In June 2008 India’s Finance Minister, P Chidambaram, offered his hallucinatory vision of a poverty-free India, ‘an India where a vast majority, something like 85 per cent, will eventually live in cities’. He related this inspirational image to the necessary removal of mineral wealth from the sterile inutility of lying buried in Mother Earth, and the orderly concentration of people in cities where their needs may be serviced with industrial efficiency.
Maidservants working in five or six houses, rickshaw pullers, builders of the concrete fortresses of the rich, vendors, sweepers, drivers and cooks have morphed into thieves and criminals
