We arrived back in Delhi for about 7.00pm. The road trip has been one of the longest ones that I have ever been on, but it has shown us a part of India that we have never been before.
Moving out of the Punjab and the Delhi region you begin to see the vibrancy of the northern regions begin to wane as you enter the middle states of India. Here there are more signs of poverty than in the more affluent northern regions of this great country. What worries me is the gap between the rich and the poor, the rich seem to be getting richer whilst the poor poorer.
In areas like Agra in particular there is evidence of substantial poverty existing next door to new shopping malls and five star tourist hotels. We only really saw a small part of the social make up of India because we travelled mainly on the highways and therefore did not see the situation in the local villages. I had to ask myself what makes the situation in the Punjab so different to say Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan? Well the Punjab (the land of the five rivers) has an abundance of access to water (in what was a predominantly an agrarian society) this proved to be the life blood that enabled this state to develop economically whilst others could not (the Punjab is still known as the breadbasket of India).
The underdevelopment of some of the southern states has resulted because they do not have the standard of infrastructure that exists in the more affluent developed states. Unless this imbalance is addressed in the next few years, India may be storing huge social problems for itself in the future.
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