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Dry taps, open sewers: welcome to India's Millennium City

Reuters, Gurgaon
Sarika Kapoor lives in a spacious home in one of the wealthiest cities in India. But something as simple as having a shower is fraught with problems.
Most days there is just a trickle of water from the taps and sometimes even that dries up before noon. The 56-year-old has often had to scurry to a neighbour across a potholed road to borrow a bucket of water and haul it back to her rented $300,000 home, sweat rolling down her face.
"Every morning I have to decide whether I want the upper half of my body clean or my lower half. With the amount of water we get, it's impossible to take a full-body bath," Kapoor said, sitting in her large, well-lit living room.
Welcome to Gurgaon, a city of wealthy urban professionals with gleaming shopping malls, Ave-star hotels and sprawling golf courses on the southern outskirts of New Delhi that is a symbol of newly affluent India.
But crippling power and water shortages, crater-riddled roads and open sewage drains have made it an extreme example of the poor infrastructure that is constraining growth in Asia's third-largest economy.
"Gurgaon is just a symbol of beautiful buildings. Otherwise it's rubbish," said PK Jain, the founder-president of the Gurgaon Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "Ultimately, the town is going to collapse."
Alongside the towering residential condominiums are glass and steel officeblocks.The India offices of some of the world's best known companies are here, including Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and agribusiness giantCargill Inc.
But public infrastructure has failed to keep pace with the rapid growth unleashed by landmark economic reforms in 1991.
The provision of essential services is so bad that many companies and residents rely on expensive diesel generators to beat power cuts, pay private water tankers to deliver door-to-
door when the taps run dry.
But demand outstrips supply, and with long power outages of upto eight hours a day, even well-off citizens are sometimes forced to havedinnerby candlelight.
This week, residents erupted in anger over the lack of water and power during the hottest summer in the region for three decades. They took to the streets in protest and set tyres on fire to block traffic.
Nevertheless, Gurgaon has some of the fastest growing property prices in the world, with rates for some upscale homes nearly doubling to 21,000 rupees a square foot in 2011 from about 11,000 rupees in 2008, according to a report by Citibank.
At current prices, a 2,000 square foot apartment in those areas would cost $760,000. At the very top end, huge 5,500 square foot apartments set around a golf course sell for about $3 million.
Like many other Indian cities, Gurgaon is made up of two parts. The highway to New Delhi separates the new from the old, which is still a traditional market town
serving farmers inthe region.
The new Gurgaon shot up out of farmland two decades ago, mainly to cater to the overflowing population of the nearby capital It is now India's third-wealthiest city by per-capita income, and its population has climbed to more than 1.5 million from just900,000 in2001.
Gurgaon has also become one of the hubs for the IT and outsourcing boom that drove India's economic growth from the 1990s, giving it the name " Millennium Ci ty".
Experts say the boom caught local authorities unawares, and they did not plan adequately for the power and water needs of a rapidly expanding population.
A company like DLF, which has been buying up chunks of land in Gurgaon since the 1970s to convert into residential compounds, commercial hubs and shopping centres, has set up its own private infrastructure network.
Pockets of Gurgaon developed by DLF have their own back-up power plant, water recycling