In a country crowded with beggars who rush traffic at red lights or stalk their quarry on crutches, Indira frequented the same crossing, just before the Qutab Minar road forks off to the road for the town of Gargaon.
At the beginning, she was my introduction to the wretchedness of India. An independent survey last year found that 4 in 5 of India’s billion people have no share in whatever economic reforms the nation has achieved since it abandoned protectionism a decade ago.
In time she became my model for the resilience of Asians who can survive on a daily plate of peas, a bowl of rice and the dream of finding a job.
In this part of the world, millions of bureaucrats still shovel paper from one desk to another, snubbing the concept of computers. Low-caste worker brigades still build roads and highways with pick and shovel, clear land and public parks, doing jobs for months that a single bulldozer could do in a week.
Ragged artisans working on their haunches with basic tools duplicate Louis XVI furniture for a $100 a piece or make AK-47 assault rifles for the same amount in northern Pakistan. Indians revive broken gadgets with a minimum of material and a maximum of ingenuity. On the sidewalk a little man, using only a hammer, a chisel and a file, duplicates a house key four locksmith machines failed to reproduce.
The future of this timeless work force looks grim.
India is building more and more labor-saving computers, but modernization has a twist. In an effort to have a place in the global village, India is making machines and electronics that would shrink the labor market even though a booming population growth needs more jobs.
In the early days of our encounters, Indira–spindly, barefoot and wearing a tattered sari–would hold out one dirt-stained palm while the other clutched a tiny boy, naked but for a ragged loin cloth. If I looked away she would stick a finger in her mouth to signal hunger.
For some time I lost track of her. One becomes too quickly accustomed to the Indiras on a continent that measures success in terms of an increased GDP and considers compassion a luxury reserved for affluent Westerners.
After all, so Indians explain, she is part of the unfortunate and widening gap between rich and poor, a fate predestined by the gods or the price paid for the transition from a controlled to free market economy.
I learned Indira lives in the slum quarter of Yamuna Pushta. A fourth of New Delhi’s 12.7 million people live in similar
fly-infested mazes of festering hovels.
She came from impoverished Bihar, one among an estimated 450 million rural Asians who have migrated to cities in search of a better life.
Such migration will strain urban infrastructure to the breaking point all over the continent. Bangkok, Jakarta, Karachi, Bombay, Dhaka, Manila–in most of these cities the crime rate has tripled and the water supply has dwindled. Toilets are considered a luxury; power blackouts are a daily thing. Twelve-hour outages in cities like New Delhi are normal now. Pollution creates toxic cupolas above cities through which the sun may not penetrate for days. It’s likely to get worse.
Indira is a legacy of an India that for decades shut itself off from economic innovations and practiced what Ramesh Thakar, head of the Canberra Peace Research Center, calls “the most successful program of poverty multiplication in human history.”
It is so across Asia, but modern communications and better education have made the have-nots conscious of the power of their numbers. “They can’t shoot us anymore because we’re on television,” gloated a club-wielding youth in Jakarta last fall. “We brought down Suharto. We can bring down anyone.”
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On the Indian subcontinent– home to 1 in 5 humans on the planet–an inflammatory mixture of nuclear technology and religious fundamentalism has made the region ripe for social unrest.
Newly acquired nuclear arsenals have become symbols of national pride in Pakistan and India. Common people often consider “the bomb” as the fist of Allah or the trident of Shiva, a tool to destroy the enemy.
The rise of fundamentalism found fertile ground in a region agitating for more equitable wealth and land distribution, for the right to employment and fair wages. Massacres in East Timor, which pitted Catholics against Muslims, were in reality a battle over ownership of the land, a battle between the newcomers from Muslim Indonesia and the natives converted to Christianity by their Portuguese colonizers.
Above the poverty rests a thin layer of extravagant lifestyle for an elite, coddled by servants, which plays golf and tennis at clubs left by the British and sends its children to prestigious campuses abroad. An aspiring middle class, never quite able to make it through the social barriers into the upper echelons, either joins the Communist Party or learns enough about computer science to find lucrative jobs in the West or management posts in the Arab Emirates.
Indira is at the bottom of the pack, someone who glimpses the good life through the windows of the chauffeur-driven cars whose passengers she solicits for alms. One day, about a year ago, she tapped on the window, grinning.
She had graduated–to selling tissues and chewing gum to motorists at the same corner. The free market economy had finally touched her. Her sari was nearly new, and she wore sandals. Encased in her smile was the hope of millions of Indians and Asians for a foothold in a future of plenty.
Hope keeps them from revolting.
This year India’s new coalition government is opening the doors further to foreign investments and foreign companies, all with ambitious plans for a slice of the huge Indian market.
About two weeks ago, while stuck in a traffic jam, I saw Indira again.
She waved a shovel from a roadside sewage ditch on the road to Gargaon. Her face was caked with dirt, and she looked as if she hadn’t washed for weeks.
But she was smiling broadly among the brigade of women and men who camp under blue plastic sheets by the roadside at night and push the ditch along during daylight hours, seven days a week.
Indira had landed a job.
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Uli Schmetzer, former Rome and Beijing correspondent, has covered Asia for the last 11 years.