Comment
The future ‘class’ city
URBAN settlements are soon expected to house half the Indian people. What does this mean for the future of the urbis? Most analysts (and educated folk) think that they will collapse under the burden of more and more ‘poor migrants’ unless steps are taken to restrict their numbers. But there may be more deeply rooted causes. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched by the prime minister in December 2005, came with the promise of providing Rs1260 billion to 63 million-plus cities and towns for a massive programme of urban renewal. However, for the mission, the ‘sustainability’ of the city is directly related to its financial ability to recover investments. And the ‘reforms’ are of systems geared towards accessing funds from capital markets and promoting public-private partnerships, putting in place higher user fees and taxes. These are clearly designed to aid in improving the ‘efficiency’ of the money market, not the condition of the citizens.
The JNNURM does not stand alone. It is part of a larger package of programmes that pervades the new urban Master Plans, the Integrated Small and Medium Town Development Programme, the Urban Environment and Infrastructure Improvement Projects, the New Economic Policy, the National Urban Transport Policy, the Integrated Low Cost Sanitation Scheme, and the series of agreements under the World Trade Organization negotiations. It also shares the same genealogy of state intervention as the National Slum Development Programme, the Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana, and the Rajiv Awas Yojana. At the core, therefore, is a new model of urban governance that is emerging as part of an ‘investor-friendly’ design. This mode of governance is already exploding into a series of ‘investor-friendly’ scams in huge land-grabs, shady deals, sports events, and mega constructions. In fact, there is now sufficient evidence from these scams to show that the ‘public-private-partnership’ is nothing more than a wholesale transfer of public money into private pockets!
Such a design has also given rise to three trends. First, large sections of the urban poor are being displaced by every government in metro cities as well as small towns from spaces that they have occupied for many years. These sections are often the ones who have been employed in the informal sector or are self-employed in the tertiary services sector and contribute to a large chunk of the city’s economy. Second, the geographical and occupational space that they occupy is being transferred to larger private corporate entities or wealthier groups, such as retail stores, malls, and residential layouts so that the space becomes a commodity that can contribute to city revenues. Third, while the driving force behind these changes is manifestly the new globalized economy, it is offered on an environmental platter of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘beautification’ that is strongly supported by ‘civil society organizations’, judicial, legislative, administrative and commercial institutions, and a very compliant media.
In the meantime, the Planning Commission is preparing the Approach Paper to the Twelfth Five Year Plan. Earlier, in the first three Five-Year Plans (1951-66), the planners had concentrated on construction of homes for government employees and weaker sections, slum clearance schemes, and preparation of Master Plans. The Fourth and Fifth Plans (1969-79) were made to promote the growth of smaller towns and the Urban Land (Ceiling & Regulation) Act was enacted for this. The Sixth Plan (1980-85) focused on integrated provision of services along with shelter in the more than 4,000 small towns that had been created. The Seventh Plan (1985-90), for the first time, entrusted the responsibility of housing construction and provision of urban basic services for the poor to the private sector. It was only from the Eighth Plan (1992-97) that the importance of the urban sector for the national economy and the role of the urban poor in the informal sector was recognized.
But all these plans were made with concepts that were developed in the first half of the twentieth century, essentially by European geographers and economists, on the basis of how the West had ‘developed’ by accumulating the resources of the colonies through trade and converting it into capital and manufacturing. The theorists merely reversed the arrow and argued that if this accumulation was converted into a ‘development’ role, then more capital investments in the centre would send growth impulses outwards into the periphery, and the benefits would eventually ‘trickle down’ to the bottom. But the planners kept coming up against the contradictions that were implicit in the concepts themselves, namely that such growth never actually trickles down because it assumes a uniform landscape of equality amongst all citizens, and idealizes the idea of perfect competition and the ability of all to pay for all services as commodities.
