India shining mirage

My Two Indias — A Journey to the Ends of Opportunity by S. Mitra Kalita; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.399; 209 ppThis is an interesting book written by a bewildered ABCD (America born confused desi) who reverse migrated to India in 2006 to experience the India shining growth story. A senior deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), New York, S. Mitra Kalita (34) volunteered to help with the launch of the now successful business daily Mint, published by the Hindustan Times group in collaboration with WSJ. Born in the US to Assamese parents who fled socialist India to the land of opportunity three decades earlier, she took an eighteen-hour non-stop Continental flight to Delhi with artist husband Nitin and two-year-old daughter Naya, not only to help with Mint but also re-connect with the family her father left behind in Assam. Back home she quickly discovers that while a new India of steel and glass malls, luxury brands, gourmet restaurants, gated colonies and high-rise apartments, 126,700 dollar millionaires, yuppie IT professionals and a highly aspirational middle class which is routinely hyped up by business publications including WSJ, has indeed emerged, theres also a not-so-hyped old India bypassed by liberalisation and the India shining growth story. She discovers soon enough that in old Indias fetid slums and medieval villages over 836 million people live on less than Rs.20 per day, nearly 665 million dont have access to piped water and sanitation facilities, and theres the neglected rural outback where over 2,000 farmers commit suicide every year. Within two weeks of arriving in Delhi, Kalita, whose debut non-fiction book Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and their Passage to America from India was published in 2003, gets a taste of the real India when she begins a harried search to rent an apartment and encounters untrained real estate brokers, greedy landlords, sky-high rents (Rs.53,000 upwards — rent in India basically pays for four walls nothing else), black money (that formed an entirely parallel economy in this capital of capitals), black market gas cylinders, invertors and illegal booster pumps to siphon off scarce water supply into luxury apartments. In the workplace she discovers that US-style efficiency is entirely lacking and hierarchy and deference to elders ingrained in Indian culture makes her task of getting reporters to think out-of-the-box and approach every story as a blank slate with no assumptions formidable. Outside work, she and Nitin by virtue of being expatriates, are welcomed into the capital citys happening party scene, into farmhouses and plush bungalows, among people who think nothing of dropping Rs.5,000 to Rs.10,000 at nightclubs to have a good time. As a business journalist Kalita experiences first-hand the much-too-familiar woes of Indian industry — grave shortage of skilled workers, unemployable graduates, steep in-house training costs and corruption in government. Unwittingly, she stumbles upon the hidden truth that Indias crumbling higher education system produces the worlds largest number of low-calibre graduates and postgrads. Even the best colleges in India struggle to give students the…