Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Gurgaon, the Millennium City

Gurgaon is the city we based our small company in.
Five years back they told us: "It's a posh place". I never understood what they meant. As a small company we didn't have the means to lease an office in the few new MNC-buildings. We had to go with the regular places, where also normal people are living.

During the years I have seen:
- lots of big projects coming up, including thousands of skyscrapers
- these skyscrapers are for a big part not used, as can be seen from the few lights that are burning inside the flats in the evening
- though flyovers have been constructed, and a metro, the quality of the regular roads is really pathetic
- the city gets more and more crowded with people, vehicles, ...
- lease prices going up till 2008 and collapsed in 2009 (according to me to never come back to the old levels)

Though my wife and I considered for a while buying some property in Gurgaon, I'm very happy that I didn't take the risk. You can just see how much cheating, stealing and robbery is going on with these constructions.
Buying a flat in Gurgaon? With the levels of maintenance accepted by Indian people ? Not in a million years ! It's lost money.

The video from this link clearly describes what is going on. The report is in Dutch but you can easily follow the video by the witnesses.

I will not mention the social inequality which is apparent everywhere, but not shown hard enough in this video:
There's the woman pretending to find no single beggar. However, if I myself walk ten minutes from my office, then I see hundreds of families living on a waste belt. I will shoot some photographs and place them here one of the next days.
The same woman tells openly that "her maid is not allowed to leave the compound". Now the shown maid is an adult but in India the majority of maids are just kids below 18. In my eyes that is sheer child-slavery.
It's very disturbing to hear Indians talk openly about this shame!

I hope they will be able to enjoy their Commonwealth Games.