Hence, in spite of the official mid-term appraisal of the Eleventh Plan indicating that the aim of achieving an average growth rate of 9% per annum was not met because of the global financial crisis – although India’s financial system was partly protected because it was not fully exposed to ‘toxic’ assets in the international market and depended mainly on domestic savings and consumption – the Planning Commission is intent on pursuing more ‘reforms’, opening up the financial system to the international markets and private firms, while still depending upon private savings and investment. It suggests that the states and cities have to be ‘pushed’ to enhance user charges, commercialize land and services, and raise property taxes. In other words, cities are, by design, becoming more and more expensive to live in and thus ignoring the needs of the large majority of citizens who are currently barely able to make a decent living for their families.
Some of these issues became manifest when, towards the end of 2010, the Planning Commission opened up the discussion on the Approach Paper to the Twelfth Plan to ‘civil society organizations’, as distinct from a friendly coterie of industry, trade, and business associations with whom the commission would confabulate earlier. A series of consultations with organizations working with the urban poor (as with other marginalized groups) arrived at a clear consensus rejecting GDP growth as well as the concept of public-private-partnerships as the basic premise of ‘development’ on the grounds that these were not meant for the welfare of the poor. On the contrary, they argued for a plan focusing on growth in employment and the social security of the work force. Yet, the commission not only chose to reject or ignore these recommendations, but publicly proclaimed that there was ‘general agreement’ on maintaining a GDP growth rate of nine per cent.
Just as the earlier ‘Garibi Hatao’ slogan of the 1970s was used to remove the poor, similarly the new vision of the ‘Slum Free City’ is today being manipulated to attack the working poor. In such an exclusionary design, urban societies are bound to become increasingly polarized. The idle rich will grow wealthier and more lavish in their lifestyle, consuming vast resources to catch up with their imagery of the ‘world-class’. The working poor will become more impoverished, marginalized, and made invisible through coercive measures. Even their status as citizens will be called into question through various measures like identity cards, cut-off dates, and ability to pay ‘easy instalments’. This is not a doomsday prognosis; it is already happening in every urban settlement, although the media does its best to conceal the truth from prying eyes. And the truth is that such a duality cannot coexist peacefully. It has to either be brutally suppressed or will explode into social violence.
Or – and this is a dream that many live with – perhaps better sense will prevail and we, as a people, will once again move towards policies that design for a more humane way of life. Perhaps.
Dunu Roy
Challenges facing Indian democracy
EVEN though many great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx drew our attention to the ‘first order’ question of ‘Who Rules Us’, the Anglo-American social theorists like John Locke and John Stuart Mill or the founding fathers of American Republican Democracy, particularly after the declaration of American independence in 1776, shifted focus and brought the issue of democratic governance to the centre-stage of public discourse. Following in the footsteps of modern liberal democratic theorists of the western industrialized capitalist countries, Indian analysts too seem to have relegated the fundamental question of Who Rules Us to the background, preferring instead to grapple with the theory and practice of universal adult franchise based representative democracy.
Any comment on this mainstream discourse must first contend with the actual reality of our democracy-based governance. First, over the fifteen Lok Sabha elections, popular participation and voter turnout in every election has remained high and stable, with the voter showing no fatigue or withdrawal symptoms. The state assembly elections of April/May 2011 in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Pudicherry, Assam and West Bengal witnessed a voter turnout of 70 to 80 per cent as the ruling parties or coalitions in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala became victims of voters’ fury and anger. The Indian voter has learnt to punish or reward parties, groups and leaders during the elections, indicating that the level of consciousness of the Indian voter has been completely transformed. It can thus be safely stated that fundamental changes in India will take place only on the basis of power of rising consciousness of the voter and not on the basis of propositions like ‘power flows from the barrel of a gun.’
Second, a competitive multiparty system is considered as the bedrock of representative democracy and it is quite clear that India’s multipolar political system consists both of all-India/national parties like the Congress, the BJP, and the Communists, and powerful regional and sub-regional parties and groups, all of whom compete for political power. Moreover, the all-India parties, to be successful, have to align with regional parties. Finally, no incumbent party can take voter support for granted, evidenced by the frequency with which voters have punished ruling parties for their arrogance or misgovernance. All this needs to be welcomed.
