Taming street-people: India’s grand civilizational project

A status message by a friend on Facebook has had me thinking for many weeks now. He wrote:

Ranchi is an amazing city. In my first 30 minutes there, two schoolchildren, one bike rider and a goat tried to kill themselves in front of my car.

I have given this a great deal of thought, and I have had to come to the conclusion that my friend’s language is disingenuous. He speaks as if the schoolchildren and the goat were actually going to commit the act that would result in death, but he’s wrong. When a car hits a pedestrian and the pedestrian dies, the car kills the pedestrian.

How much more should we give up for parking?

I have written previously about parking spots replacing parks and playgrounds in cities like Bangalore and Chennai. Now we learn that even houses will be demolished and river beds covered up to make parking lots. It is time we asked our government – in this case the Chennai Corporation – why parking should be given such high priority. How much more should we give up for parking?

Models of parking provision in urban India

Mumbai’s parking policy gives builders FSI incentives to build public parking (source: indianurbaninfrastructure.com)

It is incontestable that there is a shortage of parking in Indian cities. One only needs to look at the number of vehicles parked on the streets to guess that the number of off-street parking spots in the city is insufficient even without considering the new vehicles added all over the country every year. This being the case, how do we tackle parking shortage?

On expertise and public participation

It appears that the folks at the Lucknow Municipal Corporation have a curious notion of the meaning and purpose of public participation. When their funding proposals under the centrally sponsored scheme for urban development (JNNURM) were rejected due to the lack of public participation, they came up with the brilliant idea of a “city volunteer technical corps” that would participate in the planning process. Members will be chosen by the city corporation based on “expertise” in planning and related areas. The newspaper also reports that a prior attempt to constitute such a consultative body was aborted when “undesirable” persons who were not “experts” entered the consultative group. The corporation promises only to include “desirable” persons this time round.

BOOK REVIEW: Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

This review was originally written for a class I am taking with Prof. John Pucher here at Rutgers University. I am putting up this review here even though the book reviewed talks mainly about the United States, because I feel that the lessons learned are most immediately applicable to developing world. It is a lengthy read, but I hope you will enjoy it.

BOOK REVIEW – Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, by Peter D. Norton

The study of transportation tends to be a particularly ahistoric affair. Transportation planners remain focused on how we might extricate ourselves from the mess we have landed ourselves in, and on these questions, there might even be agreement within the profession. But few seem to be interested in seriously looking at how we got here in the first place, and as a result, this subject of quite full of myths and conspiracy theories of all varieties that end up clouding our understanding.

We do happen to know quite a bit about highway planning and suburbanization in post-World War II America, and also about the dismantling of the streetcars beginning in the 1930s. But all these put together do not quite add up. By the time the streetcars were dismantled, ridership was down and their finances had taken a beating. By the time highway planning began in earnest, the automobile was already entrenched in the transportation systems. While these developments did increase automobile use, the automobile was already dominating urban transport by this time. In the absence of convincing explanations for the rise of the automobile, we begin to accept the assertion that its ubiquity was indeed inevitable and merely a result of new technology asserting its natural superiority.

Peter Norton takes up the challenge in his book, and comes up with the missing piece of the puzzle that will allow us to claim that the automobile’s complete victory over the pre-existing transportation system was not inevitable. He starts with the question – “How did the American city become an automotive city?” and to answer this question, Norton takes us back to the American city of the 1920s and meticulously looks at the evidence that comes out of newspapers, magazines and other sources of historic information. Based on his study, Norton argues that “before the city could be physically reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where automobiles unquestionably belong”. This social reconstruction, Norton finds, happened in the 1920’s and this paved the way for America’s auto-oriented transportation system. By 1930, this process was almost complete.

Governmental “informality” in India

I referred, last week, to this paper by Ananya Roy which argues that informality and the collapse of rule of law in India is not a result of the disdain that ungovernable masses have for law, but a result of informality amongst the elite sections of society, especially those who hold the reins in the corridors of power. I can give you some oft-cited examples of such informality: First consider the spate of building on the Yamuna floodplain without sufficient deliberation on the environmental impact – and through surreptitious change in land use. Second, consider the Akrama-Sakrama scheme in Bangalore that will “regularize” buildings in violation of building codes for a penalty – we now know it for what it is, a way for the bankrupt municipal corporation to earn some extra revenue. And in the third instance, let me cite the Adarsh housing society scam in Mumbai, in which top politicians and officials got apartments allotted to themselves in a housing society meant for the widows of army men killed in the Kargil conflict.

Even though such news is passe in India, I had a bit of a shock when I read this news report, according to which MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority) – Mumbai’s planning authority – is itself illegally occupying a terrace office. The  office does not have an “occupancy certificate” because the planning authority has not been paying property taxes to the municipal corporation. And it turns out that the state has also been defaulting on property taxes for many years – and now the state has very generously decided that it should start paying taxes once again.

When the elite, with vast resources at their command, and with so little “need” to act contrary to the law, still refuse to follow the law in letter and spirit, when even governments pay no heed to their legal obligations, why do we expect poor and incapacitated slum dwellers to adhere to the law, when there is no housing but illegal housing available?

The benefits of being Obama

The latest news from Mumbai is that President Obama is about to visit, and all the routes he might possibly take are being beautified. Some of them are even being adorned with date palm trees, despite these trees being completely inappropriate for Mumbai’s humid climate. And alongside, anti-encroachment drives are being carried out to evict “illegal” hawkers squatting on the pavements. This prompted one KRP Gupta to ask why it is that while Obama gets the privilege of moving around without being encumbered by hawkers, the same privilege is not extended to regular commuters.

A very good question, I must grant. And the answer is implied – when Obama is not around, the cops and BMC (Brihanmumbai Corporation) offficials make money by accepting hafta (bribes) from these “illegal” street vendors. That is why “illegal” hawkers continue to sell their goods on the street. This narrative is very convenient for middle-class rhetoric – it makes it appear as though the hawkers and the government officials are conniving to deprive the middle class of their rights to free movement. Unfortunately, reality is somewhat more complex.