Jan 18, 1999
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FIFTH COLUMN Flu Right Over Even a troubled east Asia is better than a healthy India. By Tavleen Singh Ever since the collapse began in east Asia we in India have prided ourselves on "escaping" what everyone calls the Asian flu. Our senior political leaders have gloated publicly and patted themselves on the back for not having reformed our economy too quickly. Since most Indians cannot afford to travel abroad and, in any case, pride themselves on such obscurantist economic ideas as swadeshi and our own peculiar version of socialism, they have failed to notice that even after the collapse of their economies most of these east Asian countries look much better than India. This gloomy thought was the first thing that came to mind when I stepped onto the plush glass and chrome modernity of Bangkok airport. I compared it to Mumbai airport from where I had embarked on what was only a short flight. It was a comparison that intensified my sense of gloom. Mumbai has one of India's best airports and India is one of the giants of Asia. Yet tiny Thailand's capital has an airport that makes Mumbai's look decrepit and 50 years too old. In Mumbai we had stumbled through a departure lounge jammed with people, we had walked through corridors which carried the stench of dirty toilets and tripped over the bags of delayed passengers sleeping in any corner they could find. We had then lurched down crumbling stairs to a coach that shook and rattled its way to the aeroplane, only to make the dismaying discovery that even Korean Airlines is better than Air-India. In Bangkok, on the other hand, we were led from our plane to brightly lit terminals which were spotlessly clean and almost more modern than airports you see in advanced western countries. The taxi that took us to town was air-conditioned and clean unlike the smelly tin traps that we offer at our own airports. We drove down a spanking new motorway unlike any road you see anywhere in India. While he was paying the toll that the road demands my taxi driver informed me that it now took only 20 minutes to get to town whereas it used to take two hours before the road was built. On either side rose modern office blocks and fancy residential apartments which towered over the remnants of old Bangkok's gilded pagodas. Some of the newer buildings were incomplete. The taxi driver explained why: "Thai economy not doing so well. They wait for some money to complete these buildings." When I first went there 20 years ago, Bangkok looked like a shabby, low-slung version of Mumbai. Today, it is a city that has managed to absorb and adapt the best of the West without even slightly losing its Asian identity, It appears to have made a special effort not to lose its eastern charm because of the realisation that it is this that lures western tourists to the country they once called Siam. They come here in their millions. Even at the worst of times this small country attracts more than twice the number of foreign visitors as our vast, ancient land does at the best of times. Yet, if we got our act together, India could quite easily attract three times as many tourists as the whole of east Asia put together. Will this happen in the foreseeable future? No, it will not. Because our political leaders, from extreme left to extreme right, still think of tourism as some kind of frivolous idea. They have not even begun to understand that countries can grow rich from tourism alone and that they can modernise themselves in the process. Tourism, you see, is only possible in a serious way if there is sufficient attention paid to such essential infrastructure requirements as roads, electricity and telecommunications. This kind of infrastructure is not something foreign visitors take home with them. Rather, it enhances the prosperity of local residents. Some of our political leaders are sufficiently aware of this. But their problem is they have not yet worked out how a road can be built fast enough for ordinary people to think of it as an idea good enough to vote for. Just as they fear that the very mention of tourism will make the average, poverty-stricken Indian think of elitism and privilege. So we have created for ourselves a situation in which even private investors think twice before putting their money into the tourism business. Our laws are so convoluted that it can take 10 years to obtain the necessary permission to build a hotel. As for the other things needed to transform tourism from a cottage industry into a thriving, multi-million dollar business, there are no signs yet that the massive government investment which is required is ever likely to come. Our political leaders prefer putting their money into old-fashioned things like hugely expensive public-sector factories that never seem to make money. Or in setting up vast government departments that seem to exist entirely to pay salaries to government employees. Meanwhile, some of our poorest states like Orissa remain desperately poor and often even starve. One imaginative chief minister is all it would take for Orissa to live entirely off its exquisite beauty and ancient monuments. In east Asia it is because political leaders thought differently and in more modern terms that a transformation was possible. A transformation so incredible that countries which were way behind us 20 years ago are now way ahead. So the next time you hear people boasting about India having "escaped the Asian flu" tell them to take a flight from Mumbai to Bangkok. It is all it will take to discover what it means to move from a bicycle economy to an automobile economy. |
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