The less discussed analytical question relates to the manner in which these parties or groups are themselves organized and the social goals which they claim to pursue. Daniel Bell and Francis Fukuyama, among others, claim that democracies have entered the age of ‘End of Ideology’ and that any reference to ideological beliefs of parties is out-of-date and that the only goal worth pursuing is ‘development’, captured best by the rate of growth and accumulation of wealth. The Congress, the BJP, as also all the regionalists, whether as part of coalition governments or on the basis of their own single party government in different states, fully subscribe to this worldview, even identifying state governments as ‘most developed’ or ‘developed’ or ‘backward’ only on the basis of their rate of growth in economy. Chandrababu Naidu, leader of the Telugu Desam Party of Andhra Pradesh, has gone further to categorize the states as ‘performers’ and ‘non- performers’ or ‘doers’ and ‘non-doers’ on the same basis. This is the context in which Indian democracy is to be situated because ‘social equality and distribution’ have become dirty words for every political formation and capitalist entrepreneurs, middle class professionals and the czars of real estate have become the new role models of society. The rising rate of growth in the economy has sharpened the levels of social inequality and India is witnessing a rural-urban divide, class-caste divide, and enhanced regional imbalances. In this backdrop of inequality and great social disparities, we see the emergence of many Indias which are in serious conflict on the basis of ‘left outs’ versus ‘the beneficiaries’.
Are political parties and leaders at the national or regional levels really worried about the levels of growing social unrest, a consequence of the alarming growth of inequality in society? The answer to this big question is in the negative and can be substantiated by the weak political response to the challenge of inequality. First, it is uncritically assumed that the regional parties and leaders are more aware than the distant all-India national parties to the actual social discontent which prevails at the grassroots levels in their specific region. The fact is that every regional party is following the same path of economic development which has resulted in the growth of social inequality. Their organizational response to reach the mass of people essentially involves projecting the virtues of the ‘Leader’ and close family members as the sole saviours of the downtrodden. The impact of these leader-based family shops is evident in the way they govern in their region.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Home Minister, P. Chidambaram have repeatedly proclaimed that the indigenous ‘Left wing Extremism is the greatest threat to Indian security.’ Clearly, the regional/ national parties which are in power in the affected states – the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in Jharkhand, the Biju Janata Dal in Orissa or the BJP in Chhattisgarh – too fully support the strong police and paramilitary based response of the central government to the Naxal problem, especially in the backward and neglected areas inhabited by poor tribals. This is just one example where the writ of elected representative governments is enforced by well-equipped and trained paramilitary and police forces of the Indian state and draconian laws are enforced in response to the demands of the people. While not an all-India situation, it does show that even as growing social inequity and deprivation has created ‘many Indias’, in as many as nine out of 28 states, the ruling parties survive on the basis of armed might and undemocratic laws.
Second, the model of economic growth has also created a fertile ground for the growth of a communal Sangh Parivar, whose governments in various states are following a policy of ‘open targeting’ of the minority communities and minority cultures. Even as Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, can easily assemble billionaire industrialists like the Tatas, Ambanis and others to showcase and legitimize his government, there is little concern about the poor of India. Evidently, the emerging power of Asia is only keen to project its successful billionaires and millionaires at the global level.
Third, in a country of starvation deaths and malnutrition, aptly described by economist Utsa Patnaik as the ‘Republic of Hunger’, the Manmohan Singh government has not been castigated by any regional or all India opposition party for delaying the introduction of the Food Security Act in Parliament. Where is the agenda for the poor in a Shining India? Fourth, the democratic Republic of India is fully integrated with global capitalism with the full consent of all parties, all-India and regional. It appears that the only national political consensus is on the path of capitalist development on the basis of complete global integration and free flow of foreign finance capital. Can real democracy ever thrive in a social situation which glorifies its multi-millionaires while giving a short shrift to the deprived strata of society?
It is our firm belief that the marginalization of the pro-poor communists in politics is dangerous for our democracy. What kind of democracy will we have if the voice of the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ cannot reach the corridors of power? The reference here is not only to the serious electoral setbacks suffered by the communists in the Lok Sabha elections of 2009 or in the state assembly elections of West Bengal in 2011, even the organized working classes and their struggles have become weaker because of caste based and regional fragmentation of the labouring classes in the last two decades. The growing marginalization of the organized communist parties and communist-led all-Indian working classes is a warning signal because the right-wing shift of Indian polity, culture and society is becoming unstoppable in the absence of any countervailing force.
