Implosion (11 page)

19
. ‘Building on a dream – How illiterate farmers helped K.P. Singh create India’s biggest real estate firm’, Interview with K.P. Singh of DLF,
Business Standard,
22 March 2005,
http://www.business-standard.com/article/management/building-on-a-dream-105032201044_1.html
and also on
http://www.dlf.in/dlf/DLF-Chairman/chairmans_profile_link3.htm

20
. ‘K.P. Singh in the
Forbes
Rich List’, 14 November 2007,
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/77/biz_07india_Kushal-Pal-Singh_0UU7.html

21
. ‘K.P. Singh in the
Forbes
Rich List’, October 2013,
http://www.forbes. com/profile/kushal-pal-singh/

22
.
First Post,
17 November 2012,
http://www.firstpost.com/business/robert-vadras-got-vision-rest-of-the-world-wears-bifocals-526787.html

23
. ‘Deal between DLF and Vadra Cancelled’, NDTV (with timeline), 16 October 2012,
http://www.ndtv.com/article/cheat-sheet/58-crore-deal-between-dlf-and-robert-vadra-cancelled-by-ias-officer-ashok-khemka-280411
; Ashok Khemka, a senior bureaucrat in Haryana, was transferred three days after he cancelled DLF’s purchase of 3.5 acres and also ordered an inquiry into all land deals within the state between Vadra and DLF – see chapter on corruption

24
. ‘Senior official probing Vadra-DLF land deal shunted out’,
The Hindu
, 16 October 2012,
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/senior-official-probing-vadradlf-land-deal-shunted-out/article4000137.ece

25
. ‘Gurgaon was envisaged as another Chandigarh’,
Mint
, 3 December 2011,
http://www.livemint.com/Companies/9FsmGo7MbA0W PNWSLv9RDI/KP-Singh--Gurgaon-was-envisaged-as-another-Chandigarh.html

26
. ‘Gurgaon is growing, but for how long?’ Centre for Science and Environment, 12 April 2012,
http://www.cseindia.org/content/gurgaon-growing-how-long

5
Getting Things Done and
Who Can Do It

Every 12 years, tens of millions of people gather over a period of several weeks to bathe in the sacred river Ganga at a Hindu festival called the Kumbh Mela. This is the biggest assembly of people anywhere in the world, and there are similar, smaller festivals at other locations every three years. Naked sadhus covered in ash and adorned with garlands of flowers mix with rich and poor pilgrims, self-conscious politicians and tourists to enter the water at auspicious times as near as possible to the confluence of the Ganga with the river Yamuna at Allahabad, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

In early 2013, around five million people lived there for 55 days in a vast tented camp covering 6,000 acres. As many as 30m to 50m more people visited every day. Equipped with electricity and water supplies, sanitation and emergency services, the mela was run by the state government jointly with religious organizations and other voluntary bodies. There were no disasters at the site, though 36 people were killed in a stampede at Allahabad railway station.

The successful organization of this complex mega event, with all its potential for chaos – and in one of India’s most corrupt states – belies the failures of jugaad and chalta hai. ‘It shows that the system is capable of saying “we know we have to do this”,’ says Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who runs the Planning Commission.
¹
This is also a significant and rare example of a government learning from a disaster – in 1954, several hundred people were killed when there was a sudden surge in the crowds. (Another example of disaster triggering a new approach came in Orissa in October 2013, when fewer than 25 people died in a massive cyclone – the state and central governments had learned lessons from a cyclone in 1999 when 10,000 people were killed because of a lack of planning and effective administration.)
²

The significant point about the Kumbh Mela is that one senior official from the Uttar Pradesh government was in sole charge. He reported to top state bureaucrats and to the chief minister, but he had overall administrative powers based on the authority of a district magistrate. Akhilesh Yadav, the state’s young chief minister, was inevitably quick to welcome plaudits when he led a delegation to Harvard University to discuss how it was organized,
³
but basically, politicians did not interfere. ‘It only goes on for a short time, so it is not a threat to political authority, and its success is important politically because of the problems if something went wrong,’ says Rahul Mehotra,
⁴
a Mumbai architect
⁵
and Harvard University urban design professor.

Mehotra led a Harvard group to the mela in 2013 to see what could be learned for the organization of temporary cities that house refugees from conflict areas and natural disasters. He reckons the success is partly due to a ‘common purpose and clarity’ about what is needed, with clearly defined objectives, and without the sort of conflicting aims and tensions that develop over time in a community. The absence of prestige-conscious politicians also lessens demand for the best spaces, once the needs of the akhara (sect of Hindu Sadhus) leaders have been met. Mehotra says that order is helped by the site having a strict grid layout, which in 2013 included consumer goods outlets and corporate marketing displays. ‘For many who participate in the melas, these huge human gatherings are opportunities for the practice of commerce, politics, services of many kinds, or public health,’ he says.
⁶

This story demonstrates what officials can achieve when they are not fettered by politicians, and shows that there are ways through India’s corrupt political and bureaucratic quagmire, though both the Kumbh Mela and the Orissa cyclone were one-off events that did not require sustained and effective administration over a long period. Mehotra graphically explains that the ‘Indian wedding syndrome’ ensures that ‘differences are put aside to make it happen’ for a short time. ‘It would be different if it went on for five years.’

Such success needs a precisely defined focus in the way that government and the public sector work, plus people committed to achieve change and excellence. Use of information technology for communication and storage of records and other purposes can also help, though this is only effective when it is accompanied by a will to perform and, where necessary, change procedures. Strong political leadership, which has been lacking at a national level in India since 2004, is also needed, and the will to stand aside to let things happen.

