Imagining India

Today is the day of the ‘people’s car’ launch, and its no exaggeration to say that this car is likely to transform the face of India’s traffic, both for better and for worse. The good: If creating widespread access to better services and products is the aim of free markets, then the Nano car is a triumph. It has made the dream of owning an automobile attainable for millions in India. The bad: The car will probably increase overcrowding on roads and pollution. But as long as our cities lack viable mass transit systems, people have no choice but to resort to private vehicles, and poorer Indians should not be denied a choice that the middle and upper classes have had for so long. 

For Indian companies, the Nano is only the most recent success when it comes to making products and services suited to the Indian market.  C. K. Prahalad has written about these low-cost approaches many Indian companies have adopted in his book The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid  - of companies targeting the poorest citizens and turning them into consumers, by selling them two rupee sachets of detergent and shampoo, bringing them internet access through community kiosks, providing loans through Self Help Groups and even providing low-cost health care, such as Arvind Eye Hospital. 

And as we weather the global recession, I think this approach is only going to gain steam - India’s countryside has not been as affected by the recession, and rural India is even showing signs of above-average growth. Hopefully, this will draw our markets into the villages,  help address our long-lamented ‘urban rural divide,’ and do its bit in empowering our rural poor.  

Photo credit: Carol Mitchell

The smell of elections is in the air. Both our newspapers and TV are inundated with extravagant promises from our politicians, and accusations and counter-accusations are flying over which party is the most corrupt, who is the most unconcerned about terrorism, who the most callous about poverty, and interestingly, who is allowed to play the current catchy movie tune.  

My area’s polling station is walking distance from my house, so casting my vote means just a short stroll in the morning. The queue is not very long, and I don’t find it a hassle. Many people I know however feel differently about voting, especially in the younger age-group. They tell me that they don’t bother to vote - ‘It doesn’t make a difference’, ‘I don’t support any among the field of candidates,’ are the usual answers I get. 

I had written earlier on this blog about Jaago re, and whether shifts in voting make a difference in the governance we get. Many of our problems are deeply rooted, especially in terms of corruption and interest groups, and it will take much more than small voting shifts to change that. But what can change to some extent with the literacy of the average voter is the transparency people demand from governance, and better answers on policy (more educated voters for example, demand to know where the money for government handouts and loan waivers is coming from). 

And only more informed voters can force political parties to shift to a higher standards in the quality and qualifications of their candidates. We are not in a pleasant place with regard to this. However much we boast about how educated our present Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is, its telling that he has never won a popular election.

How much of such reform is possible right now, if for instance, more of the middle class participate? The conventional wisdom has long been that this group lacks the numbers to make an impact. But these last few years tell us otherwise. The numbers in our middle class have ballooned in the last half-decade, even though we still feel like our effect on politics is that of a tiny minority. The Delimitation Commission’s recent reforms have also given the urban vote more power: for instance in Karnataka, Bangalore’s share of seats has now gone up from 11 to 28 - that is one tenth of the strength of the Assembly, which means that Bangalore (and Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Hyderabad) now matters a great deal as a swing vote. With urbanisation only speeding up, and voters in urban areas skewing educated and informed, this is not good news for the unvarnished populists among our politicians. 

Is a tipping point emerging? And is a 300 million strong middle class enough to trigger a change in our standards?

Photo credit: Daniel Bachhuber

There is a new change of tone in the already tense negotiations on climate change, if we look at the recent comments the European Commission has directed at India and China. The EC is now pitching for emission caps for both these countries. This is an approach that the Indian government has long said is off the table. Chidambaram has spoken before of India’s ‘right to development’ - that since India is still a developing country and has to address the critical issues of poverty and growth, it has to postpone any commitments to reduce emissions. 

Whether the EC’s tone gets sharper or not, depends on the US position on developing country emissions. I believe though, that India has a chance to set the tone of the emissions debate. So far, we have been backbenchers when it comes to global negotiations on climate change, responding only when we are forced to. But India as an emerging economy, has some precious flexibility when it comes to growth and emissions that both the US and Europe lack. 

As developed nations, both the US and Europe have high emission infrastructure in place as well as ‘high-emission habits’ - in terms of car ownership, consumption, polluting industries and agriculture approaches  - that will be difficult to break or change. India on the other hand, still does not have its infrastructure fully in place. Car ownership is still extremely low, and the high consumption economy is still not in place here. We consequently have a chance to carve a development path that is environmentally safer than the ones that developed nations have pursued. Such an approach ought to be pursued for its own sake, rather than because of external pressures. 

