Made in India - Part 2: Paving bedlam.. The man who wants to build a modern nation in an ancient land

By MARCUS GEE , Globe & Mail, Canada

HYDERABAD, INDIA — Entering the new airport in this booming south Indian city is like passing through a portal between different worlds.

Approaching from downtown, visitors travel along a road choked with cars, taxis, scooters, motorized rickshaws, ancient buses and the occasional hand-pushed cart. Women in saris dig at the median with crude hoes in an attempt at landscaping. Barefoot boys block a lane of the roadway with rocks so a creaking steamroller can lay asphalt.

Overhead, a new flyover that is supposed to transport travellers above the bedlam stands unfinished – like just about every public building project in India, way behind schedule.

At the access road to the airport, everything changes. Smooth, freshly laid asphalt leads past an immaculate 3,500-space parking lot lined by palm trees. A massive terminal building with a wave-like roof and towering glass walls rises in the foreground. All is new, clean and modern.

This is the world of G.M. Rao, the man who would rebuild India.

To first-time visitors, India sometimes seems like a place where everything is dirty or broken and nothing ever gets done. Their introduction to the rising “New India” is often a rundown airport with smelly toilets – followed by a ride in a rattletrap taxi through slum-lined streets to a city where the lights go on and off for lack of power.

Mr. Rao wants to change all that. The barrel-chested former jute trader who has made a fortune building airports and power plants says there is no reason on earth why India has to be a living museum for crumbling roads, half-finished overpasses and congested seaports.

To prove that his country can do better, he has just built a temple of aviation that rivals anything in China, Japan or Singapore. “We want to show that Indians can also build airports,” he says. “We want to show the world.”

If anyone can do it, it is Mr. Rao....

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