t’s no small irony that even as employment, and the share of the national income going to the poor, have decreased in India over the past five years, car sales have doubled. Automobile manufacturing is one of India’s fastest-growing industries, thanks to the consumerism of the upper-middle class and its elitist notions of lifestyle, personal mobility and the glamour it attaches to cars.
Tag - Transport
Terminal folly
Delhi's ecologically unsound new airport terminal does not represent progress; rather it marks the Indian elite's dependence on false symbols of grandeur.
A perverse notion of modernity
The subcontinent’s leaders never learn from mistakes—their own, or one another’s. Nawaz Sharif’s White Elephant M-2 expressway was one of the greatest scandals in global infrastructure development history. Now, India is about to produce its match—in aviation, by building a $4 billion (Rs12,700 crore) new terminal at Delhi airport. Terminal-3, to be opened soon, is claimed to be the world’s fifth-largest airport terminal, and bigger than Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Singapore ’s Changi. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh euphorically described T-3 as signifying the “arrival of a new India , committed to join the ranks of modern, industrialised nations …”.