by John Elliott
‘Cracks in the Social Structure’
Traditionally, fault lines in India have involved caste rivalries, clashes between religions and communities, the activities of secessionist groups (at various times, in areas of the north-east, Punjab and Kashmir) and insurgencies. Of these, by 2013, the most serious was the Naxalite movement, but new ones were emerging, especially over the use of land, which were increasing the risks of social unrest and political upheaval while also creating uncertainty and new risks for business. Yogendra Yadav, a social scientist and political analyst who became a founder member of the new anticorruption Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), has talked about ‘how the plunder of natural resources will affect the existing fault lines’ and worries ‘there are some cracks in the social structure that could take democracy apart’.16
The growing role of the states has been changing their relationship with the centre in India’s federal system, opening up fault lines in the way the country is run. The relationship is laid down in the country’s Constitution but, in practice, regional parties have gained enormous additional ad hoc political clout in recent years since they became members of central government coalitions. Their power was particularly apparent in the 2004 and 2009 Congress-led coalition governments that depended on the support of regional political leaders for their survival. This virtually allowed these regional leaders to dictate what the coalition could or could not do – for example, on land and tax reforms, foreign investment in supermarkets, a river water sharing agreement with Bangladesh.
Pressure on the use of land and rapacious profiteering by real estate and other speculators when land became available for development, have led to bottlenecks that affect economic development and growth. Small landowners, mostly rural and including tribal groups, have opposed their lands being used for mining and industrial development. This, along with the growing impact of the Naxalite rebels, has led to social unrest and protests in both rural and urban areas.
Legislation conferring a right to information that was passed in 2005 has opened up a new fault line – albeit a very constructive one – because, as in other countries, governments can no longer assume that deliberations will remain confidential. Coupled with rising popular pressure against corruption, it has made politicians vulnerable to sudden and unforeseen exposure of corrupt dealings and has undermined the image and authority of the government and of politicians. It has also slowed down decision-making because politicians and bureaucrats have become nervous of being accused, rightly or wrongly, of corruption. This combination of jugaad, chalta hai and emerging fault lines has led to increasingly dramatic and extensive project failures in recent years that have compounded India’s traditional crab-like approach to decision-making and execution. The best-documented and most shaming events were the Commonwealth Games preparations in 2010, and a day in July 2012 when power supplies to half of India’s population were cut for up to eleven hours – said to be a world record.
All international games have their moments of crises before they start, but Delhi’s went to an extreme with its inefficiency, bad governance, shoddy work and corruption. This led to international rejection of ‘filthy and uninhabitable’ conditions at the athletes’ village, just 13 days before the games were due to begin, which coincided with the collapse of a new steel arch footbridge near the main sports stadium. Among many other problems, the flats were incomplete or had quickly become dilapidated after being invaded by construction workers (and stray dogs) seeking refuge from their grossly inadequate labour camps in unusually heavy monsoon rain. The basic problem was that there were too many people nominally in charge, with no top-down coordination and leadership. Those responsible for various aspects of the preparations and operations included Delhi’s chief minister and the central government’s ministers for urban development and sports, none of whom had the calibre or authority to lead such a mega event, especially not Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of India’s Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee. Manmohan Singh and his Prime Minister’s office (PMO) should have taken an early lead, but he played his usual role of standing back from the fray, and the PMO lacked punch. Singh should have been encouraged to step in by Sonia Gandhi, but nothing happened, and Sonia and her son and heir Rahul did not deign – or dare – to become involved.
In 1982, Sonia’s husband, Rajiv Gandhi, who was then a Congress party general secretary, had taken charge of preparations for Delhi’s Asian Games when they had fallen behind schedule.17 As in 2010, there were ‘vast numbers of overlapping government committees and over-spends, with construction workers leading miserable underfed lives,’ wrote Ved Mehta in Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom.18 ‘The whole exercise is being transformed by unscrupulous entrepreneurs with political pull into a money spinning operation,’ Mehta wrote, quoting The Hindu newspaper. ‘It has led to widespread hoarding and black-marketing of construction material. pushing up costs and, in the process, filling the pockets of the privileged few’ Yet, 26 years later, India had learned no lessons and the Gandhis stayed away – though, ultimately, the games went well and India won 38 gold medals, coming second to Australia.19 Chalta hai!
Multiple accusations of corruption and extortion led to court cases against officials led by Kalmadi, a flamboyant, wealthy and well-connected politician in the Congress party. He had made a career out of heading sports administrative bodies, including the Indian Olympic Association, and was the chairman of the games’ organizing committee. He was booed at the opening ceremony because he was seen as the leader of all that had gone wrong. The boos reflected the pent-up anger and frustration of Delhi-ites who saw this blustering responsibility-dodging part-time politician as the focal point for failures that had blackened India’s international image.20 He was jailed, pending trial, for ten months in 2011. He was then released on bail and was, unsurprisingly, rehabilitated into some activities of the Congress party though he was no longer socially acceptable. In February 2013, he was put on trial along with nine others on charges linked to a Swiss firm’s contract for the games’ timing, scoring and results system, but there was no sign of action against many others in the Delhi government and elsewhere who were suspected of involvement in corrupt deals.
The other major breakdown of infrastructure occurred when the national power grid failed in July 2012. It was overloaded by at least three states drawing more than their authorized share of electricity. A few days earlier, there had been a similar shutdown affecting a quarter of the population. About one-third of the 174 gigawatts of electricity generated in India annually is either stolen or lost in the conductors and transmission equipment that form the country’s distribution grid, contributing, along with slow project development, to a shortfall of close to 10 per cent in supplies.21 Jugaad usually solves the problem, partially and expensively, with power generated by large private power plants in factories and portable generators in individual homes and shops.