Elections are a necessary but not a sufficient condition to sustain democracy in a society where organized parties have turned their back on the issues of distribution and equality. John Stuart Mill in ‘On Liberty’ warned against privileging ‘empty liberty and an abstract individual’, reminding us that the individual is a real person, and social inequality is palpable. A polity in which unequal distribution of wealth has created ‘plutonomies in which small class fractions control increasingly large portions of wealth’ cannot but prove extremely dangerous for the future of Indian democracy.
C.P. Bhambhri
Flaws in pro-nuclear power advocacy
IN these days of specialization, some specialists tend to develop such narrow ‘tunnel views’ as to lose sight of everything around and even shed common sense. Dr. Anil Kakodkar and Dr. Srikumar Banerjee, the former and the present heads of India’s nuclear establishment, have overnight become such nuclear scientists-cum-super-geologists as to know for certain that India’s nuclear sites will not be visited by earthquakes or tsunamis of horrific intensity; and even if they are, they will remain proof against damage and will not spew radioactive substance on any fearsome scale. In their (mistaken) self-confidence, they mimic the big dam enthusiasts, who too are busy planning serial dams, inviting violent earthquakes and dam collapse which can assume proportions of man-made tsunamis over vast areas.
Before pleading for any nuclear power plant construction, they must answer the following questions forthrightly:
1. Is not nuclear power the most expensive of all power generating options and the most hazardous of all industries? Did not the joint report issued by the Environmental Adviser to the Russian President and the Director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences, Belarus, reveal that Chernobyl’s casualty figures stood at 9,85000 up to 2004 (with prospects of more casualties later)
1 as against the much-attenuated casualty figure of 4000 cited in 2006 by the Chernobyl Forum of the IAEA? Is it not obvious that the latter agency deliberately lied because the IAEA’s job was, and is, to promote the nuclear reactor business while blocking nuclear weapons production? Does this not prove that big nuclear accidents tend to become far worse disasters than even the Bhopal gas tragedy? When the risk is so horrifying, why should anyone spend any money on such hazardous technology before exhausting all avenues of harnessing renewable forms of energy which are far less expensive, more clean and require much less maintenance?2. Is there anything to choose between life’s extinction by global warming caused by fossil fuel generated greenhouse gases and life’s disintegration by the pervasiveness of penetrative radiation all over the biosphere? Which phase of nuclear programme – from the mining of uranium ores, milling and pelletization, to the making of fuel rods, transportation to the reactor site, fissioning in the reactor, and storage for cooling of the spent fuel – is free from radioactive hazards?
3. Can they deny that the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009 (commissioned by the German government), in its conclusion clearly said that: ‘While many industries experience declining costs as they move out of their technology learning curve, the nuclear industry continues to face steadily increasing costs on (both) existing construction and future estimates.’ Is it also not a fact that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003 reported that the earlier nuclear power cost estimate of $2000 overnight doubled to $4000 per installed kilowatt? What are the likely costs by 2012 and 2015?
4. Is it not a fact that the turnkey job given in Finland to France’s Areva N.P. for installing a 1650 mw EPR reactor has turned into a fiasco, its estimated cost rising from $ 5.3 billion in 2003 to $ 8.6 billion, while the construction is already three years behind schedule, with the prospect of further delays? Has not the cost there come to $ 5000 per installed kw which is unbearably high? Since Jaitapur’s proposed installed capacity is six times that of the Finn project, what is likely to be its escalating cost?
5. Will the costing of nuclear power in India be open to audit by the CAG? If not, why should nuclear power cost accounting remain shrouded in secrecy?
6. Since there are reports of Areva contemplating the use of MOX (i.e. the mixture of hypertoxic plutonium oxide with uranium oxide) in EPR as reactor fuel, will they guarantee that it will be disallowed in Jaitapur?
