I spent three months travelling alone around northern India. After returning to England, people often asked me, 'what's the main difference then?'

My trip to India was the first time I had left the western world; and it was the first time I had travelled alone for an extended period of time: so everything seemed very different to me. Even after only a few days in the country though - submersed in unfamiliarity and trying to make sense of it - I found myself already preparing the answer to this question.

The main difference - that is, the differences expressed as simply as possible - is that India is not as developed as the West. 'Well - yes - obviously', you might reply; and to say simply that the country is not as developed is to make a very general statement; but if you're anything like I was before I went on my trip to India, you may not be very familiar with what it really means for a country to be less developed.

Some of what I write now are the ideas I've been through several times in the conversations I've had with other travellers in India; when two backpackers meet they invariably have lots to say to one another about their impressions of the similarly alien country that they're both travelling through. One girl I met in Jaipur said, in response to my generalisation about India's state of development, that she didn't like to use the phrase 'less developed', which carries connotations of worse, when she felt that India was just different.

'But it is worse', was my response. When I say 'less developed', I'm referring to the poor access to adequate health care in India; the apparent lack of access to education; the generally low standard of the country's rural and transport infrastructure; the widely primitive and disorganised commercial, industrial and agricultural environments; the inadequate protection of workers' and consumer rights; the evidence of inequality for women; and - of course - India's widespread poverty. As I read in Siddhartha Deb's article (Observer Magazine 26 Nov. 2006): half the children in India are undernourished; and eighty percent of the population have no access to safe drinking water, with more than one million children dying every year through illness as a result.

I do make a distinction though, between these social conditions, and India's cultural conditions. India has a culture distinct and quite distantly separate from the West (a fact that is demonstrated by the juvenile approximations of western culture that are easily found at expensive restaurants and nightclubs in Jaipur or Delhi). Differences between India and the West in the quality of what I identify as cultural conditions are differences that you may not necessarily be able to judge to be either better or worse. These are conditions such as the relative importance of family in India; India's social profiling according to the caste system; the evident acceptance of begging as a shameless occupation; and the relatively strong work ethic, especially amongst business professionals (for whom it is not uncommon regularly to work eighteen hour days).

Many of these cultural conditions are necessarily related to the social ones, and their qualities will change - almost certainly becoming more western - as social conditions become more developed. The order of cause and effect though between social and cultural conditions isn't always clear; almost certainly it varies from one case to another. There will be instances where cultural change is the catalyst for social change.

Having established that India is undeveloped, or rather that it is 'developing', and therefore that it is in some respects worse off; having noted that around thirty-five percent of India's one billion inhabitants live in a state of poverty; the natural question that follows is 'why? - what is to blame?' This is a question that is all the more pertinent for the undeniable fact that India has a whole subcontinent's resources at its disposal.

While we have identified cultural conditions as distinct from social conditions for being those elements of the socio-cultural complex that are not necessarily intrinsically bad, it's likely that some cultural conditions are at least partly responsible for bad social conditions: the importance of family, for example, may provide sustaining forces behind social conditions including female inequality, a primitive commercial environment, and possibly even poverty itself. As I suggested above, there will be instances in India's development where a change in such a cultural condition may catalyse the development of one or more social conditions whose state of 'undevelopment' it previously sustained.

However for the same reasons that cultural conditions cannot easily be judged bad - since they are not intrinsically bad - they cannot easily be regarded as the most significant contributors to undeveloped social conditions. One clearer contributor is India's profound and apparently chronic executive mismanagement. The details of this management are summarised in an article by Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar that I read in the Sunday Times of India (New Delhi, Dec. 17 2006):

He goes on to explain that the Indian government's development projects have focussed on providing jobs, in compliance with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which requires that at least 60% of spending must be on labour. This has resulted in the construction of infrastructure that simply doesn't last, like mud roads that are washed away come the monsoons; 'Pucca construction', he asserts, 'needs at least 70% materials and 30% labour'.

Aiya's drawing of our attention to labour-intensive development projects rang a few bells with me: I was told that many of the historic monuments that I visited in the drought-prone states of Gujarat and Rajasthan were built as a means of providing relief through employment during famine. Perhaps we can find an established cultural tradition partly at fault for the mismanagement Aiya describes.

Secondly, He identifies ill-considered subsidies and services, in summary of the government's mismanagement.

Free electricity and water not only makes rural electricity unviable, it encourages excessive pumping that dries up all drinking water wells and all shallow tubewells […]. Free canal water has encouraged water-guzzling crops that are ecologically inappropriate.

Educational and health services are provided by unsackable staff belonging to trade unions with huge political clout. Staff are not accountable to those they are supposed to serve, and so are absent - with impunity - 25 to 60% of the time.

