Sure, econ­o­mists praise India for the rapid growth that has brought hun­dreds of thou­sands out of poverty. How­ever, a story about a sport­ing event reminds us that a lot of work needs to be done.

India will host the Com­mon­wealth Games next year, and instead of mov­ing the slums out of New Delhi, India will hide them from the games. As we find out from this Dean Nel­son story from the Tele­graph.

The Games was sup­posed to be India’s moment to show off its rapidly ris­ing wealth and ban­ish mem­o­ries of a coun­try once syn­ony­mous with chronic poverty.

But with barely a year to go offi­cials have con­ceded defeat. Vast sup­plies of bam­boo poles have been ordered from the jun­gle states of Mizo­ram and Assam to keep the poor out of sight dur­ing the games.

New Delhi is lit­tered with makeshift slums which house the mil­lions of migrants who pour into the city search­ing for work to escape the poverty of rural life in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Their inhab­i­tants are often seen naked at the road­sides wash­ing at stand­pipes or defe­cat­ing astride open sewers.

Offi­cials had planned to shift their set­tle­ments to the out­skirts of the city so the city that tele­vi­sion view­ers and vis­i­tors see is restricted to the capital’s gleam­ing new Metro sys­tem and world-class air­port, and its smart new roads, pave­ments and streetlights.

But yes­ter­day they revealed they sim­ply could not reset­tle enough slum-dwellers or street-sleepers, and that they had opted to hide the prob­lem instead.

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