On the same night as the biggest black-out, a fire on an express train killed 32 people. Two months earlier, 29 people had died in two train collisions.22 Although very different occurrences, these infrastructure failures stemmed from the country’s generally laid-back approach to tackling and curing problems, in the hope that they would go away. In both cases, there was a lack of focused political management. The railway minister at the time was Mukul Roy, a minor politician from West Bengal, who spent most of his time in the state, doing the bidding of his political boss, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister, who herself had earlier been an absentee railways minister. Like Banerjee, Mukul rarely visited his railways ministry office in Delhi.
Sushilkumar Shinde, who had been minister of power for three years, was not wholly responsible for the grid failures because power supplies are managed by individual states. He should, however, have put more effort into tackling India’s overall energy crisis, which had been left to fester by the government, from the prime minister downwards. In particular, insufficient effort had been made to speed up delayed coal deliveries from the badly run governmen
t-owned Coal India, which had caused power stations to cut output and even shut down. Management of coal production had also been disrupted by a crisis over corrupt mining licenses. Shinde could have used his political clout to demand more action on these fronts.
Notes
1. Parliament Session Wrap, PRS Legislative Research, http://www.prsindia.org/parliamenttrack/parliament-updates/parliament-session-wrap-budget-2013-2746/
2. http://www.prsindia.org/parliamenttrack/vital-stats/
3. K. Shankar Bajpai in conversation with JE, October 2012
4. K. Shankar Bajpai, ‘The closing on the Indian Mind’, The Hindu, 29 May 2012, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3466593.ece
5. ‘Inclusive Growth for the Bottom of the Pyramid’, The C.K. Prahalad Memorial Lecture by Prof Gautam Ahuja, 9 January 2011, http://www.pravasitoday.com/prof-c-k-prahalad-memorial-lecture-by-prof-gautam-ahuja-at-pbd-2011-complete-text-and-video
6. The Ambani story was told by Hamish McDonald, an Australian journalist, in The Polyester Prince, Allen & Unwin NSW, Australia 1998, which the Ambanis arranged to have withdrawn from publication in India. It was reprinted in two modified and extended 2010 editions: Ambani & Sons, Roli Books, Delhi, and Mahabharata in Polyester, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.
7. The Polyester Prince, Allen & Unwin NSW, Australia 1998, p. 52.
8. Ibid., p. 47.
9. ‘An Ambani Story gets a makeover’, Mail Today, pp. 20–21, by JE, 3 October 2010, http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=3102010 and on http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/ambani-sons-%E2%80%93-revived-from-the-polyester-prince-they-pulped/
10. India Calling, Anand Giridharadas, HarperCollins India 2011, http://www.harpercollins.co.in/BookDetail.asp?Book_Code=2740
11. ‘Indian telecoms – The right connections’, The Economist, 18 December 2003, http://www.economist.com/node/2304669
12. S.A. Aiyar, ‘Jugaad is our most precious resource’, The Economic Times, 15 August 2010, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-08-15/news/27567823_1_jugaad-frugal-engineering-innovation
13. George Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought, Rand Corporation, 1992, http://books.google.co.in/books?id=sOsCAAAACAAJ&dq=Tanham+%E2%80%9CIndian+strategic+thought%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=A qarUNraCMHprAfWkoDQDA&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAg
14. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/india%E2%80%99s-fdi-changes-reveal-weaknesses-in-industrial-policy-making/
15. In conversation with JE, September 2013
16. Yogendra Yadav, speaking on ‘Fault Lines of Democracy’, at a King’s College India Institute (London) conference, ‘Making Sense of India’, in Delhi, September 2012
17. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/history-repeated-as-delhi-judders-leaderless-towards-the-commonwealth-games/
18. Ved Mehta, Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom, Penguin Books India, 1995; Yale University Press, 1996, http://www.amazon.com/Rajiv-Gandhi-Ramas-Kingdom-Mehta/dp/0300068581
19. ‘The games end well – in a week of other incredible India scams’, Riding the Elephant blog, 15 October 2010, http://wp.me/pieST-15y
20. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/boos-and-cheers-clear-the-air-for-a-vibrant-commonwealth-games/
21. ‘World’s Greatest Power Thieves Keep 400m Indians in Dark’, Bloomberg TV, 1 June 2011, Power Secretary P. Uma Shankar gave the statistics in an interview. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-31/world-s-greatest-power-thieves-keep-400-million-indians-in-dark.html
22. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/creaking-india-hit-by-power-and-railway-failures/
4
Planning the Unplanned
India’s cities have a rich architectural and cultural legacy. It ranges from the Mughal tombs and British-era imperial government buildings of New Delhi to the Rajput palaces and forts of Rajasthan, and the Hindu temples of the eastern coastline. But the legacy is being lost in modern India because of a lack of planning controls and corruption. This is partly a result of the lucrative powers of patronage and a laid-back approach that assumes planning can be fixed when the need arises.
Huge swathes of India’s towns and cities have grown unlawfully without official permissions, especially in the 2000s, to meet the needs of rapid economic growth. They have done so without the necessary infrastructure of roads, water and power supplies, and sewage and drainage facilities. About 75 per cent of the country’s cities have no master plan,1 and there are few sustained programmes of infrastructure development and maintenance. This has brought India to the brink of a national crisis. Between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of water supplies are lost in transit in most Indian cities, and less than 30 per cent of officially recorded sewage is treated in adequate facilities.2
Since the days of Mahatma Gandhi, who regarded the ‘growth of cities as an evil thing’,3 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’,4 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 patron
age, 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’.5
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’.6 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’.7 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.8
