China can build a hospital, bridge, building & railway line by the time India fixes a footpath: Frustrated Delhiite

In the global race for technological supremacy, India might want to take a break from aiming for the moon and start by repairing its footpaths. At least, that’s what one frustrated resident from Dwarka seems to suggest, after a minor sidewalk repair job spiralled into an inexplicable bureaucratic black hole.

Manoj Arora, a financial advisor, environmentalist, and author, recently took to social media to highlight the four-month saga of a footpath repair outside his society in Dwarka, Delhi.

A minor two-meter section of the footpath was damaged, and the repair work was expected to take a week – a timeline that, even by Indian standards, seemed generous.


Yet, four months later, the sidewalk still remains in ruins with absolutely no activity in sight.


The small things in life

Arora’s complaint is simple: a broken sidewalk that has become the perfect metaphor for the snail’s pace of bureaucratic inefficiency.

“The expectation to finish the repair work was max 1 week time even with Indian standards. Actually, privately done, it's a day's job,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter), sharing pictures of the abandoned site.

“The contractor has shelved the work and there's no activity for the last one month. No authorities are listening to us. Where else should we go?”

For perspective, Arora humorously, but with a hint of exasperation, compared the pace of Indian infrastructure projects to China’s lightning-speed development.

The China question

While India struggles to fix a footpath, China is busy building entire cities, manufacturing powerhouses, and advancing in technologies like AI, rail, and semiconductors.

According to Arora, " at the same time that we hopefully repair this footpath, China would have built a 1,000 bed hospital+ a ten storey building + a bridge + a 300km fully operational railway line."

The comparison may seem tongue-in-cheek, but it highlights the disparity in infrastructure development.

While China’s aggressive investments in infrastructure (over $1.7 trillion since 2015) have turned it into a manufacturing juggernaut, India’s manufacturing push is still in its nascent stages, with the government’s National Manufacturing Mission aiming for gradual progress, said a Business Today report.

The real irony, however, lies in the fact that a footpath – a small, albeit essential part of any city’s infrastructure – is apparently beyond our capacity to repair promptly.

Arora’s frustration is palpable: “Pls don't tell me that we can't build a footpath because, unlike China, we have democracy.”