These subsidies and services must be rendered sensibly in order to provide the necessary 'basics of growth'.

The article in the Sunday Times of India also reproduces Hernando de Soto's suggestion, from his book The Mystery of Capital:

From what I have gathered though, government in India seems partly disabled from the outset. Through my conversations with different types of people, all trying to get on in India, I learnt that corruption in the public sector is a real and undeniable fact of life. The position of the police officer in many towns and cities in India is regarded as a particularly valuable job for the personal authority bestowed upon its holder, and for the income, akin to 'tips' in the service industry, that is derived from bakshish, bribes. The widely expected consequence of being caught violating a traffic law, or even dealing drugs to tourists, is not criminalization and punishment by the state, but rather a financial penalty made payable to the officer who is responsible for policing your behaviour.

No doubt this corruption extends beyond petty crime and the police force, and into all areas of state action. Touching again on the theme of inadequate development of infrastructure, I remember hearing or reading about an investigation that was taking place into a bridge that collapsed: a state-commissioned construction company had allegedly conspired with local governors in a scheme to split the proceeds from money saved through skimping on the quality of construction materials. It's easy to imagine that the investigation process itself would likely have been vulnerable to corruption too.

Measures must be taken to engender responsibility and accountability in place of corruption: it undermines the successful operation of any society, and is certainly an obstacle to development. In a similar, and perhaps equally deplorable vein, is the apparent irreverence in India of common laws and legislative and disciplinary systems. There is traffic and road safety legislation in India, but the de facto flow of traffic is chaotic. There is health and safety legislation, but in practice people cross and walk down railway lines. When road traffic accidents happen, drivers flee the scene of the crash; I refer to accidents involving not only private motorcars, but commercial goods vehicles, and even, as I read in the newspaper on one occasion, a state bus, full of passengers, that had been hit by a train.

One of the immediate effects caused by this social attitude (and also a result of corruption in executive and judiciary government) is vigilante behaviour. In response to the ineffectiveness of legislative and discipliniary systems, and in fact also because those systems fail to prevent such a response, communities take disciplinary action into their own hands. I read in daily newspapers on two separate occasions about teachers who had been violently assaulted by angry mobs of parents, due to allegations that they had been abusing their positions of responsibility for young children. It's likely, probably as a consequence of the unaccountability amongst the staff of educational services that Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar identifies in his article, that these teachers I read about did indeed abuse their positions; but vigilantism, like corruption, breeds prejudice and injustice, and further undermines the systems of government whose ineffectiveness is its cause.

I will admit that towards the end of my three-month period in India I was looking forward to returning to the West, but I don't want to paint to grim a picture of the country. I love India for its culture and beauty, and also because of how exciting a place it is to be: the country is changing rapidly, and young Indians have a lot to look forward to. Evidence of India's development can be seen in the development of its industry, particularly in software and outsourcing. As we keep hearing, India's is the world's second fastest growing economy: the 'Indian stock market is up 200 per cent over the past five years' (Observer Magazine). The stable, happy communities that have already begun to appear under the influence of progressive companies like Tata, one of India's one or two Virgin-esque multi-industrial conglomerates, are a demonstration of the developing force of business and a sign of things to come.

People often talk of India's pronounced social stratification, and that this condition grows increasingly extreme is evident of the country's ongoing development. Siddhartha Deb observes 'a concerted effort by affluent Indians to dissociate themselves from the squalor, diversity and frustratingly unmodern nature of their country'; and while some are able to catch the wave of India's booming industries, there are

With an increasing wealth of resources at the top, greater now than ever, if undeveloped, impoverished India isn't changed almost unrecognisably in the next ten or fifteen years, then there must be a real danger that it will never change. While we can only hope that it will be replaced by the liberal-democratic tenets of opportunity and equality for all, it must be a worry that social inconsistency is so ingrained in Indian national identity. In talking to one friend from Delhi, I was almost shocked to hear him refer to the people of Bihar, India's poorest state, as though they were another race ('they're not stupid people', he was saying, 'many successful politicians and intellectuals have come from Bihar').

The brightest ray of hope though for the people of undeveloped India, might be the enthusiasm for western culture amongst so many of India's youth. It seems to me to foreshadow India's proper union with the developed world. Many young Indians aspire to western culture. Increasingly, they conceive a right to opportunity and equality. Attracted to liberalism, and many spurned on by at least a degree of increasing affluence, they yearn for progress. They are the first forward-looking new-born generation of independent India, where their parents were born into an infant country still reeling from its violent birth. Young Indian's are ambitious, and upwardly-mobile, and rightly they entertain, as Deb puts it, a flowering 'sense of destiny'.

© 2007 Kevin Joyner. All Rights Reserved