The Real Definition of a Developed Country Has Nothing to Do With Poor People Owning Cars

A developed country is not where the poor have cars. It is where the rich use public transport.

That one line exposes everything wrong with how India measures its own progress.

What Actual Rich Countries Look Like

The Prime Minister of the Netherlands cycles to parliament. Not for a photo-op. Every day.

The Prime Minister of Norway takes commercial flights in economy class. No chartered jets. No 50-car motorcades.

In Switzerland, senior ministers take the train to work. They sit next to schoolchildren, factory workers, and retirees. Nobody makes a scene. Nobody blocks a road. Nobody dies waiting for an ambulance that couldn’t get through because a minister’s convoy owned the highway.

This is not poverty. Switzerland, Norway, and the Netherlands are among the wealthiest nations on earth. Their infrastructure works because the people in power use it. When the Prime Minister takes the metro, the metro gets fixed. When the minister’s car gets stuck in the same pothole as yours, that pothole disappears fast.

That is accountability through inconvenience. It is the most powerful governance tool ever invented.

Now Look at India

In India, a Panchayat President — someone governing a village cluster — travels with 4 to 10 vehicles. Pilot car. Escort vehicles. An SUV for himself. Sometimes a trailing ambulance. Sirens. Flags. Men hanging out of windows looking important.

A District Collector shuts down an entire road for 20 minutes so his convoy passes without interruption. Schoolchildren are late. Patients miss their hospital slots. Delivery drivers lose their jobs.

A MLA — a legislator governing maybe 2 lakh people — demands a red beacon, Z-category security, and three vehicles minimum.

A Union Minister travels with a fleet that resembles a small military operation.

The Prime Minister’s convoy in India has been documented stopping ambulances. People have died. Not occasionally. Repeatedly. And nobody resigned.

What This Reveals

This is not about security. Norway’s leaders face real threats. They still take trains.

This is about ego institutionalised as entitlement.

In India, public office is not service. It is arrival. It is the moment you stop being ordinary. The convoy is not protection — it is announcement. It tells the public: I am above you now. Make way.

The VVIP culture runs so deep that even retired bureaucrats fight to keep their government cars years after leaving office. Beacon lights were officially banned in 2017. Half the political class found workarounds within months.

The irony is catastrophic. These are the same leaders who give speeches about Jan Seva — service to the people. They say it from podiums while 15 police vehicles idle outside burning public fuel.

The Real Benchmark

Stop measuring national development by GDP per capita, skyscraper count, or how many people own smartphones.

Measure it by this: Does the most powerful person in the room face the same daily friction as the least powerful?

If yes — that is a developed country.

If your Panchayat President needs a convoy to buy vegetables — you are not developed. You are just a poor country with expensive habits borrowed from the people who colonised you.

India will be developed the day a Chief Minister stands in a BEST bus queue in Mumbai and nobody around him thinks it is remarkable.

We are not close.

— Nishani | nishani.in

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