One of the examples of effective administration is the Election Commission, which runs India’s national and state elections with overall authority that includes the freedom, for example, to reprimand even a cabinet minister for breaking election rules by making a policy announcement, or removing senior officials and police commanders who favour one party. Like the Kumbh Mela, India’s general election is the biggest event of its kind in the world with over 700m voters – more than all the countries of Europe or the Americas taken together – and over 8,000 candidates. It harnesses modern technology by using 1.2m electronic voting machines. The Commission consists of three commissioners with just 30 officials and 300 supporting staff, plus 11m civil servants who are seconded from their regular jobs at election time. ‘This shows the bureaucracy can perform. All we need to do is to insulate what we do from political pressure,’ says S.Y. Quraishi, the chief election commissioner from 2010 to 2012.
⁷

Possibly the best early example of the will and determination of one person implementing change is the success of Verghese Kurien, a single-minded and stubborn metallurgist-turned-dairy manager, who set up Operation Flood, the National Dairy Development Board’s cooperatives-based milk scheme, and ran it for 33 years from 1970, making India self-sufficient in milk. Another possible candidate is the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) project, run by Amitabh Kant, an extrovert bureaucrat with a sound administrative track record in developing tourism. This project aims to reverse the lack of urban planning and infrastructure by constructing nine new cities along a 1,483-km dedicated freight railway track. It is at a very early stage and the strong central leadership will be inevitably diffused as the action moves down to individual states, where powerful political and business interests will wade in.

Three more examples demonstrate what can be achieved with a firm government and leadership – the 1998–2004 BJP government’s Golden Quadrilateral highway programme, the construction of the Delhi Metro in the 2000s, and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Aadhaar biometric identification scheme launched in 2010.

People with direct experience in such projects say that, without a powerful and determined politician as a sponsor or patron, it is almost impossible to break away from political and bureaucratic blockages and then stay clear of the constant attempts to invade and suborn. ‘You cannot do a project of this scale and magnitude without very strong support from the prime minister and lot of other people who matter,’ says Nandan Nilekani.
⁸

Vajpayee’s Golden Quadrilateral

In 2000, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then the prime minister, provided political backing for the construction of the first stages of India’s 5,800-km Golden Quadrilateral highway under the direction of Major General B.C. Khanduri, a retired army-engineer-turned-politician who was already in his early seventies. Running in an erratic square or diamond shape around the bulk of the country, the Quadrilateral was part of a new, mostly four-lane, national highways programme and it linked the capital of Delhi with three other big metros – Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

With Vajpayee’s personal authority backing him – and with adequate government funding and a general acceptance of the urgent need for new roads – Khanduri became a hands-on minister for road transport and highways. ‘The message went out that I was interfering – interfering to help the contractors, the National Highways Authority and consultants – so it was accepted,’ Khanduri told me in 2005 for a
Fortune
magazine article.
⁹
‘No one thought India had the construction industry, the funds, or the management expertise to do such a programme.’ Khanduri proved the sceptics wrong. ‘We changed the mindset because I set targets that looked unreasonable and impossible,’ he said. ‘Gradually people realized what could be achieved.’ Highway contracts awarded while the BJP was in power, mostly on the Quadrilateral, led to some 6,000 km being completed by the end of 2005. (Khanduri later became chief minister of the state of Uttarakhand where he found it more difficult to be effective in state-level politics.)

When the BJP unexpectedly lost the 2004 general election, the road-building programme lost top-level sponsorship and direction, and it has never fully recovered. Sonia Gandhi and her ministers did not seem to want to draw attention to one of their predecessor’s spectacular successes, especially after the BJP had personalized it before the election with pictures of Vajpayee on banners strung across completed highways. Manmohan Singh was an enthusiast and ordered widespread six-laning of four-lane highways, but T.R. Baalu, his minister of road transport, shipping and highways, was more interested in promoting a shipping canal between his home state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka than in building highways elsewhere.
¹⁰

There was also extensive infighting between the highways authority and ministry and the Planning Commission, which wanted the private sector to replace the BJP government’s substantial public funding and unwisely insisted on complex contractual arrangements that slowed down project awards. As frequently happened in the Manmohan Singh government, no one took ministerial responsibility for making decisions that would cut through the lethargy, contract and funding rows, and corrupt aspirations. There were also inevitable delays because of slow land acquisition and extortion by gangsters and Naxalite rebels. By the end of April 2009, the total completed road had only gone up to just over 11,000 km, and awards of new contracts had slowed to such an extent that work was only started on 9,700 km compared with a five-year target of 16,000 km.
¹¹
It picked up again but the single-minded momentum of the Vajpayee-Khanduri period was not recovered, though there was a successful government-funded rural roads programme that opened up access to villages and led to improved health and education services as well as access to markets for farm produce.
¹²

Sreedharan’s Delhi Metro

Around this time, Delhi’s highly successful metro railway was being built by Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, a former Indian Railways engineer. He was 65 in 1997 when he became managing director of the government-owned Delhi Metro Corporation and he stayed in charge till 2012 when he turned 79. He was backed by Sheila Dikshit, Delhi’s chief minister, and by other city authorities including Vijay Kapoor, who was the lieutenant-governor when the project began. They saw the urgent need for the railway, which was substantially funded by Japan, though Dikshit also gave surprisingly enthusiastic support to a rival ill-planned and chaotic Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) System.
¹³

Sreedharan became internationally recognized for his achievements. A slim, rather austere-looking man, he had earned his reputation as a top project manager during a long career with the railways, finishing as a board member. From 1990, he was in charge of building the 760-km Konkan Railway on India’s west coast. Cutting through difficult terrain, across the mountains and rivers of the Western Ghats, with nearly 150 bridges and 92 tunnels,
¹⁴
the railway runs from Mumbai through Goa to Mangalore in Karnataka.