Infrastructure is India’s biggest handicap

I got this article from economist.com.... Very good article with great facts & figures.. Have look at them..

TO KNOW why 1,000 Indian children die of diarrhoeal sickness every day, take a wary stroll along the Ganges in Varanasi. As it enters the city, Hinduism’s sacred river contains 60,000 faecal coliform bacteria per 100 millilitres, 120 times more than is considered safe for bathing. Four miles downstream, with inputs from 24 gushing sewers and 60,000 pilgrim-bathers, the concentration is 3,000 times over the safety limit. In places, the Ganges becomes black and septic. Corpses, of semi-cremated adults or enshrouded babies, drift slowly by.

India’s sanitation is execrable. By one estimate, only 13% of the sewage its 1.1 billion people produce is treated. An estimated 700m Indians have no access to a proper toilet. Water-borne diseases caused by poor sanitation are a big reason why India’s children are so malnourished. This might sound familiar. Almost a century ago Mohandas Gandhi disparaged a book about India by Katherine Mayo, an American novelist, as a “drain-inspector’s report”. India needs to follow a simple mantra: “Fewer inspectors, more drains”.

The general rottenness of India’s infrastructure has long been recognised as the likeliest constraint on the country’s economy. In the past year or two the problem has become extremely urgent. India’s ports, roads, railways and airports have been operating close to—or beyond—capacity. It takes an average of 21 days to clear import cargo in India; in Singapore it takes three. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai, which handles 60% of India’s container traffic, has berths for nine cargo vessels; Singapore’s main port can handle 40. With the number of air passengers in India growing at 30% a year in the past two years, the creaking of its four main airports was almost audible.

India’s 3.3m km road network is the world’s second-biggest, but most of it is pitiful. Its prize national highways—a vaunted infrastructure success of the previous government—account for only 2% of the total, and only 12% of them, or 8,000km, are dual carriageways. By the end of 2007 China had some 53,600km of highways with four lanes or more. India’s urban roads are choked: the average speed in Delhi has fallen from 27kph (17mph) in 1997 to 10kph. All of the country’s roads are perilous, even before a million Nanos a year are added to them, as predicted by Tata, the car’s maker. Last year 130,000 people died on India’s roads, 60% more than in China, which has four times as many cars.