In the last 50 or 60 years, rigid master plans have been the way to plan India’s cities. And what has this resulted in? “The urban dysfunction,” according to Sanjeev Sanyal, Principal Economic Advisor, Government of India.
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“We have a long tradition of urban design, and much of our philosophical dysfunction comes from a complete misunderstanding of that history.”
We have seen six-fold investments in the urban sector towards city planning and development. While we were ahead of the game in terms of planning, where did we lose the plot?
We believe we did the great master plans for cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and then we did nothing till Chandigarh was built. But this is not true.
In the Arthaśāstra, there is plenty to read about urban design and there are many other treatises on urban design, building design, architecture, and aesthetics.
Jaipur was built on the way of traditional principles, which were developed much later than the Harappan period. In the modern times, several princely states had good cities and some were functioning cities such as Vadodara. But they were not built with these rigid plans.
So Harappan cities were not master planned, but were continuously evolving cities. For example, Dholavira used to have an upper town and a lower town. Eventually, the city expanded out of the regional design. We have seen the city change, adapt and around 2000 BC, it went into decline due to climate change.
However, adaptation attempts were made through creating more water reservoirs and ultimately it was still not tenable and was abandoned.
First, the idea that Harappan [civilisation] had great master planned cities is wrong. Second, we have oddly enough come to think that post-Harappan cities were not properly designed.
Contemporaneous to the Harappan, there was the copper hood civilisation and it was as technologically advanced. It is quite possible that Varanasi was contemporaneous to the Harappan civilisation. Even by conventional reckoning, the city is more than 4,000-years-old. It does not have any of the characteristics that excite us about the Harappan cities. But the Harappan period only lasted for 400 years, whereas Varanasi is still a thriving city.
So what is Varanasi doing [right]? Continuous adaptation. In a pedestrianised environment, the design of Varanasi is perfect. It has got a lot of public space. It is completely mixed-use with temples, next to it housing, around it is the market. It mixes all kinds of social groups. It also has a lot of history, architecture, and everything that 21st century cities invest in.
Also in India, the impression is that the best planned city in the country is Chandigarh and the best planned city in the world is Singapore. But these are completely different models. The model of Singapore is continuous adaptation. Chandigarh on the other hand attempts to look like how it did in 1965.
A complex adaptive system is more effective and efficient than having the master plan approach that Chandigarh attempted to do. Chandigarh, it is the most successful version of its type. Most cities that attempted this model have not succeeded. Hence, rigid master plans do fail.
In current times, what about the prioritisation? A lot of money has been invested in transportation, housing, energy … and these are important. But like Mahatma Gandhi once said, somehow we neglect good sanitation and waste. Why ?
Till as recently as 2000, we used to have this mind-set that the real India lives in its villages. This idea was also propagated by Mahatma Gandhi. Hence, there was some hesitance about investing heavily in urban infrastructure.
India has gone through many cycles of urbanisation and de-urbanisation. Consequently, no evidence suggests that the country lives in its villages. India has sometimes lived in its villages and at times in its cities. Today, we are going through another phase of rapid urbanisation. In the next 10 years, we will be an urban majority country.
Instead, the real game is in managing our cities. And hence, we need to also invest in waste management. Our approach needs to be more dynamic.
Delhi might look cluttered. But when you look at it from a flight, it looks orderly yearned from above. All the sector roads are correctly laid out, buildings are nicely spread. This is because the planners took the top down-view. But the real game is in managing on the ground, and not the top-down view. And as we build our cities as well as the rural areas, one of the major things that we need to manage is waste.
Municipal commissioners have an average tenure of around 10 months, making it impossible for them to have any commitment in any project that they take up. So how is the required ownership in the change going to come forth?
The way the administration is set up in India, this is where we pay the least attention. For instance, the municipal commissioners tend to be the junior most people in the civil service with the least amount of experience. So a 32-year-old person will be put in charge of a city, which he has never visited before, and will be given 10 months to revisit it. This is impossible for a person to do.
The joint secretaries should be the ones running the cities. The elective system needs to somehow correlate to the administrative system. We have a sister of counsellors that are completely delinked. If anything, the only value they add is getting in the way of the municipal commissioner.
We have a bizarre system where the mayors too are not in-charge. We have the worst of all worlds where nobody is in-charge of the city. It may well be a better idea to have an elected official run the place and in charge for five years.
Else, let’s continue to retain a weak counsellor system, and make the municipal commissioner most powerful. But in that case, the municipal commissioner must be a senior official for at least three to five years. Also, the role of the municipal commissioner must be upgraded in the hierarchy of the bureaucracy.
Nine cities have raised municipal bonds and they are moving towards a sustainability model. But unless we are able to fix this part about the accountability and ownership of the CEO, what we would have created in terms of sustainability would get affected.
Most of the world does it routinely. Basically, we need somebody being in-charge of the system. Consequently, being a mayor of a town needs to be an aspirational activity. In India, today somebody would want to be a MLA, but not a mayor. The mayor of New York is better known than the governor.
Also, after the prime minister of the UK, the mayor is the best known politician. So the question is what works. In our political architecture, the DC may be the easier point, so that political overview happens at the chief minister’s level. If that is the model going down, then the chief minister’s representatives━the DCs━have to be powerful characters.
While the Smart Cities Mission has achieved success in certain areas, it has been wanting in certain areas too. How is it progressing?
As for smart cities, the basic idea was to decentralise everything that a city wanted to do. It had nothing to do with digitalisation. To a certain extent, some cities did opt for digital outcomes. Cleaning up a park or painting a heritage building could also be part of a smart city budget.
In the mission, cities came up with their ideas and this was different as compared to the earlier top down approach, which was run through planned projects such as JNNURM. In JNNURM, a lot of money was spent and some things went right.
However, a lot of resources were wasted as there was no local ownership of those ideas. And the smart cities idea was basically to provide some local ownership. While some of those projects have worked and some have not, that should be okay. Not every project will work. The idea here is: It is important to document the successes and the failures.
Institutional knowledge is important. Else, in India, we keep repeating the same mistakes, and do not progress. Documentation will create accountability towards those who took the resources and did whatever they wanted to. Even in those cases, certain ideas do not work.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.