The deeper one digs, the more you become aware of the utter failure post-independence India’s socialist ideology imposed upon a subcontinent with several millennia tradition of private enterprise. The latest evidence is provided by the collapse of the haphazardly constructed Satya Niketan building in Delhi which housed higher education students. At the time when the building — with two additional floors piled on top of a structure with weak foundations licensed to construct five floors — collapsed like a house of cards, it housed 24 students cramped like sardines in a tin. When the building slumped because of minor flooding in the basement, seven students died.

Delhi University and other tertiary education institutions in the national capital attract 2.46 lakh students from across the country. Against this, the total number of government hostel beds available to students aggregate a mere 7,200. This is precisely the type of imbalance that Indian socialism — driven by 13 detailed Soviet-style five-year plans (until the Planning Commission was abolished in 2014) — was adopted to eliminate. Yet in every sector of the economy, such demand-supply gaps prevail 76 years after socialism was adopted as the official ideology of newly independent India. Whether it is irrigation, road networks, affordable housing, food, number of schools, colleges, universities, hospital beds, railway berths, number of teachers, doctors, engineers and trained plumbers, carpenters and welders, India has remained an economy of chronic shortages.

In academia and media, dominated by faculty and scribes with sentimental rather than cerebral attachment to socialism, the root causes of why 21st century India remains an economy defined by inequality and shortages, are routinely fudged. The original sin of canalizing public savings into white elephant public sector enterprises (PSEs) which have never delivered the dividends and surpluses for investment into public education, health and agriculture and/or into manufactures on a scale that would have absorbed surplus agriculture labour — itself the outcome of under-investment in primary education, the best contraceptive — is seldom acknowledged. Nor that private enterprise was strangled in its infancy by pervasive licence-permit-quota raj which has transformed India into arguably the most corrupt economy worldwide with an 18 million extortionist bureaucracy a major stumbling block to socio-economic growth.

As graphically proven by the Satya Niketan building collapse in Delhi, the failure of Indian socialism is most evident in the quality of housing stock. The country hosts a mere 246.7 million dwelling units for a population of 1.4 billion, the majority of them of rock-bottom quality. With families largely crammed into tiny residential homes, per capita dwelling space for citizens is a mere 100 sq. ft cf. 431 sq. ft in China and 890 sq. ft in the US. Doubling this to 200 sq. ft necessitates a massive public housing construction effort. Collapsing roads, bridges, buildings and spreading slums signal that even if belatedly, India needs to take the capitalist road.