Minimum planning for a rainy day

The only good thing that has come out of our financial capital, our city of dreams, our New York and Shanghai grinding to a halt for days be...

The only good thing that has come out of our financial capital, our city of dreams, our New York and Shanghai grinding to a halt for days because of rain, is that it has drawn attention to the lack of common minimum governance in Mumbai. As someone who was marooned in the city, albeit on dry land, may I say that the main problem was the absence of common minimum governance. This is what we should be talking about since it affects not just Mumbai but all our cities and towns. Urban development is going to become our most urgent problem in the next couple of decades when the majority of Indians will be living in towns and cities and here is our chance to start talking about solutions, but as usual the debate has been hijacked.

Suddenly everyone is an expert on what went wrong. Advertising executives, financial wizards, mighty CEOs, retired bureaucrats, environmentalists, movie stars, everyone has become an instant expert on what ails Mumbai. Environmentalists believe that the city collapsed because its natural drains have been blocked by too much building. Too much? They must be nuts. Half the population of this city lives in filthy shanty towns in hovels so small they should be declared an environmental hazard. Mumbai needs at least six million more housing units. If this city is to ever become 8216;8216;world class8217;8217; there will have to be much, much more building and while we must make sure that the environment is damaged as little as possible we must accept that human beings need homes fit for human habitation and that cities need buildings. The environmentalists were more wrong than almost anyone else but succeeded in grabbing much television time for their bizarre views.

Preity Zinta provided light entertainment in her new role as an expert on infrastructure development. Writing in this newspaper she said, 8216;8216;The Bandra-Worli Sea Link has been under construction for four years. Every day, some 100 cables are installed. Why can8217;t we make a big section where underground cables can be put?8217;8217; Excuse me Preity, would you please elucidate?

Meanwhile, let us talk about governance. We would be losing a great opportunity if we did not use Mumbai8217;s crisis to start talking about the need for our cities and towns to have elected governments headed by powerful Mayors, not namby-pamby, powerless chief ministers of the Sheila Dixit genre. The Lieutenant Governor of Delhi has more power than her in a post from colonial times that should have been abolished long ago as should the post of Collector.

Our cities and towns need Mayors who are accountable for everything in the city from the police to infrastructure development and public transport and a model of governance on the lines of New York and London. Without this we will continue to see the failure of municipal governance.

Mumbai8217;s irate citizens have pointed out often in recent days that this city pays more in taxes Rs 58,000 crores to the Centre than our other metropolitan cities put together and yet the municipality has baulked at spending the Rs 1,000 crores needed to modernise the city8217;s hundred-year-old storm water drains. Proper drains and there would have been no crisis in Mumbai. What makes things even more farcical is that had these drains been in place, Mumbai would not now be paying Rs 15,000 crores in losses.

Mumbai is not our only city that has hopelessly inadequate infrastructure. All our cities and towns have serious problems and some like Bangalore and Pune are growing so fast that they will implode unless municipal governance improves radically. At the moment, you see massive development because of private enterprise and a total failure of the State to match this with investment in basic utilities like roads, parks, water and power supply. So our cities now have the finest private hospitals, hotels, restaurants, schools and office buildings without decent roads to get to them.

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Things will not improve as long as we continue to delude ourselves into believing that State Governments can also be municipal authorities and Chief Ministers can also be Mayors.

The Prime Minister should be thinking of these things. He should be ordering his Urban Development Minister to come up with a model for city governance. Instead, he chose to play politics. He came to Mumbai at the height of the crisis and congratulated the Chief Minister for doing a good job. Even Vilasrao Deshmukh must have been embarrassed.

As for Madame Chairman of the government8217;s National Advisory Council, she continues to believe that India lives in the villages. Lady Bountiful of the villages is full of grand plans for rural people. She plans to guarantee a hundred days of employment a year to rural families at a cost to taxpayers of a minimum of Rs 40,000 crores a year. She wants to hand over forest land to Adivasis at the risk of destroying what is left of our forests. Not only are her grandiose schemes a criminal waste of our money, they are doomed to fail since they imitate a pattern of 8216;8216;poverty alleviation8217;8217; that has already been proven to be a failure. Besides, this obsession with rural India shows that she is out of touch with the times. Rural Indians in increasingly large numbers are moving to towns and cities in search of employment and a standard of living that villages cannot offer. Once they have seen Mumbai most do not go back because, sadly, life on the pavements of Mumbai is better than it is at home, and yet we treat our cities as if they had no right to exist.

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