The big mistake of the developed world was in ignoring the impact on the environment during their high growth phase. For writers such as Charles Dickens, the smog of 19th century London- created by coal-burning in the city - was a consant theme in his novels about urban decay. Much of the West never considered that use of the environment ought to be ‘priced’ the same way other resources are. This however, was something that Indian environmentalists such as Anil Agarwal suggested as early as the 1980s, when they noted that GNP ought to be about ‘gross natural product’ rather than ‘gross national product’. With an approach that prices environmental resources, industries would have to pay for dumping untreated waste into our rivers; open coal mines could no longer pollute the surrounding land, turning our soil into unusable sludge. Razing down forests and building a coal-fired plant would have to be ‘compensated’ for, by funding a green project elsewhere. 

Who could such an approach benefit? And how much would it hurt us in our growth numbers? I have some thoughts on this, that I’ll follow up on in a second post.

If there’s a place that can be described as ground zero for New India, it is my home town Bangalore. This is not because of  its identity as India’s IT city, or its aspiration to be the ‘Silicon Plateau’ of the world, the next stage after California’s Silicon Valley. What gives the city this promise is that in its successes and its struggles, Bangalore is a microcosm of the new, emerging India.  

Nehru had once called Bangalore ‘India’s city of the future’. For him, the city was untainted, relatively unburdened of the imperialist architecture that dominated the Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta skylines. And for the entrepreneurs entering Bangalore in the 1970s and 1980s, the city – then a hub mainly for the textile and public sector industries – was also untouched in another way. Bangalore was distant from the chaos and politics of Bombay and Delhi, which had limited the rise of firms without the connections and clout to get past the red tape and old boy networks.

For this new breed of first-time entrepreneurs – and Infosys was among them – this city was a refuge. The companies that came here were therefore, disproportionately young and new-industry. The focus of both IT and the textile industry on the international market also meant that Bangalore developed as a city with a global outlook, welcoming to outsiders and strongly aware of international standards and practices when it came to doing business. The city’s firms, especially in the IT industry, have tried to envision a more responsible role for the private sector, focusing on transparency, fairness to their stakeholders, and ethical management. And they made early efforts to expand the role of business within the broader community, by participating in India’s first public-private partnership, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (which I chaired), which worked to improve the city’s governance systems. 

A different kind of business also attracted a different kind of community – a large proportion of Bangalore’s workers are educated, white-collar, and middle-class. These workers have often either lived or travelled abroad, and have a global outlook, fully aware of best practices when it came to public services, governance and social welfare. 

With these entrepreneurs and workers have come new possibilities, and a potential framework for reforms in India. Civil activism is vibrant and thriving in Karnataka – from MYRADA’s work in microfinance lending to the poor, to Srikanth Nadhamuni’s egovernments Foundation which is working towards technology for urban management and Akshara Foundation’s work in primary education. New experiments in entrepreneurship and government are also seeing success here, from Sriram Raghavan’s Internet community kiosks, to the Bhoomi land reform project led by the bureaucrat Rajiv Chawla. In these efforts, we are seeing a push for positive change that is reshaping the growth of the city. 

Even the struggles that Bangalore faces foretell what India shall encounter as we develop. The whispers of future conflict are right here – as the city faces the influx of millions of migrant workers.  It is telling for instance, that the death of the Kannada actor Rajkumar in 2006 triggered violence across the city, with cars and buses attacked and glass-fronted offices pelted with stones. Rajkumar was an icon for many of the older city, a quieter, less modern and chaotic place, one whose identity was unequivocally Kannadiga. Bangalore today, with its growing migrant middle and working classes, its industries and restaurants that are so obviously cosmopolitan, has become an uneasy melting pot. The challenges of inequality emerging across the country are also all too visible here. Nowhere is the secession of the middle classes as stark as it is here with the walled gardens of corporate campuses and gated communities. And the rapid growth has laid bare the complete inadequacies of our urban governance.      

But this city is exceptional in that it is also relatively young, and has the opportunity to tackle the challenges of inequality and of housing and land shortages that left unaddressed has sharpened inequality so severely in cities like Bombay and Delhi. Bangalore’s entrepreneurs, NGOs and civil activists are fighting for better urban planning and infrastructure, with the support of the city residents. Citizen groups pressure the government towards better environmental practices; a variety of organisations have cropped up to manage waste and sewage disposal issues that the government has ignored. 

We can thus see tentative steps forward to the future as Bangalore searches for better solutions, and attempts to overcome its divisions. Rural politicians have tried to capitalize on the urban-rural divide by championing the ‘common man’ of the rural country while inveigling the city ‘elites’. In recent years however, this pitch has had far less power over Karnataka’s voters, as even our farmers aspire to educate their children, and send them to the city for a better life. The 2008 state elections, the first after delimitation has also increased urban voice. 

Bangalore is where we will have to look closest when we try to predict the long-term success of India’s rise – in how we address our divisions, the tensions of large-scale migration, provide equitable access to education, health and housing, build infrastructure and reform governance. It is our weathervane, when it comes to imagining a new India.

