Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (30 page)

Kolkata, or Calcutta as it was known then, was the country’s pre-eminent city in the first two decades after independence. The political capital had shifted to New Delhi but Calcutta was the most important industrial, commercial and cultural hub of the country. It was the headquarters of many of the country’s largest companies as well as of leading multinationals. Although it had lost part of its hinterland to East Pakistan, Calcutta’s industrial cluster included British-era factories as well as new public sector establishments like Chittaranjan Locomotive Works. The nightlife in Park Street was said to be liveliest in Asia and the city’s elite clubs buzzed with the rich and famous.

Unfortunately, it was too good to last. The rise of communism and militant trade unionism from the late sixties
sapped the city’s entrepreneurial spirit. Through the seventies and eighties, the city was repeatedly brought to a halt by strikes against ‘capitalists’, ‘American imperialism’, the central government and even against computers. One by one, the companies left and with them left the patronage for the arts and culture. Educational institutions also suffered from politicization. By the 1980s, the middle class, including me, began to leave in search of education and jobs. Mumbai clearly replaced Kolkata as the country’s commercial capital; the latter has never made a serious bid to regain its position.

By the 50s Delhi had reverted to becoming a patchwork of cities rather like what Ibn Batuta had witnessed six centuries earlier. There was Old Delhi, including Shahjehanabad and Civil Lines. Then there was Lutyens’s Delhi, which was dominated by the national government. As already discussed, there were also the numerous refugee resettlement colonies
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. Soon, the city had to deal with yet another influx—that of civil servants and public sector employees needed to run the centrally-planned, socialist economy. The Public Works Department (PWD) went into overdrive and created whole new government colonies. This led to the construction of Bapanagar, Kakanagar, Satya Marg, Moti Bagh and many others. In the seventies, a large new township called Rama Krishna Puram was built to the south-west.

These government areas were built to standardized plans and according to a strict hierarchy denoted as AB, C-1, C-2, D-1, D-2 and so on. The civil servant was expected to slowly make his/her way up this hierarchy over the course of his/her career. Note that a similar housing ladder existed for the military, the public sector, university professors and even
for the private sector. Smaller versions of it were created in the state capitals and in industrial townships.

As the son of a civil servant, I too spent my childhood moving up this housing ladder. Life in the government colonies had its pros and cons. Design and maintenance was poor. Painted in lime-wash, the walls flaked off to the touch. The doors and windows expanded and contracted with the seasons—one had to master special techniques to open and close each of them. At the same time, housing for the more senior officials, at least, was spacious, centrally located and had access to parks and other amenities. One interesting aspect of this hierarchical system was the fact that everyone moved up the system at about the same rate. This meant that one grew up with roughly the same group despite changing homes every few years.

By the late eighties, the children who had grown up in this system began to marry each other irrespective of their origins. Till then the Indian middle class had been made up of the Tamil middle class, the Bengali middle class, the Punjabi middle class and so on. I am not suggesting that they were not proudly Indian; after all, these groups had been at the forefront of the freedom movement. However, their roots were firmly tied to their home provinces. This changed as the children of the middle class intermarried. Suddenly, there was a rapidly expanding group whose world view was essentially pan-Indian, their identity forged by the common experience of the housing colonies, the high-pressure education system, Bollywood films and cricket. We will return to this group later.

One of the unfortunate aspects of urban growth between the mid-fifties and the mid-eighties was the influence of
‘brutalist’ modernism. To socialists and fascists alike, the industrial starkness of reinforced concrete had a great attraction that is difficult to understand. Yet, the architects were somehow able to design buildings that are simultaneously unfriendly to the user, difficult to maintain and astonishingly ugly. Thus it came to be that India, land of the sublime symmetry of the Taj Mahal and the organic orchestra of Palitana, is also home to some of the ugliest buildings in the world. Every major city has them—Nehru Place and Inter-State Bus Terminal in Delhi, the Indian Express Building in Mumbai and the Haryana State Secretariat in Chandigarh.

