Did anyone say Jan-path?

India is probably the only democracy in the world where government accommodation is provided to politicians.

On the very day last week that I learned that a property in a leafy avenue in Lutyens Delhi had sold for more than Rs 100 crore, I happened to visit a minister in his home. He was late so I had time to look around and time to reflect on when we are going to realise that we cannot afford to allow our ministers, elected representatives and bureaucrats to live like princes. Not any more. For those of you who may not have seen one let me describe for you an average ministerial bungalow in Delhi.

It is usually set in between one and five acres of land with one acre costing more than Rs 100 crore at current prices. The bungalow itself consists of several large, high-ceilinged rooms and my own estimate is that each of these rooms would accommodate 10 tenements from a Mumbai shanty. In our old socialist days these ministerial bungalows used to be sparsely furnished with badly made PWD Public Works Department furniture. This has changed. You see expensive furniture and carpets, bathrooms fitted with modern plumbing and Mantriji spares no effort in getting himself the latest in televisions and computers. The only other people in India who can afford to live as well as our rulers are big industrialists, and in Mumbai many of them live in flats that would fit into two rooms of a ministerial bungalow in Delhi.

Is this fair when half of Mumbai8217;s citizens live in one-room shacks in the filthiest shanties in the world? In Delhi the situation is not quite so bad but around 20 per cent of its citizens are believed to live in similarly abysmal conditions, and the same is true of other Indian cities. Living standards are no higher in rural India. A windowless hovel is home for our poorer villagers and the 300 million Indian citizens who live below the poverty line would be lucky to get even that. It is estimated that in these wretched homes there are 60 million children who do not get two meals a day.

It is sick that those who bang on endlessly about poverty alleviation and the poor should live in royal splendour. May I remind you that India is probably the only democracy in the world where government accommodation is provided to politicians and bureaucrats. This is a 8216;8216;socialist8217;8217; practice we copied from China and the former Soviet Union where the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Kremlin in Moscow were reserved for the exclusive use of Stalin, Mao and their courts.

When real estate prices in Indian cities were low it did not matter so much that nearly the whole of Lutyens Delhi and vast bungalows on Malabar Hill were reserved for our rulers. It matters now because we can simply no longer afford to waste taxpayers8217; money on keeping our politicians and officials in luxury.

If we could kick them out of government accommodation many good things would happen. Artificially high land prices in cities like Mumbai and Delhi would drop dramatically. This is to the good when you keep in mind that a windowless tenement in a Mumbai slum sells for several lakhs. The other thing that would happen is that if governments sold the land they squat on or rented out those lovely bungalows in Delhi it would have more than enough money to build the low-cost housing our cities so desperately need.

There would even be money to spare for sanitation, efficient waste disposal and public amenities like parks and playgrounds. These are basic, minimum needs of a modern city and India is among the few countries left in the world where our most important cities look like slums, except in what our political class likes to call the 8216;8216;VIP areas8217;8217;.

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Generally, these VIP areas come into being on the specious grounds of security. So, the Prime Minister and his establishment now occupy a whole street in Delhi and the President sits on an estate that sprawls over more than 500 acres. This is absurd, but assuming that we cannot oust the Presidnt and the Prime Minister we can still make better use of the presidential estate. It has the highest security arrangements so where better to move our ministers, MPs and bureaucrats? Where better to move Sonia Gandhi and her children who between the three occupy for security reasons around 20 acres of the most expensive real estate in India?

A government that came to power by speaking for the 8216;8216;aam aadmi8217;8217; and that stays in power because of Marxist support should surely be living more humbly.

write to tavleen.singhexpressindia.com