by John Elliott
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.9 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.11 It comprised top Indian businessmen and public figures, headed by Percy Mistry,12 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.13
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 2009.14 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.’
Delhi’s municipal authorities’ tight grip, which is supported by the Ministry of Urban Development, has continued across the city. This creates even greater rewards for corrupt bureaucrats who sanction unauthorized developments that include conversion of houses and flats to shops and offices, addition of extra floors and other extensions to existing buildings, increased building densities, commercial redevelopment of old traditional villages as the city envelops them, and construction of palatial ‘farm’ residences and weekend retreats on large plots of land around the city’s perimeter. As with virtually every Indian city, there is little or no control of building standards, nor any effective safety measures such as fire precautions. Many bazaars and other crowded areas are unsafe.15 Colonies (as residential districts are called in India) have sprung up all over the city, teeming with as many as 250,000 residents in broken narrow lanes, crudely erected concrete and brick buildings, and a jumble of low-hanging electricity cables that typify India’s poorer urban areas.
Such haphazard development, often without public services, has of course fuelled the economic expansion of the capital, without which India’s growth in the 2000s could not have happened. From time to time, various areas are regularized16 – sometimes as a political gesture before elections – but only enough to bring a glimmer of order and not so much, or so precisely, as to reduce the power of extortion and inflow of bribes. That was evident in 2012–2013 during the preparation of a new Delhi master plan. The same is true of towns and cities across the country.
Purges of unlawful construction often have ulterior motives. In 2005 and 2006, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) blitzed and sealed the fronts of shops, homes and other buildings across the city with mechanical diggers and bulldozers, provoking violent scenes and near riots that had to be controlled by security forces. officially, this was a drive to clear illegal extensions that had been allowed, in most cases, because MCD officials had been bribed. Four small shopping malls on the Mahatma Gandhi (M.G.) Road, a major highway from Delhi to Gurgaon, were included in the partial demolitions in a move that illustrated cruel authoritarianism and a lack of care for the environment. The buildings housed upmarket designer fashion shops and restaurants, which were well-built and were less at fault than thousands of other illicit structures across the city.
It was suggested at the time that the owners were being forced out in order to make them move to a new mall that was being built nearby. Later, it was alleged that the then chief justice of India had authorized the demolition ‘around the time that his sons got into partnerships with mall and commercial complex developers, who stood to benefit from his sealing orders’.17 The MCD, which is famous for being riven by corruption, did nothing to tidy up the sites after the front of the buildings had been hacked by its mobile cranes and diggers. Seven years later, the buildings still stand semi demolished on a major highway, looking as though bombs had hit them.18
Buccaneering Gurgaon
Restrictions on development in Delhi led to growing pressure for office space and homes in authorized developments, which eventually burst outside the city to what are now the satellites of Gurgaon in Haryana, Noida in Uttar Pradesh, and beyond. Noida began as an industrial development by the Uttar Pradesh state government, which drew up an overall master plan that provided fast highways and open areas, plus good water supplies because it lies in the relatively water-rich Gangetic flood plain. Diverting from the planners’ intentions, it rapidly expanded into residential and commercial development, and is now a thriving though chaotic conurbation providing jobs and homes for over 650,000 people. Like Delhi itself, it is beset by predictable crony capitalism on land deals, poor governance, and law and order problems.
Gurgaon should be a showpiece for modern India. It epitomizes the country’s rapid growth and economic success with stylish buildings housing top multinationals as well as Indian information technology and industrial businesses. There are masses of blocks of flats to accommodate the aspirational young, plus shopping malls, night clubs and golf courses, and Delhi airport is nearby. But it is not a showpiece. Instead it is an unplanned, uncoordinated concrete and plate glass jungle. A total lack of infrastructure planning has led to failing water supplies and drainage and sewerage systems, plus a lack of organized parking facilities, all spelling disaster in the next decade unless there is a dramatic change.
