Implosion (9 page)

Since the days of Mahatma Gandhi, who regarded the ‘growth of cities as an evil thing’,
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populist political focus has been on rural development and financial support for the rural poor, not the needs of urban areas. Urban planning was started by Jawaharlal Nehru in the early days of India’s independence, but it provided a restrictive framework that failed to inspire orderly urban expansion and has been exploited for decades by well-connected developers. Few government officials seem to care about urban decline. Those that are aware of what is needed can do little to ensure that state governments draw up and implement plans, though a start was made in 2007 with a government aid scheme, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), which has yet to have a significant impact.

Nehru envisaged 300 planned cities by the end of the twentieth century. Instead, there are now only a handful, led by Chandigarh, a grid-based city planned by Le Corbusier, the French architect who also designed the city’s raw concrete government buildings in the international brutalist architecture style of the period. Only two major planned cities have appeared in the past 50 years – a state capital for Gujarat at Gandhinagar in the 1960s, and a state capital for Chhattisgarh at Naya Raipur, which is under construction. More are now planned as part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project which envisages nine new cities.

‘India’s Urban Awakening’

In 2010, McKinsey Global Initiative produced a report, ‘India’s Urban Awakening’,
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which warned that India was in ‘a state of deep inertia about the urgency and scale’ of necessary urban reforms. It said that India’s infrastructure required capital expenditure investment of $1.2 trillion by 2030 in roads, railways, water supplies, sewage, drainage and affordable housing. That was equivalent to $134 per capita, but only $17 was being spent in 2010, a figure that was likely to double to $34 on current trends. China, by comparison, spent $116 and New York $292 in 2010. ‘Despite the perilous state of many Indian cities and the impending wave of urbanisation, there seems to be comfort with the status quo, resistance to change, and a lack of recognition of the urgent need for change,’ said the report. Like many such dire forecasts about India’s future, the report hit the headlines for a short time, but has been forgotten in the three years since it was published.

Current performance shows that there is no chance of such a massive programme being implemented without basic changes in the way India is governed. The report said that, contrary to public perception, there need be no real shortage of funds to build the infrastructure, provided various sources were tapped. This would include developing government land and introducing realistic property taxes and user charges that could provide the government with market-value revenue from real estate as values increased, plus private sector participation. The report was not explicit about the sensitive politics that would be required to accomplish this, but it was in effect calling for a total change in the relationship between developers and governments so that maximum payments stopped going to politicians and political parties with smaller amounts reaching the government and city authorities.

One of the report’s authors, Ajit Mohan, hinted at what this involved in a
Wall Street Journal
blog in 2011 when he wrote that ‘in a political system built around patronage, and where the rapid rise in the cost of elections forces political parties to look for substantial sources of funding from private interest groups, chief ministers and state leaders are reluctant to devolve power over such decisions to city governments and systematic urban planning processes’. He added that ‘in the arbitrariness of urban land allocation lie power, wealth, and the possibility of political patronage’.
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Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders and a former chief executive of Infosys, the Bengaluru-based information technology company, who went on to set up India’s country-wide personal biometric database, traces the post-independence story in his book
Imagining India
. Tracking the decline of city institutions, he says that political power was ‘amputated at every level’ and, in the absence of powerful elected bodies, ‘city resources became prizes to be quartered among powerful interest groups’.
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By the 1970s, with a series of restrictive laws, ‘a pork-barrel politico could not have had it better!’

Amitabh Kundu, a professor at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, explains that the meticulous planning of the 1960s ‘did not take vested interests into account’ so, in later decades, there were only ‘vision documents that leave things open for the actors to do as they want’.
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The actors include politicians and bureaucrats who run city administrations and are, more often than not, in league with real estate and other companies. Ravi Kaimal, a Delhi-based architect and partner in an urban design firm, Kaimal Chatterjee & Associates, deplores the system of administration because, he says, it is in the hands of ‘intelligent amateur bureaucrats on short-term appointments’ plus ‘nominal control’ by politicians.
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Since there is ‘no downside for being inactive’, the bureaucrats mostly look after themselves and protect their careers by pleasing the politicians above them, says Kaimal. The politicians owe primary allegiance to slum dwellers who, because of middle-class apathy, make up the vast majority of their vote-banks and are content with their semi-legal lifestyle where they pay little or nothing for services. There is therefore little or no pressure on politicians to improve urban planning and facilities, while the bureaucrats, generally speaking, have no stake in improving the situation or services, but often show initiative in the awarding of contracts, though not in the completion of the contracts, says Kaimal. (The initiative, of course, though he does not say it, is receipt of bribes and other favours at the start of contracts and while they are in progress.) ‘Till the current governance structure of cities changes to more empowered [for decision-making and for revenue] and locally accountable city governments, the concerns of the middle class for long-term vision and planning are likely to be ignored,’ he adds.

Crumbling Mumbai

India’s commercial capital of Mumbai is one of the worst examples of urban decline, both in terms of its physical infrastructure and its governance, despite being touted in the 2000s as a potential international and regional financial centre conveniently located between Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan to the east, and Dubai, Europe and the US to the west. It does, of course, serve India well, with top businessmen and financial services executives thriving in the sophisticated seclusion of well-furnished and efficiently equipped islands of excellence in what are often scruffy, ill-maintained office blocks surrounded by the chaos of traffic, broken roads and footpaths and a general lack of public services.