Adapated from an article written for the Bangalore edition of the DNA [15 December '08]

There was a very good reason for Rudolph Giuliani to run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008 – the formidable reputation in crisis management that the former New York mayor had gained after the 9/11 attacks struck the city. He was photographed at Ground Zero immediately after the planes mowed into the Twin Towers, and was a prominent presence on the airwaves in the days after. He came through as decisive and in complete charge of the city’s response to the terrorist attack; in fact, criticism later converged on whether his presence influenced decisions too much, rather than not enough. 

But in Mumbai after 26/11, all we received from our mayor was deafening silence.

The lack of comment or reaction was probably expected. I doubt many in Mumbai even know who the mayor of the city is – it’s a largely ceremonial post. There was no powerful official representing Mumbai’s city administration simply because the administration has no power to speak of. The responses in the immediate aftermath of the attacks – orders to the police and military, evacuation operations – flowed from the state and central governments. It was the state, central and defence officials who seemed to be in charge.  An entire tier of government at the local level appeared non-existent.

This had huge repercussions in the speed and efficiency with which Mumbai responded to the attacks. The city’s police were ill-equipped for any sort of rapid response. The NSG commandos who cleared the hotels had to be flown in from Delhi – and after their arrival in Mumbai, had to wait for hours to be transported from the airport. 

In a crisis, the city was thus left helpless, its institutions frozen in place. The power of city administrations has in fact, been deliberately hollowed out since independence, as state governments superseded city authority and co-opted its power. The decline of the Indian city took a decisive turn after the battle over Bombay in the 1950s, when states were being formed according to linguistic boundaries. Bombay presented a puzzle to the Indian government – while it lay in the heart of Maharashtra, it had Gujarati as well as Marathi residents, and vast numbers of other language communities. Nehru proposed at a point that Bombay become a separate, bilingual area, but the rioting and protests that ensued forced him to back down, and the city became an unequivocal part of Maharashtra. Since then, our cities have been passive and subordinate to the state governments. The bulk of city taxes are collected by the state and central governments and administration is dominated by state run agencies. And with local authorities powerless and unaccountable to citizens, city infrastructure has neared collapse.

The disadvantages of weak and ineffectual city governance become most stark in these times of disaster. The Mumbai floods in 2005 saw civilians far more present in rescue and rehabilitation operations than civic agencies. When calamity hits, the lack of local power and the authority to respond instantly, means that such events are far more catastrophic than they need to be. The twin challenges of climate change and terror are therefore only going to get exacerbated.

The Indian city has long been exiled from our collective imagination. The romance of the ‘village republic’ for India’s politicians and the strong association of the city with the British Imperial Raj doomed the city in Independent India. Gandhi said, ‘I regard the growth of cities as an evil thing’ and for Nehru the city of New Delhi was ‘un-Indian’. Cities were barely mentioned in the Indian Constitution, and were constitutional orphans for over four decades, passed over in favour of state and central government. It was only in 1992, that the Narasimha Rao government passed the 73rd and 74th amendments, which mandated more power to local bodies in cities and villages.  Even these amendments were meant to fulfil Rajiv Gandhi’s dream of the Panchayat Raj and village power  - city governments were an afterthought. 

But these changes, and the powers that the amendments offer, have largely remained on paper – states have been reluctant to cede powers of taxation and control over their cities. The possibility of competition from the grassroots has made state political parties wary of an ‘hour glass’ effect, of being squeezed in the middle between a strong centre and powerful cities. And no state Chief Minister wants to let go the money and patronage that comes from controlling urban land.  

But there is some pressure for change. In the years since independence, it was easy for Indian governments at both the state and the centre to dismiss urban India as somehow ‘inauthentic’, and not as legitimate or representative as the rural country. Even today the former CM of Karnataka HD Kumaraswamy justifies protests about Bangalore’s school children reaching home 5 hours late due to his party rally as the outpouring of an ‘effete’ IT/BPO crowd, and the BJP spokesperson Mukhtar Naqvi dismisses ‘women with lipstick’ as somehow not eligible to protest.  But as the spontaneous outpourings in our cities over the terror tragedy has shown, there is change in the air. As India’s urban population steadily grows they will demand more local empowerment. And the implementation of the Delimitation Commission’s recommendations will increase urban representatives in the state legislature reversed this marginalising of urban India. But these are small steps, and crises like the one we just witnessed shows how urgent empowering our city governments has become. 

We cannot keep our cities – the centres of our economic growth, innovation and where we are most able to move beyond our caste and our past – weakened and marginal in our politics. This imbalance has led to the decline we can see in every Indian city, the apathy made concrete in our crumbling roads, massive encroachments, and our chaotic, unplanned growth. Without local governments that answer directly to their citizens, urban India will face the threat of being mauled again when the next crisis hits.