Originally there was just an old village here, together with (since the end of the 1970s) the factories of Maruti, India’s largest car manufacturer. A mixed bag of developers, with varying degrees of ethics (or lack of them), moved into what till then had been undeveloped farmlands, buying up and agglomerating small plots from the locals, and getting together with local politicians to bully landowners and obtain permissions. It started with residential developments for people to escape from Delhi, followed by modern office blocks of a quality that Delhi lacked, and then mushroomed with mixed developments. A master plan was superimposed, but it came too late to solve water and sewage problems.
The most successful of the private sector developers was Kushal Pal Singh, a businessman then in his forties, who worked for Delhi Land and Finance, now called DLF. The company had run out of land in New Delhi, having developed what became prosperous middle-class suburbs such as South Extension, Hauz Khas and Greater Kailash, so Singh moved out to what is now Gurgaon. There he began the urbanizing of rural settlements of the agricultural Ahir and Jat castes and, in the process, turned DLF into the country’s leading real estate company.
He illustrated the original buccaneering spirit in a Business Standard interview in 2005.19 ‘I did everything it took to persuade these farmers to trust me. I spent weeks and months with their families. I wore kurtas, sat on charpoys, drank fly-infested milk from dirty glasses, attended weddings, visited the sick. To understand why this was important, it is necessary to understand the landholding pattern. The average plot size in Gurgaon was four to five acres, mostly held by Hindu undivided families. Legally, to get clear titles, I needed the consent of every adult member of these families. That could be up to thirty people for one sale deed. Getting the married daughters to sign was often tricky because the male head of the family would refuse to share the proceeds of the sale with them. So I would travel to their homes and pay the daughters in secret. Remarkably, Gurgaon’s farmers sold me land on credit. I would pay one farmer and promptly take the money back as a loan and use that to buy more land. The firm’s goodwill made them willing to act as bankers for DLF. But it also meant I had to be extra careful about interest payments. Come rain or shine, the interest would be hand-delivered to each farmer on the third of every month at ten a.m. We bought 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon, more than half of it on credit, without one litigation against DLF.’
In 2007, Singh listed the company on the Indian stock exchange and five months later Forbes magazine estimated him to be India’s fourth richest man, worth $35bn.20 Dramatic falls in DLF’s stock market prices had reduced that figure by October 2013 to just $3.4bn.21 Saddled with heavy debt, DLF sold hotels, wind farms and other diversifications while maintaining its core activities. It was also hit by controversies that included a deal with Robert Vadra, husband of Sonia Gandhi’s daughter Priyanka, whose sudden wealth and business activities (which included DLF) had begun to lead to criticisms of the ruling dynasty. The deal exposed widely suspected and gossiped-about links between businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats in Haryana. A Vadra company called Sky Light Hospitality had bought a 3.53 acre plot in February 2008 in Manesar-Shikohpur near Gurgaon f
or Rs 7.5 crore from a local real estate company that was owned by a businessman said to be close to the chief minister of Haryana’s Congress state government.22 The following month, the state’s town and country planning department issued a housing development licence for 2.7 acres of the land and, within 65 days, Vadra entered into an ‘agreement to sell’ to DLF for Rs 58 crore.23 The land value had gone up nearly eight times in two months because of the change-of-use licence, allegedly due to Vadra’s political connections.24
DLF has built impressive-looking office blocks, some of which would not look out of place on the Hong Kong waterfront. But, along with other developers and Haryana’s state government, it did not provide the basic infrastructure needed for an area that grew to a population of 1.5m by 2011, with 3.7m forecast by 2021. In an interview in 2011, Singh admitted that ‘the city is based on archaic planning norms’, adding (apparently to deflect the criticism) that there were ‘big roads, golf courses’ in later phases of DLF’s developments.25 There was no mention of providing basic amenities. The city was ‘thinking malls and high-rises, but not water or sewage’, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said in 2012.26
‘Gurgaon is drowning in its own excreta,’ warned the centre’s director general, Sunita Narain. In 2021 Gurgaon would need 666m litres of water a day, she said, but would on present plans only be able to treat and supply 573m litres. It would be generating 533m litres of sewage daily, but have a capacity to treat just 255m litres. Chalta hai?
