Abject Misery Alongside Prosperity’s Glow in Asian Cities : Development: Entrepreneurial spirit has fueled engines of the world’s fastest economic growth. But rich and poor alike pay a heavy price.

Five years ago, Kimnai Satreewong took her dreams to the city. Now, if she can ever scrape enough money together, she wants to buy a pickup truck and go home to the country.

Kimnai, 43, makes a pretty good living selling somtam, or raw papaya salad, from a cart on a downtown corner. Her take of $20 to $28 a day is several times the minimum daily wage of $5.

But it is not enough to provide the new life she had sought for herself, her unemployed husband and their two children, who stayed behind. She lives in one tiny room and, at work, police badger her for blocking the sidewalk.

“I will stay here just one or two years more,” she said.

Life is sweeter for banker Manit Panitkul, 35, as it is for the thousands of other prosperous young business professionals. Manit and his wife live in a house on the outskirts. His main complaint is traffic jams, which can be horrendous in Bangkok.

The banker and the somtam vendor embody the entrepreneurial spirit that has made Asia’s cities the engines of the world’s fastest economic growth. But the mega-cities are paying a severe price, and many who live in them are concluding that the frustrations and hazards outweigh the rewards.

Gleaming towers rise beside sprawling slums in Jakarta, Manila and Bangkok. The rich can afford comforts and protection, but must breathe the same air, drink the same water and navigate the same clogged streets as the poor.

Kimnai needs only about five minutes to push the food cart from her room to her street corner. Manit noses his new Toyota through rush-hour traffic at about the same pace. Like her, he rises before 6 a.m. Unlike her, he spends 2 1/2 hours getting to his job at the Laem Thong bank.

In the developing countries of Asia, city services provide little benefit to either rich or poor. Public transport is inadequate and cars choke the streets day and night, fouling the air with exhaust.

Asians tend to build cities as production centers rather than as places to live, and “the problems increase faster than the rate of solving them,” said Somsuk Boonyabancha of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights.

Since World War II, millions of Asians have moved from farms to cities, often ending up in ramshackle slums as squatters.

Only 20 years ago, one-fifth of Asians lived in cities. That is expected to reach more than half in East Asia by 2005, and a similar proportion in South Asia by 2025.

At current rates of growth, 13 of the world’s 21 mega-cities--those with more than 10 million people--will be in the Asian-Pacific region by 2000.

Singapore has planned successfully, but Dhira Phantumvanit, president of the Thailand Environment Institute, said other cities have grown haphazardly.

Large cities are being strangled by rapid growth, Dhira said, adding: “What is happening now in Bangkok will happen soon in Jakarta, then go to Manila, then go to Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

“This is the dilemma facing all major cities of every (developing) country. By the time we feel we have enough money to start to invest, we are confronted with the magnitude of the problem.”

Although the poor suffer the most, as usual, not even the rich can escape such pervasive urban problems as air pollution.

Lead in Bangkok’s air--most of it from automobile exhaust--kills 200 to 400 people a year and accounts for 200,000 to 500,000 cases of high blood pressure, the U.S. Agency for International Development estimated in 1990.

In the long run, high concentrations of airborne lead may have the more insidious effect of reducing the intelligence of Asia’s children, the custodians of the future.

“The less qualified they are, the less productive the future will be,” said Jens Overgaard, co-author of a report on Asia’s cities by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, a regional U.N. organization.

Only about one-fourth of the urban poor have safe water supplies, fewer than half have access to sanitary facilities, and garbage disposal and sewage treatment services are breaking down, the report says.

It recommends reducing red tape and bureaucracy, sharing power and decisions with the people and private groups, and preventing pollution instead of trying to clean it up.

Red tape often makes it difficult for workers in cottage industries and street vendors like Kimnai to start small businesses.

“Don’t waste time trying to slow down growth--it will grow anyway,” Overgaard said. “Remove the obstacles to growth,”

Despite the misery of the slums, the prevailing attitude is resourcefulness, not despair.

Activists in Bangkok and other cities have begun their own efforts to clean up the environment and nurture small business, and are pressing governments for help.

Somsuk of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights heads a project to lend money at low rates to responsible local organizations, and says the officials must work with the communities.

“It would have to be done in partnership style,” she said. “That should be the theme of the new decade.”