Fascists and socialists have another thing in common—the urge to impose rigid master-plans on cities. In 1950, Prime Minister Nehru invited Le Corbusier, a French fascist, to design the new city of Chandigarh. Although the new city was to be built at the heart of ancient Sapta-Sindhu and very close to the Saraswati-Ghaggar, Corbusier was specifically asked by Nehru to create a city that was ‘unfettered’ by India’s ancient civilization. Enormous resources in land, material and money were poured into building the new city. At the same time, rigid master plans were imposed on existing cities. Delhi was master-planned in 1962 into strict zones according to use. However, the static master plan is to the city what socialist planning is to the economy. Both cities and economies are organic and rapidly evolving eco-systems. Just as the Mahalonobis model of central planning damaged the Indian economy, the country’s urban thinking was severely damaged by Le Corbusier’s philosophy that buildings were machines for living.

This mechanical world view is echoed in the Delhi Master
Plan of 1962 which proclaimed that ‘there is undesirable mixing of land-uses almost everywhere in the city’. Just as the government had the right to control the economy through licences, it also had the right to tell people where to live and where to work. The problem is that such an approach cannot create a living ecosystem. New industrial cities like Durgapur never took off, and today’s successful cities are still those with British-era roots. Even Chandigarh, the expensive poster-child of master-planning, has generated little of economic or cultural value after half a century of existence. Much of its apparent ‘cleanliness’ comes from simply having left no space for the poor within city limits. It remains a sterile and heavily subsidized city of tax-consuming bureaucrats that encourages neither entrepreneurship nor tax-generating jobs despite being the capital of two prosperous states. To the extent that the city has shown any energy at all, it comes from the evolving suburb of Mohali rather than from Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Nehru had wanted Chandigarh to be the symbol of India’s future. Instead, the face of twenty-first-century India is a city that is chaotic, unplanned, infuriating but undeniably dynamic: Gurgaon.

Gurgaon lies to the south of Delhi and, according to legend, is said to have belonged to Dronacharya who taught martial arts to the Pandav and Kaurav cousins in the Mahabharat. Indeed, the name Gurgaon literally means the ‘village of the teacher’. Despite its proximity to Delhi, however, the settlement of Gurgaon was never particularly large. Its population was estimated at a mere 3990 in 1881 and nearby
towns like Rewari and Farrukhnagar had much larger populations. The
Gazetteer
of 1883–84 tells us that the British used Gurgaon as a district headquarters and that the town consisted of a small market (Sadar Bazaar), public offices, dwellings of European residents and a settlement called Jacombpura named after a former Deputy Commissioner
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. An old road connected Gurgaon to Delhi via Mehrauli. The road is now the arterial MG Road, but the contours of the British-era settlement can just about be discerned if one goes to Mahavir Chowk, the busy marketplace in Old Gurgaon. If one looks closely enough, one can still see the remains of an old serai that would have been used by caravans heading to and from Delhi.

For the first few decades after independence, Gurgaon remained a relatively small town in a largely rural district. The first major change came when Sanjay Gandhi, son of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, acquired a large plot of land to start an automobile company in the early 1970s. This is now the Maruti-Suzuki factory, but the project was not initially successful. From the early eighties, however, a number of real estate developers, particularly DLF, began to acquire farmland along the Delhi border. The idea at this stage was to build a mostly low-rise suburbia for Delhi’s retiring civil servants. Although the Maruti car factory did get going by 1983, no one really envisaged Gurgaon as an independent growth engine.

The whole dynamics changed after India liberalized its economy in 1991, which coincided with the communications and information technology revolutions. As India globalized, a number of multinational companies discovered that call
centres and back-office operations could be outsourced to India. Delhi was a good location for this because of available human capital and a well-connected international airport. However, the necessary real estate could not be created because of Delhi’s rigid master plan. The old planners had never envisioned white-collar factories. The outsourcing companies, therefore, jumped across the border to Gurgaon and began to build huge facilities for this new industry.

This attracted young workers to Gurgaon. Many of those seeking their fortune in the newly liberalized economy were the children of civil servants, public sector employees, military officers and schoolteachers. The influx of so many young people, in turn, encouraged the construction of malls and restaurants. As this generation intermarried and set up home, the single-house format was abandoned in favour of condominiums more suited to the lifestyles of corporate executives. Schools and other educational institutions too began to multiply. The pace of expansion can be gauged from a lone milestone that survives on MG Road under the elevated Metro line (in front of Bristol Hotel). This is now the effective city-centre but the milestone confidently proclaims that Gurgaon is 6 km away!