It also functions well in its slums where eight million people run a huge parallel and informal economy that demonstrates India’s ability to make the best of dreadful conditions. Flying into Mumbai airport, many visitors’ first view of the country is of a mass of corrugated-roofed slums clustered on hillsides around the end of the main runway.
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But there is another image crouching below the aerial view, which was painted in the colour, drama, fun and cruelty of the Oscar-winning film
Slumdog Millionaire
. The film was set in a slum in Juhu, though the most famous of the slums in Mumbai is Dharavi, which is also one of the biggest in Asia, covering over 500 acres. Up to one million people live and work in unhealthy cramped conditions, fuelling a highly entrepreneurial informal economy. Alleyways a few feet wide lead to bakeries, metal workshops and sheds that recycle discarded plastic goods ranging from medical syringes to telephones and computers. Lorries crammed with buffalo, goat and other skins collected from abattoirs push through narrow lanes to grimy tanneries. Nearby, workers in a series of tiny workshops spray-paint, cut and press strips and sheets of leather and vinyl with varying degrees of expertise and branding authenticity.
^10
.

Slums like these, which are surrounded by high-value business and residential areas, have defied planners and real estate firms’ redevelopment schemes. Many of the people working and living there would like to legitimize their unauthorised occupancy of land and premises and maybe move to better conditions, but few have legal titles to their premises and they currently gain by evading taxes and other official payments. There is also an established business momentum and order amidst the apparent chaos. If they were moved out, these people would probably switch to another slum rather than try to adapt to the new economic realities of redevelopment. This in many ways is the story of modern India – so many people have vested interests in life as it is, however awful it may be, that there is strong resistance to change.

The slums are among the least of Mumbai’s serious worries – while they are bad for the city’s image, they are part of its success too. A government committee listed the main priorities in 2007 – they included ‘crumbling housing in dilapidated buildings pervading the city; poor road/rail mass transit as well as the absence of waterborne transport in what is essentially an island-city; absent arterial high-speed roads/urban expressways; poor quality of airports, airlines and air-linked connections domestically and internationally; poor provision of power, water, sewerage, waste disposal, as well as a paucity of high-quality residential, commercial, shopping and recreational space that meets global standards of construction, finish and maintenance.’

The ‘high powered’ committee was reporting on what Mumbai needed to do to become an international financial centre.
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It comprised top Indian businessmen and public figures, headed by Percy Mistry,
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a former World Bank economist and Hong Kong banker who now runs a consultancy in the UK. In addition to financial and other policy reforms that included the creation of a single financial services regulator and privatisation of banks, it named a devastating range of infrastructure deficiencies that applied not just to Mumbai but, in varying measure, to every Indian city and town: ‘Lifestyle facilities that concern human welfare will need to be brought up to world standards and run on world-class lines in terms of their management and growth.’ Hospitals, public and private health care, and educational, recreational and cultural facilities were needed. The greatest challenge was likely to be raising ‘the quality of municipal and state governance, the provision of personal security and of law enforcement’ that would need to ‘improve dramatically from third-world to first-world standards’. Mumbai would also ‘need to be seen as a cosmopolitan metropolis that welcomes and embraces migrants from everywhere – from India and abroad’ with ‘more user-friendly visa/resident permit mechanisms, making all arms of government expatriate-friendly, and exhibiting a gentle, tolerant, open and welcoming culture’.

The committee might have simply said, ‘forget the idea’. Instead, it correctly noted that an international finance centre was ‘too small a tail with which to wag the much larger urban development dog’.

There have been individual improvements since the report, but they are fragments compared with what needs to be done. There are new airport terminal buildings, with a new airport under construction, plus a part-completed expressway with an elegant cable-stayed bridge called the Bandra–Worli Sea Link across a bay on the urban coast. There is a new financial district of good modern buildings adjacent to the city’s airport highway. Mumbai is not however tackling the macro problems, and it is failing to monetize large-scale up-market residential, office and retail development, thus missing a big opportunity to harness the government-funding suggestions made by McKinsey. It is also failing to make significant progress on clearing Dharavi and the other slums, while Navi Bombay, a satellite city that was planned in the 1970s, is only half-built and has a massive slum problem.
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Perhaps the committee was doomed from the start. Its ‘high powered’ title predictably had the opposite effect, and its report called for action ‘on a war footing’, which is a public relations line, not a clarion call for action. Such is life in India where, perhaps more than in other countries, when one thing is said, the opposite is meant.

Crony Delhi

Now regarded as a hive of corrupt crony capitalism, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was set up in 1957 when Jawaharlal Nehru’s government merged the capital’s planning and development agencies. It was given sole responsibility for the city’s development with ‘public purpose’ powers (dating from an 1894 legislation) to acquire land forcibly below market prices. Delhi’s Nehru Place office centre on the city’s southern outer ring road, which was proudly built by the DDA in the 1970s and 1980s, is a monument to all that is wrong with bureaucratic control. It is a dreary multistorey concrete jungle of offices and scruffy shops with unmade roads and broken pavements. Car parking is pure jugaad, with touts using every possible space to squeeze in vehicles. It was a blot on the capital city’s landscape when I used to go there in the 1980s to visit companies like the Modi family group and the National Thermal Power Corporation. Today it is best known as the computer hardware equivalent of a flea market.

‘Such physical rot is an outward indication of the enormous corruption that gripped the DDA in its heyday of the 1970s and 1980s,’ Rana Dasgupta, a writer, reported in
Granta
, the UK-based quarterly magazine in 2009.
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The DDA would keep the supply of land low and developers would claw back the cost of their bribes with poor-quality construction. ‘This racket was big business, and some of the largest fortunes in the city were made by mid-level DDA engineers whose job it was to rubber-stamp new projects – and many of them resisted promotion out of these lucrative positions for years.’