Lawlessness, corruption, poverty and pollution: the city where we're all headed

Rana Dasgupta, who was born and brought up in Britain, moved to Delhi at the end of 2000, principally to pursue a love affair and to write his first novel. He soon found himself mixing in bohemian circles, spending his evenings in ‘small, bare and, in those days, cheap’ apartments, talking with ‘artists and intellectuals’. These are not the people, nor is this the life or the city that he describes in Capital. The book’s title is in fact a pun, since its principal subject is money: how it is acquired, how it is spent and what it has done to Delhi and its citizens.

When India gained independence it was decided that the state needed to exercise ‘a considerable measure of intervention and control’ if this vast new country was to thrive and benefit all its people. A closed and centrally planned economy more or less persisted until 1991 when the then finance minister (now Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh introduced ‘liberalisation’, opening up the country to global markets.

One result has been India’s astonishing economic rise; but while some villagers in rural Bengal now have mobile phones, the disparity between those who have accumulated almost unimaginable wealth and those who still lack such basic requirements as fresh water and proper sanitation has grown even wider. Dasgupta suggests that the poor have become ‘totally irrelevant’ to the national enterprise. Visiting the Bhalwa Colony, a slum accumulated around a vast rubbish tip in north Delhi, he writes:

It is impossible to communicate how remote and inaccessible this place is, though it is in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities. It is easy to understand how national borders might separate populations with very different access to the global economy, but more difficult to conceive of how such divisions might run through a single city.