From the fourth floor of an office building in Gurgaon, a northern Indian city of tangled highways, yammering call centers and wandering livestock, Sanjay Gupta plays a bit part in the Great Game. His company, C&C Constructions, first ventured into Afghanistan in 2002. It started with a road from Kandahar to Spin Boldak, and then another one from Kandahar to Kabul. Over the past eight years, C&C has built more than 700 km of roads — worth about $250 million — and has subcontracted with USAID, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. “It’s good to see a country getting built,” Gupta says. “We also feel we contributed.”
C&C’s grandest project is the $125 million, bronze-domed Afghan parliament building. Funded by the Indian government and scheduled to be finished at the end of 2011, it will be the most prominent symbol of Indian efforts to help Afghanistan. But it may also be, at least for the time being, one of the last sizable manifestations of India’s $1.3 billion aid program. After a series of attacks targeting India’s presence in Afghanistan — including bombings of the Indian embassy in 2008 and 2009 — India is scaling back. Pakistan resents India’s presence in its backyard, and Indian companies like C&C fear they can no longer guarantee the safety of their workers. “There are elements who don’t want the Indian presence there,” says Gupta. “Maybe it’s time to wind up.”
