By Kate Wallace, 1/21/2015. I was supposed to meet Erica in person for coffee today but was busy with her head in the toilet. She can now officially tick “Delhi belly” off of her list of India experiences. Despite being ill she was kind enough to take the time to speak to me over Skype about her experience being in India on course study with the university of Berkeley. Erica is here studying “smart cities” and is looking at India’s developing infrastructure. She has spent the last few weeks meeting with the ministry of transportation and other infrastructure companies talking about the future of India and building for globalization, and eating dominos pizza in boardrooms because apparently every company assumed “oh they’re American, that’s what they’ll want.”
Her first impression of India didn’t come as a surprise to me: she said it is both dirty and busy. She got food poisoning from one of the Dominos pizzas lunches and has been out of commission ever since. Erica called the concierge at her 5 star hotel and they notified a Doctor who was sent to her room. The doctor used a lot of dated instruments such as an old school thermometer. She didn’t have travellers insurance so she paid for it out of pocket, it came to 3000 rupees for about a 10 minute appointment. Erica says her parents were nervous letting her come to India and getting e-coli just confirmed their suspicions about the food not being safe. She said she would have no idea what to do if she had to go to the hospital, but wouldn’t worry about the quality of healthcare because people here are well educated and her experience with a doctor was really good. This is particularly interesting to me because it shows that TripMD is a needed product to connect foreigners to good quality doctors in the area.
Safety-wise Erica has felt ok because she has been very well taken care of by her school and they are very cautious about the safety of the students. The school told them not to bring any shorts or v neck clothing. They also give them two escorts when they go out in the evening in Delhi. Her perception is that it’s really the rural parts that are dangerous but “even in the city she wouldn’t feel safe out by myself, but feels safe at the nice hotel.” Before she got to Delhi she stayed in a rural area next a slum and from the sounds of it experienced some culture shock. She said there was no hot water and breakfast was nan and hardboiled egg. She said she couldn’t have stayed for too long but it wasn’t unbearable. She says the scariest part is the way Indian people drive, and I agree thinking about last night in the fog a motorcycle almost hit us going 100 mph up the wrong side of the road.
The road design part is of particular interest to Erica who is here studying India’s infrastructure problems relating to developing cities to support globalization. She says she thought New Delhi would be more developed, but before they start focusing on developing modern buildings they need to focus on basic needs problems. She thinks India mainly needs to focus on sewage problems, traffic and road issues and improving food safety. To live here she would have to feel safe walking on the street, and right now there are cars coming at you and poverty everywhere which supports a negative view of India. She says she loves Indian culture and has a lot of friends who are Indian but being here as an American has been really difficult.
She thinks there needs to be one standardized drug store where she could go to get all the basic things you would be able to get at a CVS back home. She has had trouble getting access to wifi, there was none in the rural area and at the hotel you have to pay an extra 5 dollars a night despite it already being very expensive to stay at, and there is no 4G network. She is frustrated that she feels like as a tourist everyone is always trying to get the most out of her. She went to the market with her Indian friend and a woman tried to charge her 8000 rupees, and her Indian friend was able to get it down to 1500. She described shopping as mentally exhausting. The honking drives her crazy, people just honk all the time for no reason. Erica was also surprised at the racism present in Indian culture. One of the students who was African American tried to get a visa on arrival and was declined, being told she had to fly back. The sponsors in India spoke for her and eventually got her in the country, but the girl said she was treated as less than human, went through emotional trauma and no hotel would let her stay despite the fact that she could see they had empty rooms. She eventually had to pay a hotel an overcharged rate in order to have somewhere to stay. Her other friend, a white male, got a free upgrade to first class on the way here. We talked about how interesting it is that we talk about white privilege so much at home but here you can see it so strongly multiple times a day.
I found this conversation to be interesting because she has listed a lot of the problems most foreigners face when arriving in India. Access to healthcare, language barriers, health and safety relating to food and infrastructure problems are all issues India needs to address if they want to attract more foreigners to their country. The constant poverty was hard for Erica to see and she wondered why the Indian government would spend money investing on tourists instead of helping its own people first. There is lots of criticism on tourism based economies and said that tourism is not a sustainable form of income for India. If the economy of Delhi is benefiting from Erica’s tourism money, what happens when she leaves? To constantly depend on other countries is not sustainable for India in the long term and will not give India the resources to address their larger issues such as poverty. I look forward to speaking with Erica when she is feeling better about India’s infrastructure problems, as this is a key part to India’s development.