Delhi: dystopia or utopia?

A new report on the state of the national capital offers timely lessons for rapidly urbanising India, given that half the country8217;s population is expected to be urban-based by the year 2030.

When a city that can claim to have hosted almost 2,500 years of human habitation confronts its future, illuminating sparks are bound to fly. A two-year project of number crunching came to an end last week with the release of the Delhi Human Development Report 2006, the first undertaken by a metropolis in India. Such exercises, especially if spearheaded by the government, tend to be careful balancing acts 8211; fashioned both as self-critique and pat-on-the-back. The Delhi report is no exception. Yet it throws up some important trends that India should be alert to, given that half the country8217;s population is expected to be urban-based by the year 2030.

In her book, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore8217;s Twentieth Century, social historian Janaki Nair reminds us that 8216;the urban8217; has always had a 8220;fugitive existence in the political, cultural and sociological imaginations of modern India8221;. India8217;s politics, culture and sociology have always privileged the village, as opposed to the city. India, Nehru famously observed, lives in her villages. Sixty years on, that is still largely the case, but soon it may be impossible to understand the village without factoring in the innumerable forces that bind it to the brick and concrete sprawl of the city. Perhaps it is time to say then that India also lives in her cities and consider what these spaces are doing to Indian lives.

So what does Delhi, or rather the National Capital Region NCR, look like in the statistical mirror? One of the clear trends thrown up in the Delhi HDR is that the 8216;90s, which saw Delhi register a growth rate almost twice that of the earlier decade, was the very period that witnessed a sharp increase in the number of in-migrants from states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Close to 2.22 million of them came into Delhi between 1991-2001, as opposed to the 1.64 million of the previous decade. The disenfranchised villager 8212; from regions that have in the same span of time registered declining social and economic indices 8212; seems to play more than a bit role in this tableau. The authors of the Report do not hazard a guess on this one, but could it be that the forces which opened the doors of opportunity in the gigantic, ever-hungry megapolis were the very ones that were hollowing out the hinterland?

In 2002-03, Delhi8217;s per capita income was around Rs 47,441 8212; at least two and a half times that of the national average and far higher than that of the next prosperous state, Haryana, with a per capita income of Rs 26,632. Not surprisingly, then, Delhi8217;s per capita expenditure, at Rs 1,408, was also the highest among Indian states and UTs. In fact, according to the Delhi HDR, only 8 per cent of Delhi8217;s population lived below the poverty line, as opposed to the national average of 26 per cent. The authors of the Delhi HDR term as 8220;impressive8221; Delhi8217;s record in reducing its levels of urban poverty by 82 per cent between 1973-4 and 1999-2000, and it is certainly the largest such reduction in any one state, although of course Delhi does not have the encumberances of a large rural base to worry about.

What is striking is that the wealth creation of the last decade has not resulted in greater public access even to basics like piped water. The Report notes that the number of households with access to piped water remained the same between 1991-2001, while the number of households without toilet facilities had actually risen. The hospital bed-population ratio has also remained unchanged for the last 20 years. This tells you of a system that creates wealth but cannot ensure that its benefits are sufficiently dispersed, a system that has deep and serious asymmetries embedded within it. Among these assymetries is that of gender. Delhi8217;s child sex ratio, which declined from 915 in 1991 to 865 in 2001, speaks of an all-pervasive devaluation of women 8212; a reality highlighted by the additional fact that crimes against women in this city state are the highest in the country 8211; 14 for every 100,000 persons, as opposed to Kolkata8217;s 4. Crime against women, children, and the elderly in the city is so widespread that, in a Public Perception Survey conducted in 2005, only 19 per cent of Delhi8217;s residents believed that the city is safe.

When wealth cannot create equality of access or better conditions of life, when the promise of modernity does not ensure gender equality or secure the lives of vulnerable sections like children and the elderly, it shouldn8217;t surprise anyone that India8217;s most 8216;successful8217; growth story does not, as yet, have a happy ending. Delhi continues to be part utopia, part dystopia; part success story, part nightmare; part hope, part despair.