Back in Bangalore after several years, I find that the city lives up to its avant-garde reputation. The large dotcom hoardings, the cyber cafes, the sleek restaurants offering cuisines ranging from Coorgi to French, and the pubs lining the road are impressive.

But equally impressive is the rapidity with which all this disappears as one drives out of the city. Within miles of cruising west the modern buildings give way to modest tenements. Another hour or two of driving and the landscape changes to open fields, with gigantic boulders, eucalyptus clusters, coconut groves, and banyan trees disfigured by the human quest for firewood. The simple huts and hovels of the poor are a reminder of the sameness of India—a sameness dominated, even now, by poverty.

Our first halt is at the Magadi Taluka headquarters, where the executive officer (EO) explains the development work going on in the region. He is currently involved in a housing subsidy scheme under which any poor villager can get a grant of Rs 20,000 for building a house. There are conditions, of course. The house must be built using labour-intensive technology; the original owner cannot sell the house; and the building must include a toilet, presumably to wean away residents from the lure of the fields. The EO is pained that villagers resist the toilets, and even after he persuades them, on occasion he has bumped into residents returning from the field, lota in hand.