The billionaires of Rajasthan

The desert breeding ground of India’s billionaires

Richard Orange

8 September 2007

‘This is backwoods, really backwoods,’ says Aditya, as the rackety, jam-packed bus pulls into Rajgarh, a small town in the north-west of Rajasthan, India’s desert state.

Nevertheless, the beautifully designed community centre he opened, in memory of his mother Gita Devi Mittal, cost about £600,000. It sits incongruously in the town centre among the small merchants’ shops. It has an air-conditioned, acoustically perfect, 129-seat auditorium, a room crammed with computers, and a gym that wouldn’t look out of place in a London health club. But it’s easy to argue the Mittals should have first provided roads and drains. Inside the centre, that’s exactly what P.S. Saini, the site engineer, and Kamal Singh Shettia, the centre’s manager, are busy working on. Laid out on tracing paper in front of them are plans for a concrete road costing £7,000, and a new drainage system costing £1,400. There are bigger plans for a regional hospital. Saini, a former railway engineer, gives me a tour of the centre, complete with a little ceremony in its temple to Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. He is forthright about the problems facing the town. ‘There are sand dunes all around us. There’s no water for agriculture, there’s a scarcity of drinking water, and even the ground water is of a saline nature.’

Mittal’s aid may be late in the day, but it is welcome. And one of the comforts of living in Rajasthan’s billionaire belt is that even if this tycoon’s generosity dries up, there is every chance that the town will produce another one.