Photo: Premshree Pillai(flickr)

It must be frustrating to live in a major city but face daily power outages, water shortages and the stench of manure from urban-dwelling farm animals. Any reprise from this life would be welcome.

In India, gated communities are fast becoming popular for the people that can afford them. But the protected oasis provided by many of these communities is a quick fix to India's infrastructure problems, rather than a long-term solution.

In recent years India has witnessed a boom in the upper-middle class, much of it due to outsourced jobs from the U.S. and Europe. This population can afford some of the luxuries not available to all Indians, such as reliably running water and electricity, clean streets, even 24-hour security.

They also demand special services, maids, chauffeurs and gardeners. So over time, manual laborers who populate neighborhoods these nouveau riche were trying to flee simply relocate to locations where jobs are available.

“Townships are just one example of how Indian city planners increasingly focus on the upper strata of society and ignore the vast majority of city dwellers,” believes Krishna Menon, director of the TVB School of Habitat Studies in New Dehli.

Menon also points out that gated communities gated reinforce India's traditional caste system, a system the country is trying to shed. A recent New York Times article on India's gated communities suggests that these enclosed home sites, "pressed up against the slums that serve them, has underscored more than ever the stark gulf between those worlds.”

It's not that conditions for the poor are becoming worse. But the lack of infrastructure is becoming more apparent as gated communities face some of the same problems that Indian cities do. A story in Britain's Guardian newspaper says about Central Park, a new community outside of New Dehli,

The power fails, the air-conditioning switches off and the taps run dry. Unscrupulous developers fail to deliver, confident that they will never be prosecuted by India's slow-moving legal system.

Gated communities may provide families with more security, but they don't inoculate residents against the country's deeper structural problems. Since India is the world's largest democracy, where politicians as well as developers are responsive to the upper-middle-class residents, perhaps those residents should use their collective power to bring about changes that would benefit everyone.