It was one of the big ironies of Wen Jiabao’s visit to New Delhi this month: while China has encircled the Indian Ocean region with projects from Pakistan to Burma, India has struggled to spend money within its own borders. Premier Wen left Islamabad, his next stop, with a pledge to invest up to $30bn more in Pakistan by 2015, which is about as much as the entire Indian private sector spent on its own infrastructure in the year to March.
India’s economic momentum is impressive: over the next few years, the country’s real gross domestic product growth seems likely to move above China’s, a crossover rarely seen in the past 20 years. But it is achieving this development in spite of its infrastructure, not because of it. Road traffic is slowed by single lanes and uneven surfaces. Ships take almost 96 hours to unload and load at Indian ports, about 10 times longer than in Hong Kong. And 18 per cent of India’s urban population defecates daily in open spaces, compared with 6 per cent in China.
Unlike China, of course, India is burdened by democratic government, a respect for private land rights and a very zealous environment ministry, which means that the state cannot simply bulldoze settlements or drain wetlands to make way for power plants. Even so, the country’s plans to triple private spending on infrastructure in the 12th five-year plan to 2017 are long overdue. The infrastructure deficit is one of the main reasons China’s GDP per capita has grown at an average annual rate of 9.6 per cent since 2000, according to World Bank figures, compared with 5.5 per cent for India. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel-winning Bengali poet: “One can put in as much water as the size of the pot.”