reality…
––– Dec. 6, 2005
'In Today's India Status Comes with Four Wheels'
This domestic hunger for goods has become an important engine for an economy that still lags in exports. So intense is the advertising onslaught, so giddy the media coverage of the new affluence, that it is almost easy to forget that India remains home to the world's largest number of poor people, according to the World Bank…
…And, after more decades of socialist deprivation, when consumer goods were so limited that refrigerators were given pride of place in living rooms, they have ever more wares to spend it on: cellphones, airconditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars…
…Indians are discovering in cars everything Americans did: control and freedom, privacy and privilege, speed and status. Car showrooms, the bigger the better, are the new temples here, and cars the icons of a new individualism taking root…
…That ethos is changing. "Twenty years back one car was an achievement," said Maj.Gen. B.C. Khanduri, who as minister of roads from 2000 to 2004 helped shepherd the new highway into being. "Now every child needs their own car."
To him and others who grew up in a different society, that change bespeaks a larger and troubling shift. "The value system is finishing now," he said. "We are gradually increasing everyone for himself."
––– Dec. 5, 2005
'All Roads Lead to Cities, Transforming India'
…In the rural mind. Surat, in Gujarat state, looms with outsized allure, and its girth is growing to match. In less than 15 years, its population has more than doubled, to an estimated 3.5 million, making it India's ninth largest city.
The majority of Surat's residents are migrants, drawn by its two main industries, diamonds and textiles.
Surat's growth spurt is being replicated across India. At least 28 percent of its population now lives in cities and many more of its citizens move in and out of them for temporary work.
In some southern states, nearly half the population is in cities. In 1991, India had 23 cities with one million or more people.
A decade later it had 35. As the people shift, so does the very nature of India. This is a nation of 600,000 villages, each of them a unit that has ordered life for centuries, from the strata of castes to the cycles of harvest. In this century, cities' pull and influence –– not only financial but also psychic-are remaking society.
Less visible than the heated consumerism or western sexual habits changing India, this slow churning may be ore profound and, for a country weaned on the virtues of village life, more wrenching…
––– Dec. 7, 2005
