On Chacha... And The City

Our great and illustrious leader, Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi, has made some appropriate noises on the plight of India’s cities and towns while inaugurating a national conference on the fourth anniversary of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), the UPA government’s flagship urban reforms and development programme. The report goes on to say:

[Chacha] said that the two ministries — ministry of urban development and ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation — have approved projects worth Rs 1,03,462 crore for which the central government has provided an assistance of Rs 55,625 crore.

Yawn. We have heard all this before. And we have never found out where exactly all these lakhs of crores disappear.

The basic truth is that Chacha lacks an urban vision. Note that all this time he has been harping on and on about creating employment via “workfare” in rural India. This, while most of rural India is being depopulated as villagers move en-masse to cities.

In these overcrowded cities, like New Delhi, as we witness every day, these migrants from rural India are hounded and harassed by the State police. And the municipal authorities too. These are the cutting-edge personnel of the Predatory State.

There is something very wrong with our idea of urban local self-government – in that it is corrupt and predatory. If we are to fix urban India, we must institute deep reforms. But, before that, we will need a vision of what kind of India we want to live in. I stand for an urban India: thousands of free trading and self-governing cities and towns. What do we have to do to make this happen?

For one, scrap the JNNURM nonsense. Then, from the central coffers, fund a pan-India highway system based on a hub-and-spoke design. This will allow the primary cities to decongest while boosting the prospects of the surrounding satellite towns. The urban space will grow. Migrants to urban India will have more cities and towns to choose from. There is this interesting report in Mint today that talks about the potential of Tier II and Tier III cities.

Second, continuing with highways, build twin coastal expressways while simultaneously instituting unilateral free trade. Hundreds of brand new cities will then erupt along our coasts.

Finally, institute urban local self-governments that will raise local taxes and provide just two services: garbage removal and local roads. The latter will increase the land available for each city, lowering urban land prices, which will be good for migrants.

Of course, all this will require a “new politics” – one that exhorts our villagers to hit town and get rich. The politics of villages and poverty must be replaced by this new idea of the future. An urban future. A prosperous future.

As for our great Chacha, he seems to be quite rudderless, sometimes veering this way, sometimes that. Every day he is fighting fires. Nothing is going quite right. All this is because he lacks a clear vision. Which is why he increasingly looks like the rest of them – all corrupt and predatory, all pretending to “govern.”