The construction of Gurgaon was not planned, although a ‘plan’ did exist in theory. It was made possible by a combination of a lack of rules and the blatant disregard of rules. There was always a whiff of the robber baron. Yet, what was a sleepy small town till the mid-1990s has become a throbbing city of gleaming office towers, metro-stations, malls, luxury hotels and millions of jobs. I am not suggesting that Gurgaon does not have serious civic problems ranging from clogged roads
and erratic power supply to the doings of unscrupulous property developers. I have more than enough personal experience of all these issues. It is also true that, with a little imagination, Gurgaon could have been done a lot better. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny the bursting energy of the city. It is a good metaphor for modern India with its private-sector dynamism, the robber-baron element and a government that is struggling to keep up.

One of the important things that I learnt over years of travelling through the interiors of India is that the children of farmers no longer want to farm. This is true across the country. Well-known sociologist Dipankar Gupta has also documented this phenomenon
²²
. There are many reasons for this change. For one, literacy and television are changing attitudes and aspirations. Nevertheless, in my view the biggest reason is economic. The farm economy now generates a shrinking 13 per cent of GDP and the rural population can see where the money is.

City folk tend to have a view that rural migrants get squeezed out of rural areas by the atrocities of feudal landlords who pitilessly exploit the poor villagers. This is an image that derives from old Hindi films and is completely inaccurate on the ground. In fact, there are few large landholdings left in rural India. The real issue is that property rights are unclear because of a shoddy legal system, incomplete records, disregard for common rights and arbitrary land acquisition (often by the State using eminent domain powers). The combination of
small landholdings and weak property rights has discouraged long-term investment by farmers in their land. As a result, Indian farming is hopelessly inefficient and uneconomical. The children of farmers want to opt out. Who are we to stop them? Rural India needs reforms and investment, not subsidies.

Meanwhile, urban India needs to prepare for large-scale migration: large cities will grow larger, small towns will grow big and brand new cities will be built. In some ways, India is merely witnessing what all developed countries have experienced at some stage of their evolution. Development is ultimately about shifting people from subsistence farming to other activities; urbanization is merely the spatial manifestation of this process. For instance, England’s urbanization level jumped from 20 per cent in 1800 to 62 per cent in 1890.
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More recently we have seen how China’s urban population has jumped from 12 per cent in 1950 to over 50 per cent by 2012. My guesstimate is that urban India will have to absorb some 300–350 million people over the next three decades. This will be one of biggest human events of the twenty-first century.

The explosive growth of cities like Gurgaon shows that India’s rapidly expanding economy may well be able to generate enough jobs. The real problem is to match hundreds of millions of migrants to jobs, housing, and amenities while maintaining overall social cohesion. Slotting so many individuals into the urban fabric according to their respective skills and financial abilities is a colossal task. China used draconian social control systems to manage the process over the last two decades. In most other countries, slums played this role. Even in China, ‘urban villages’ have been an integral part of the migration process.

Most people tend to be overwhelmed by the poor living conditions that prevail in Indian slums. The usual reaction is to treat this as a housing problem. Over the decades, we have seen many well-meaning slum re-development projects that have attempted to resettle slum-dwellers into purpose-built housing blocks (often on the outskirts of the city). Yet, almost all these efforts have failed. More often than not, the former slum-dwellers sell, rent out or abandon the new housing blocks and move back into a slum. The problem is that these schemes view slums as a static housing problem whereas slums are really evolving ecosystems that include informal jobs inside the slum, information about jobs outside the slum, social networks, security and so on. Thus, slums play an important role as ‘routers’ in the urbanization process. They absorb poor migrants from the rural hinterland and naturalize them into the urban landscape. In doing so, they provide the urban economy with the armies of blue-collar workers—maids, drivers, factory-workers—who are essential to the functioning of any vibrant city. As we have seen, slums existed in Harappan Dholavira, Mughal Delhi and in colonial Bombay.