In the midst of this gloom and doom about the economy and lack of reforms, the national highway development project seems to be progressing well. This has two components - the Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai golden quadrangle as the first and the north-south (Srinagar to Kanyakumari) and east-west (Silchar to Porbandar) corridors as the second. By 2009, this will mean 13,151 kilometres of national highways, compared to 13,000 kilometres added in the more than fifty years since independence. I shouldn't have said 2009. Because the completion of the golden quadrangle segment has now been preponed from December 2004 to December 2003. And the completion of the two corridors has also been preponed from December 2009 to December 2007. Sounds unlikely for a government project. But there you have it. Not only has there been financial closure, despite hiccups with land acquisition and compensation, several contracts have been awarded and construction has started. What is the definition of socialism? This question gets into all kinds of Marxist and non-Marxist theorizing. Notions of equity and related matters. Despite the fact that the Gini Coefficient of income distribution is higher today in China than in India. Soviets plus electrification was an acceptable definition of socialism in Russia. In India, an acceptable definition of socialism has become Soviets minus electrification. Consider the state of electrification all over India. If present trends are extrapolated, it will take seven hundred years for all of Bihar to be electrified. And twenty-six years for Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. These are official figures, not mine. With hindsight, whether it is Russia, China or Vietnam, successful socialism meant two things - improvements in social infrastructure (education, healthcare) and improvements in physical infrastructure, China being an extreme example of the last. Roads are one element of physical infrastructure. In India, in the mixed-up economy we created, we didn't get these benefits of socialism. Nor did we get the benefits of capitalism. Genuine private entrepreneurship was shackled by various state controls. What went by the name of the private sector was funded by public money, was not accountable to shareholders and wasn't exposed to threats of competition or exit. There are direct Keynesian benefits of NHDP. Per year, 73 million man-days of jobs will be created. Demand for steel, cement and assorted other raw materials will be stimulated. More important are the indirect benefits. For the golden quadrangle alone, estimates are that travel time will be reduced by between 50 per cent and 60 per cent, resulting in annual savings of Rs 8000 crore. Pick up any standard textbook on the Indian economy, used in schools or undergraduate courses. There will be a chapter or section describing characteristics of under-developed economies like India. Poor country. Mixed economy. Large contributions of agriculture to national income and employment. Shortage of capital. So on and so forth. Large share of population that lives in rural areas. These are all included as normative statements. Hence, living in rural areas is undesirable. Why is living in rural areas undesirable? Segments of the population live in rural areas in developed countries as well. What is special about India, in so far as undesirability is concerned? Willy-nilly, the issue boils down to the lack of social and physical infrastructure in villages. Hence the undesirability. Why have certain states performed relatively better in the post-reform period? Various hypotheses are possible. But one convincing hypothesis is better social and physical infrastructure in some of these states. For instance, transport being important, the coastal states. With the railways having gone to the dogs since independence and no signs of improvement or reform, and internal water transport having progressively deteriorated over time, transport essentially means road transport. That is the reason I wonder about the revolution the golden quadrangle and the two corridors will bring. On the golden quadrangle stretch, I don't primarily have in mind Calcutta, Chennai, Mumbai or Delhi (or Bangalore). I wonder about smaller cities like Kharagpur, Bhubaneshwar, Vishakhapatnam, Eluru, Vijaywada, Chilkaluripet, Ranipet, Hosur, Tumker, Belgaum, Satara, Pune, Surat, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Udaipur, Gwalior, Jaipur, Agra, Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi and Panagarh. On the north-south corridor, I wonder about cities like Jammu, Jalandhar, Jhansi, Lakhanadon, Nagpur, Krishnagiri, Salem, Madurai, Kochy and Kanyakumari, not to speak of Hyderabad. And along the east-west corridor you have cities like Porbandar, Rajkot, Shivpuri, Lucknow, Gorakhpur, Muzaffarpur, Purnea, Guwahati and Silchar. Their connectivity will improve several-fold. The word city needs explanation. Data on cities are obtained from the census and the census doesn't exactly use the word city. Instead, there are data for districts, towns and urban agglomerations, the last used synonymously with city, even though urban agglomerations may have some rural sections. A company named Indicus has just produced a market skyline of India in 2002, available in hard copy form as well as through a CD. This is a demographic, consumer-graphic and psychographic guide to the top sixty-eight city markets in India, as they stand today. Demographic data include information on variables like population, gender, literacy and young (less than six years) population. Consumer-graphic data include information on number of households, sales of consumer durables and telephone, mobiles and internet penetration. Psychographic data have indices on Westernization, youthfulness, individuality, experimentation, entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan characteristics of cities. Then you have an overall index that aggregates and consolidates all these variables and indices to rank the sixty-eight cities. What do the Indicus figures show? One cannot possibly give data on all sixty-eight cities. For that, you had better buy the book (or CD). Understandably, the largest market is Mumbai, followed by Delhi. If you want to sell two-wheelers, try Delhi and then Chennai. If you want to sell four-wheelers, try Delhi and then Mumbai. Perhaps a few words about Calcutta. In overall market size, it is fifth - after Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore, but before Hyderabad. It is way behind in the market for two-wheelers, but third (after Delhi and Mumbai) in the market for four-wheelers. Calcutta prides itself on being cosmopolitan and there is some subjectivity in defining cosmopolitan, because it becomes a function of the variables used. Having said that, Calcutta is sixth in the cosmopolitan rankings, after Mumbai, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Pune and Vadodara. It is 36th in 'individuality' (Kohima tops), 55th in 'gender equality' (Mangalore tops), 35th in 'Westernization' (Itanagar tops), 61st in 'youthfulness' (Varanasi tops) and 29th in 'entrepreneurial' attitudes (Daman tops). Barring size of present markets, Calcutta is thus about average. The sixty-eight cities belong to four categories - alpha, beta, gamma and delta. The alpha lot has the eight mega cities. The impact of NHDP on these (Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad) is unlikely to be that momentous. In relative terms, they already possess good infrastructure. Beta cities are upcoming towns and usually (barring Chandigarh) have a population that is more than one million. For most of these, the impact of NHDP ought to be explosive. Gamma cities are smaller and are sometimes (though not always) tourist destinations. Some of these are fortunate enough in that they are directly on the NHDP map. Others aren't. Although if feeder connections develop, they too will benefit from better infrastructure and closer proximity. Finally, there are the delta cities. These are small markets, sometimes capitals of smaller states or Union territories. With a couple of exceptions, NHDP will typically bypass these. NHDP will therefore increase disparities in connectivity across cities, with the alpha and beta in the favoured lot and the gamma and delta in the neglected lot. This is understandable. NHDP taps existing synergies in the national and state highway network and caters to where present market and demand needs are the most. After all, very few road networks are Central subjects. Most are under the purview of state governments, some the responsibility of local bodies. If state governments replicate the NHDP success, there will be quite a bit of good news on infrastructure, at least the road part of it. In any case, there is some good news on telecommunications and urban municipal services. There is also some good news on literacy, with the adult literacy rate having shot up from 52 per cent in 1991 to 65 per cent in 2001. There can be legitimate complaints about what census definitions of literacy capture. But that is neither here nor there. Caveats about definitions are constant. Despite these caveats, there is no denying that literacy levels have gone up. If we can do something about power (a big if) and something about healthcare (a bigger if, the infant mortality rate is stagnant at around seventy per thousand), we will get closer to the socialism definition of Soviets plus electrification. But to get many of these reforms going, we actually need electrification minus Soviets. The author is director, Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, New Delhi