7. What exactly is the quantity of radioactive wastes that have accumulated in India up to now? When, where, and how would these be finally disposed off? If no means for their safe disposal has emerged up to now, is it not criminal to keep on producing nuclear power and adding to these hazardous wastes?
8. In an era when terrorism is gaining ground as an ideological weapon, can there be any foolproof safeguard against internal subversion of nuclear reactor operations? Besides, is not the storage for cooling the radioactive ‘spent fuels’ in relatively open spaces (though within protected zones), accessible target for suicide squads? When portable miniscule ‘dirty bombs’ have come within the realm of practicability and can be used by rogue elements to wreak havoc among civilian populations, should not the source of life-destroying substances, which has no use for low-entropy energy purposes, be abolished altogether? When the chances of malignant uses of nuclear fission are outgrowing their productive use, why not discard this demonic technology?
9. Can they disprove the findings, released in the 1970s, of the Florida University’s team of energy analysts (a) that energy expenditure on the series of processes from the mining of the ore to the reprocessing of the spent fuel is so huge that it eats up nearly half of the total nuclear power generated and (b) that if the energy costs for keeping surveillance over the decommissioned plants over thousands of years are taken into account, then the atomic power’s net output becomes zero? Presumably, the world’s nuclear power enthusiasts have remained mute to this radical challenge by pinning their hopes on the future success of the ‘breeder reactors’. But does not the latest information – that thorium takes nearly a century to double up in a breeder – bury the hope fathoms deep?
10. Reckless nuclear power enthusiasts will like to use plutonium as fuel in the breeder to solve uranium’s inordinately long ‘doubling time’ problem. But are not breeders being given up in all countries, including France? If they dispute this, will they please show where the breeder is producing its desired result and what fuel is it using?
Before answering the above questions to public satisfaction, the nuclear power enthusiasts have no moral right to plead for nuclear power plant construction.
The propaganda that nuclear power is indispensable when the coal and oil generated electricity is given the go-by, is tendentious and false. All countries the world over are now in the process of phasing out, at different pace, the greenhouse gas emitting energy industries in compliance with the Intergovernmental Climate Change panel’s warnings. Over and above, five European countries – Germany, Spain, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands – have on their own decided to shun the nuclear path. Denmark had, from the very beginning, decided against nuclear power. These countries are confident of meeting all their energy needs by harnessing renewable energy. India, a humid tropical country, far more blessed with sunshine, hence solar heat and power, and far more endowed with lush biomass growth, can meet its energy needs many times over by relying on renewable forms of energy.
India’s policy and programme must aim at national energy self-sufficiency as well as energy availability for common people at affordable costs. For this, it would have to give pride of place to (i) ubiquity of biogas plants for anaerobic digestion of human, cattle, poultry, and plant wastes; (ii) accelerated biomass generation through afforestation of all denuded mountain slopes, hillsides, both banks of every river from its source to the delta; canal sides and all available arid and semi-arid lands; (iii) utilization of solar thermal energy in domestic and industrial uses; (iv) photovoltaic electricity generation in both on-grid and off-grid systems; (v) development of mini-grids in rural electricity generation and supply; (vi) tapping of wind energy at all available windy sites, coastal and inland, with small and medium-sized generators for local use purposes and large ones for grid connection; (vii) micro-hydels of all possible gradients in perennial canal flows; (viii) reduction of energy demand through introduction of energy-efficient devices and energy management. In fact, there are myriad ways of saving energy, ranging from passive solar architecture (building ‘green houses’) to the introduction of improved chulahs for rural households and possible switch to water-driven transport systems, which are too numerous to mention here.
Since these are mostly decentralized activities, their success depends on unleashing people’s initiatives. This requires a leadership which can inspire people and the ethos of a living democracy. Our present-day formal democracy, which often flouts people’s opinions to give eco-destructive industrial licences to foreign companies, needs to be respectful to people’s wishes, aware of people’s creative and innovative potential for generating usable energy from local recources, and more responsive to people’s safety needs.
Sailendra Nath Ghosh
Footnote:
1. The English version of this joint report was edited by Jannette Sherman as a 350-page document and published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009,
