Back From India

At the end of my two week holiday in India I took a Taxi from Colaba, the tourist district of Bombay (or Mumbai: the seldom used non-anglicised official name) to the international airport; a transition in my journey that would eventually lead to familiar food and an abundance of clean seat-style toilets with soft toilet roll for which I had bean yearning. The taxis in Bombay are all the same ancientvehicles painted in yellow and green still holding together after about thirty years, decorated in true Indian style with frills and tassels across the windscreen and the overloaded boot tied shut with a piece of rope.
The driver, a chatty twenty-one year old is dressed smartly in a the shirt and trousers combination that almost every Indian man seems to wear even in the thirty-seven degree pique of Indian summer. He tells me that the hotel owners demanded a Rs120 (that's Rupees, £1=Rs80) for providing a customer, which was over a third of the total price of the journey. He's welcoming and friendly, and calls out to friends on the street with what I can only assume were laddish in-jokes. He's excited by the fact that I work with phones and is keen to show me his. He tells me that he's been a taxi driver for three years. His father came toMumbai to work as a private driver, leaving his family in a village south of Pune . At seventeen he came to live with his father, but after three days in Bombay his father was killed in a traffic accident. He was lefthomeless and and struggling to find a job. The driving job he eventually found paid Rs3500 (£43.75) a month, twelve hours a day, no holiday. He tells his family that he makes Rs5000 working in an office, rather than the profession that killed his father. He supports them with the money he earns, while having to sleep on the street at night.
He's in good company on the streets. Wandering around Colaba at 2am every alleyway was full of people sleeping on makeshift beds. People were sleeping on their market stalls and others sprawled over the pavement. The poverty in Bombay is just so IN YOUR FACE. Other backpackers at various stages in their round the world trips were frequently of the opinion is that the slums they had seen in India were by far the worse they had seen in South America and Africa, mainly due to the fact that they contained so many more people. I was quite surprised by that.
The population in India is immense. Even when we took the train out to rural areas it was hard to get away from vast crowds of people. Looking around Iremembered the quote "They have more honour roll students than we have students" from this video (that first came to my attention on Lloyd Morgans blog). I'm sure that as the economy develops we're going to see masses of innovation and new interesting businesses coming out of India - however they'll most likely to put up with providing cheap labour and programming to the West for a few more decades/centuries. My friend asked someone "Do the Indian government have any plans to address the poverty and population problems?" the response was "What could they possibly do?". Even though India must contain an abundance of extremely clever people its difficult to imagine what they could achieve on £43.75 a month.