The New York Times is currently running a great series on the modernization of India, looking particularly at highways and automobiles so far. This section pretty much encapsulates the same dilemma that is going through the rest of the developing world:
India’s state-run rail network may have been built by the British, but it came to represent a certain egalitarianism. Powerful and voiceless, rich and poor – all navigated the same chaotic, crowded stations and rode the same jam-packed trains, if not in the same class.
Cars, in contrast, reflect the atomization prosperity brings.
This is a far bigger change for Indian society than it was for America, which in many ways was founded around the notion of the individual. Indian society has always been more about duty, or dharma, than drive, more about responsibility to others than the realization of individual desire.
That ethos is changing. “Twenty years back one car was an achievement,” said Maj. Gen. B. C. Khanduri, who as minister of roads from 2000 to 2004 helped shepherd the new highway into being. “Now every child needs their own car.”
To him and others who grew up in a different society, that change bespeaks a larger, and troubling, shift. “The value system is finishing now,” he said. “We are gradually increasing everyone for himself.”
