By Ramesh Kanitkar
It rings with all the catch phrases of the 21st century: global hubs, smart cities, employment opportunities, green buildings, eco friendly neighbourhoods, renewable technologies, solar parks, low carbon emissions… The Delhi- Mumbai Industrial Corridor, a $ 90 billion Indo- Japanese industrial infras-tructure collab-oration between the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion( DIPP) and the Japanese government is statistically impressive: a multi- axle, high- freight corridor that connects the political capital with the business capital and runs through six states, affecting almost 200 million people along the way.
For logistical reasons, the corridor divides into smaller lengths and defines places for investment, manufacturing and as transport hubs, creating whole cities with new housing, schools, factories, commercial centres etc. Among them: Ahmedabad- Dholera Investment region, Manesar- Bawal hub, and Dighi port.
Based clearly on a business model, how will the million poor of the villages along the way reconcile to this new industrial corridor? Of the many national committees overseeing the rapid — often illegal and unplanned — migration into Indian cities, few have gone beyond mere statement of statistics and demog-raphics. The numbers, often so startling, have left most experts floundering in an incoherent babble of ideas. In India it is in the nature of migration that it can neither be forced nor planned.
This is as much a condition of democracy as it is of human nature itself. Certainly if given a chance, people will move into conditions of security and permanence. But the forced evacuation of large numbers from the rural areas and their eventual resettlement into the unfamiliar hardened landscape of a new town is often a catastrophic social nightmare. The Industrial Corridor’s decision to bring the city to India’s villages may seem like a novel idea, but its sociology seems misguided and simplistic. The intent — to lift Indian poverty into European abundance and make, once and for all, a complete erasure of rural memory — is as inhumane as it is implausible.
Throughout the exercise of planning such a mega enterprise there seems little concern for an indige-nisation of the industrial model. Where the project spells out planning appr-oaches, the improved aspects of rural lifestyle takes on an entirely westernised approach: cities with high quality infrastructure, community and leisure services, world class centres for industrial excellence, socially mixed and integrated urban areas… The picture painted by the promoters is one that transforms despair into hope. Neglected waterless villages in Rajasthan will be retrofitted with apartments and town-houses with backdrops of shallow streams; the yellow bleached Indian landscape will become rolling English countryside — a strange irony that green self- sufficient cities are to be built in Rajasthan, MP and Gujarat, the country’s driest regions.
That Western affluence offers the only way out of misery is much too easy an acceptance of an ideal, especially in a society that — after Gandhi — has produced no models of its own. And yet, so baffling is the scale of the Corridor enterprise, that the mere transition from statistics to regional plans, to local implementation only reinforces its faceless detachment from reality. While work on the project continues as a routine matter of finance, land acquisition and engine-ering, the more difficult social dimension of upheaval, displacement and resettlement, remains ignored. Like the dislocation of tribals in Odisha and elsewhere, the corridor tries hard to include the rural areas within its industrial program, sadly, only on paper. Land acquisition by the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation has already begun for the project.
Whole villages and surrounding agricultural land are being bought and transferred to state and public sector ownership. In Raigad, where 78 villages have been served acquisition notices, protest marches and agitations have already become a daily occurrence at the sub divisional magistrate office in Mangaon.
For a large part, the physical territory that urbanisation entails, belong to cultures with a proven track record of large scale, and often forced, accommodation. The Chinese experience of razing whole towns and villages for new railroads and highways bears social costs that are never computed in a Communist balance sheet. Still, they too have had some remarkable failures.
Dongtan, planned as an eco- city of one million by English engineers, off the Shanghai coast, an attempt as heroic as any, has fallen by the wayside. The project’s ambitious statistics have not been met by Chinese administrators, intent on making Dongtan a showcase for future cities.
Delays, shortfalls and untested green techn-ologies have led the Chinese government to revise its completion and downgrade its overzealous plan.
The Indian city raises serious doubts about the nature of urban gove-rnance. It is hard to tell what formal structure is used to maintain a semblance of order in the Indian city — a business model, the city as just another state, or a denser collective of villages. Without the singular and motivating presence of a strong willed personality — as in Mayor Bloomberg in New York and Boris Johnson in London — can a political party ever be effective in making and running cities? Today, the need to accommodate the rising numbers by extending the city into multiple corridors between metros may be the government’s way of taking the city to the village, but the seriousness of the attempt can only be gauged if there is a genuine desire to create appropriate space and livelihood along the corridor. The densification of villages into cities can be a success only if the social and cultural constraints of local lives are taken into account on the road to prosperity. Never having ever attempted even a modest alternative to the current city — or village — how can the mere fact of industry and manufacturing be simply used to reorder rural lives, or become the basis for new cities? But, for the sheer audacity of the attempt, a spineless government, often without will or idea, needs to be lauded. INAV