Aaronovitch's Indian travels

Times journalist David Aaronovitch is on a "journey of discovery" in India. His first piece, published yesterday,as about Mumbai ('Bombay' to Times readers): Growing confidence shows in investment and returns.

This week the subcontinent was admonished with typical grandness by The Economist. “India,” it concluded, “needs to grow much faster. Otherwise, poverty will persist for decades and social tensions will mount.”

You can’t grow much faster than the Bombay suburb of Bandra Kurla, which simply did not exist a decade ago. Built on mangrove swamps that linked the Bombay peninsula to the mainland, Bandra Kurla is Canary Wharf at 36C (97F). From the central plot where the Reliance Company plans to build a giant office block, an amphitheatre of banks rises above and around you: Baroda, ICICI, Wockhardt and many, many more. It’s extraordinary.

“If you had been here just two years ago you would see what a transformation there already is. It’s something we see in our daily lives,” says Sucheta Dalal, columnist for The Indian Express and editor of the magazine Money Life. But in Gujarat state, just to the north, she tells me, growth is even higher, running at 18 per cent per annum. “When I go there every six months I can’t believe how things are changing — infrastructure, roads, water and electricity supplies.”

And it isn’t all in services or IT. The Indian enterprise Bharat Forge will soon become the largest forging company in the world, operating in Scandinavia, Germany and China. Ms Dalal says that Indians who used to emigrate and stay abroad are now coming back to build something in their home towns. It is the Return of the Patels. The confidence is there, evidenced in the property ads, the profusion of new cars, the near-ubiquity of mobile phones. The Indian middle class is rising, and consuming as it rises.

Today's long piece "finds Hyderabad in the midst of an astonishing high-tech expansion": The cities are the future – but the country's fate will be decided in the fields:

Built around the shores of a lake, Hyderabad is cleaner, less mad and less interesting than Bombay. But what is going on there is remarkable — reminiscent of Shanghai, almost.

Take the road out of central Hyderabad and you soon come to a series of suburbs that are quite new. In Cyberabad and Hitec City the developments make the Bandra Kurla development in Bombay look like Legoland. Everywhere, for miles around, in the shallow valleys and on the low ridges, building is going on or has just been finished.

There’s Dell’s long blue building, Microsoft’s deep rose one. There’s Wipro and Infosys, there’s the HSBC Hotel and Training Centre, the Hitex Exhibition Centre, the twin towers of the Indian School of Business. There’s Silicon Towers, Cybertower, the Cyber Gateway. And in between the offices are the brand new six and seven-storey housing schemes, with Floridian names such as Whitefields and Hill Ridge Springs (though my preference would be for the slightly more downmarket Kaisuri’s Supreme Enclave). And in between everything has been landscaped by the Hyderabad Urban Development Agency.

According to Syed Amin Jaffrey, a veteran local journalist, Hyderabad has not just changed physically. “The pace of life was very leisurely,” he told me. All that ended in 1995, he explained, when Chandrababu Naidu wrested the control of the ruling Telugu Desam Party from its founder, the former film star and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. T. Rama Rao. Who was also Mr Naidu’s father-in-law.

Chandrababu, seeing what was happening in Bangalore to the south, decided that Hyderabad could do the same, and better. When Bill Gates visited Delhi in 1998 Chandrababu petitioned him to bring Microsoft to Hyderabad. It was the start.

I met the serious-haired Mr Naidu at his residence (Indians do not say “his house”) in the Jubilee Hills. He listed his achievements between 1998 and 2004. It went something like this: “I created Hitec City. Then 600 acres I earmarked for Genome Valley. I created the outer ring road. So many parks I created. I brought water from the Krishna River. Our street lights are the best in the country. There are 300 colleges, there are 100,000 engineers in Andhra now.”

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