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FIFTH
COLUMN
Demolishing
Dreams
Draw up
a concrete plan for urban renewal before unleashing bulldozers on cities
By
Tavleen
Singh
If
you want to know why every Indian city appears like a slum, look only
at our two symbols of urban hope: Urban Development Minister Jagmohan
at the national level and Mumbai's G.R. Khairnar at a more local level.
Last week, Khairnar made headlines in the national press by demolishing
three floors of a building that allegedly belonged to a friend of the
gangster Dawood Ibrahim. The press expressed its delight in ecstatic headlines,
"Demolition Man strikes again!". And when Jagmohan wields his
bulldozers in Delhi he gets the same sort of delighted response. So, why
do I see them as symbols of slums rather than urban renewal? Why do I
not join in the applause? Because I believe that neither Jagmohan nor
Khairnar, nor anyone else, has understood the enormity of the problem
we face or recognised that the solution lies in construction, not mere
demolition. And only if these two activities happen side by side will
come the support of the people.
 Let
us look at the size of the problem. According to an Asian Development
Bank (ADB) estimate, quoted in the Business Standard recently, India's
urban population has more than doubled in 20 years from 109 million in
1971 to 271 million in 1991. The ADB expects it to grow to 660 million
in 2025. This means that at least half of India's population will become
urban in the next 25 years. Are we addressing this possibility? No. Not
a single politician ever mentions it, even those that bang on endlessly
about "alleviating poverty" usually mean the rural poor and
never fail to remind us that India is largely a rural country. The result
is that cities like Mumbai-where 40 per cent of the people live in slums-are
usually raped of their resources so that the money can be invested in
improving rural India. But, this is only one aspect of what has gone wrong
with urban planning. There are many others.
It's
the Unthinking Laws: What we need more than anything else from the
Urban Development Ministry is a master plan that would replace slums with
decent, low-cost housing. There are enough talented architects in the
country who can put this together in months (not years) and only when
we have a concrete model for urban renewal should demolition of illegal
buildings begin. If vast areas of our cities are covered with illegal
buildings it is mainly because unthinking laws like the Urban Land Ceiling
and Rent Control Act have stifled the growth of a real-estate market.
As in so many other areas of enterprise in India, the government attempted
to fill the vacuum its bad policies created by becoming the main provider
of housing. It has not worked in most cities and failed hopelessly in
Mumbai, besieged as it is with migrants from all over the country. So,
here the unfilled vacuum was occupied by the city's famed underworld.
Dawood is not the only gangster in real-estate development in Mumbai.
There are many others, collectively referred to by Mumbai's citizens as
the "builders' mafia", who build illegally in the metro.
But buildings
do not come up overnight. When our hero Khairnar goes forth with his bulldozers
in the glare of fawning publicity, he never tells us what action is being
taken against the municipal officials who allowed the buildings to come
up. Where are they? How much money were they paid? Have they returned
it? Will they be punished?
If you discuss
the appalling state of our cities with someone in the government, the
usual excuse is poverty-governments have no money, the pressure of population
is so great, we are such a poor country. What they never admit is that
the government itself sits on vast acres of our most expensive urban real
estate, making less than productive use of it. There are bungalows for
ministers in central Mumbai, buildings reserved exclusively for civil
servants, others for legislators and even a dairy farm on a sea-fronting
property that could make crores of rupees for the government if it was
better used.
Indian cities,
beautiful not so long ago, are today the ugliest, most polluted in the
world. They can be saved as other cities have been, Shanghai being a remarkable
example of what can be done if there is a will to do something constructive.
Perhaps, Messrs Jagmohan and Khairnar can be sent there on an inspection
tour that tax-payers would willingly pay for.
When they
return they will hopefully understand the importance of construction and
not just demolition. Jagmohan, with his extraordinary flair for purple
prose, often writes passionate articles in the national press about cities
reflecting the soul of civilisations. True, but does he ever stop to think
what our cities must say to others of our civilisation? If he can give
us a master plan for the conversion of slums into housing before his term
ends as minister, he will have put his money where his prose is.
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