Luxury mall showcases wealth gap in India

By Krittivas Mukherjee NEW DELHI (Reuters) - With gold-plated ceilings, exotic fountains and the clink of champagne glasses, the Emporio Mall in New Delhi is the perfect place to wile away a hot afternoon browsing through designer boutiques.

The mall, adorned with palms and scented with lavender, is the exclusive playground of India's rich, which despite the effects of the credit crisis still have plenty of cash to buy designer accessories with thousand dollar price tags.

Getting access to this little piece of air conditioned paradise amid the hustle and bustle of the sweltering capital will cost $5. That's about one week's salary for 80 percent of India's billion plus population.

With a phalanx of security guards keeping out the destitute and a pricey admission fee, some social observers see India's first luxury mall as a symbol of an economic apartheid that they say increasingly divides the 'haves' and 'have nots' in India.

"The conditions, the ground conditions are not like those of Western cities," said Satish Deshpande, professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.

"So, we are tending more and more toward a kind of apartheid, a kind of separation that is very sharp and sharply visible in our cities, in gated communities."

The widening wealth gap has major implications for India, which faces a general election next year, and has been plagued by waves of violence in its provinces that analysts say is at least partly due to the socioeconomic divide alienating segments of society.

The issue is likely to play a central role in next year's general election in which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Congress party will seek re-election.

The party took power in a coalition government four years ago on a platform of more 'inclusive growth' for India's 'have nots', a promise upon which it has mostly failed to deliver.

Asia's third-largest economy has grown nearly 9 percent a year over the past four years, driven largely by consumer demand from the middle-class and soaring foreign investment. Despite the boom, official data shows an estimated 800 million of India's billion-plus people live on 50 U.S. cents a day.

The top 10 percent of India's population owns between 33 to 50 percent of the country's wealth, according to a range of estimates by the government, think-tanks and academics.

Uneven economic growth is posing a serious security threat to India, Singh said last December, pointing out that a large proportion of recruits for militant groups came from regions untouched by India's scorching growth.

NO EUPHORIA FOR INDIA'S POOR

While the middle and wealthier English-speaking classes are profiting from an economic surge, it is unclear how well this is trickling down to hundreds of millions of Indians living in small towns and rural areas.

Analysts say the failure to deliver social justice and development to India's poorest regions have alienated people and helped open up economic, social and religious divides.

Socio-economic divides and governmental apathy are said to fuel some of India's deadliest insurgencies in which thousands of people have been killed, including a four-decade-long Maoist rebellion and several armed movements in the remote northeast.  Continued...