Engaging India is an online column analysing the issues, trends and forces behind the business and politics shaping India and its impact on the world. Engaging India appears Thursday mornings exclusively on FT.com India, a dedicated online section on India, and is written by Jo Johnson, the Financial Times' South Asia bureau chief; Amy Yee, New Delhi correspondent; and Joe Leahy, Mumbai correspondent.
Many had come to believe that they would never see this day. More than two years behind schedule, the expressway linking New Delhi to its airport and to Gurgaon, a fast-growing satellite city teeming with malls and call centres, has opened at last.
The 27.7km highway, the busiest inter-city route in India, will halve the journey time to the airport and slash perhaps 40 minutes off the nightmarish ride out to Gurgaon. A modest achievement by east Asian standards, it is real progress for India.
For years, the failure to attend to the chronic congestion on this critical artery suggested a disregard for the negative first impression that the road, like the dismal airport itself, left in the minds of overseas visitors.
Many first-timers to India, finding themselves trapped in truck-choked traffic on their way into town, would rub their heads in bemusement at the suggested coupling of India with China and fight off an urge to head straight back to the airport.
The new road, which completes a crucial part of the New Delhi-Mumbai leg of the Golden Quadrilateral highway, is far from perfect. There are no pedestrian footbridges or underpasses, for example, an oversight that has prompted a hunger strike by locals; and teething problems with the concessionaire's tollgates have this week been causing self-defeating 40-minute tailbacks. But it remains the best thing to have happened to the capital's infrastructure since the opening of the Delhi metro in 2002.
The airport itself will also soon be transformed. A consortium led by GMR Group, an Indian infrastructure company, and Fraport, owner-operator of Frankfurt airport, is overhauling a structure that has become a national embarrassment.
Indira Gandhi International's leaky ceilings, flickering neon lights and worn-out linoleum will soon fade from memory. GMR is promising a state-of-the-art new terminal by 2010, by which time the airport should have its own metro line to the city centre.
The buzz surrounding these incremental improvements to the capital's infrastructure is part of a bigger change now under way as India starts to make up for decades of under-investment.
It is becoming possible to see snatches of a future in which India's infrastructure is not wholly dysfunctional, a day when visiting Chinese businessmen do not split their sides laughing at the idea that a country many still write off as a large, exotic basket-case might soon emerge as a potent manufacturing rival.
The government is alive to the urgency of the infrastructure challenge. Its latest five-year plan, which calls for infrastructure spending of $492bn by 2012, up from $200bn in the prior 60-month period, is ambitious. But it remains more of an aspiration than a promise.
The government plans to contribute just 30 per cent of the total, some $149bn, leaving the rest to the private sector, a tall order in the absence of a developed corporate bond market and a stable regulatory environment.
The electoral cycle is unlikely to help the government harness its available resources for infrastructure. In the run-up to a general election that must be held by May 2009, technocrats in the government will come under intense pressure to prioritise populist projects with an immediate pay-off, a trend already evident in the policymaking paralysis over whether to pass on rising fuel prices to heavily subsidised consumers, rather than ones with distant - but more lasting - returns to the economy.
The Congress party, which leads the United Progressive Alliance coalition, is showing signs of electoral nerves. It performed poorly in all five state assembly elections held last year.
It lost power in two states (Punjab and Uttarakhand), clung on in one small state (Goa), was humiliated in India's most populous and politically most important state (Uttar Pradesh) and failed to oust the Bharatiya Janata party from power in December's closely watched two-way fight in Gujarat.
There is mounting pressure on Palaniappan Chidambaram, who as finance minister has made progress in reducing the fiscal deficit, to deliver an electioneering "people's budget" on February 29.
Combined with a looming public sector pay review, this could unravel much of his good work. Some Congress leaders see the budget as a last chance to buy votes with handouts aimed at softening the sting of widening inequalities between rich and poor, urban and rural areas and upper and lower castes.
The government is aware that even though overall poverty levels are falling, in a country in which up to 900m still survive on under $2 a day, there are large numbers who, in relative terms, feel poorer and angrier than ever. Manmohan Singh, India's thoughtful prime minister, warned in a speech to a business group last year that if the wealthy did not behave in a more "socially responsible" manner, the country's growth process could be at risk. "Our polity may become anarchic and our society may get further divided," he said.
While Mr Singh knows that investment in physical and social infrastructure would be the best way to promote inclusive growth, it is unlikely that he will be able to stop the Congress party - hardly immune to the appeal of a return to the politics of envy - from squandering resources on redistributive measures with more immediate political payoffs ahead of the election.
New Delhi, then, will not be built in a day. But the changes afoot in the capital may herald the beginning of the end of India's long infrastructural nightmare.
