Mayors in shining armour Sauvik Chakraverti THE TIMES OF INDIA December 8, 2005
Without free civic democracy we are very far removed from the democratic ideal of ancient Athens. Bangalore, like every other Indian city and town, needs a Pericles. The US has 350 million people in 200 cities. Indians, 1,000 million-strong, should see their future in 500 great cities and 5,000 lovely towns.
Without free civic democracy we are very far removed from the democratic ideal of ancient Athens. Bangalore, like every other Indian city and town, needs a Pericles. The US has 350 million people in 200 cities. Indians, 1,000 million-strong, should see their future in 500 great cities and 5,000 lovely towns.
To get there we must first fix our transport system. 'Spokes' have to be built from each of the five 'hub' cities of the Golden Quadrilateral. These spokes will connect all satellite towns. The five cities will decongest; satellites will mushroom. Apart from 'hubs-and-spokes', India will also need twin coastal expressways. With free trade, our twin coastlines will see massive economic activity and development. Under socialism, landlocked cities like Delhi and Bangalore have overgrown because of the artificial, bonsai economy. With free trade, it will be more natural for coastal cities and towns to flourish. This is what is happening in China, and from Shanghai proceeding down along the East China Sea, many great new cities are erupting.
India's west coast, from Surat to Cochin, has over 50 ports that are ancient centres of trade: Karwar, Honavar, Kundapura, Kudla, Kasaragode, Mahe, Kozhikode. Today, they are all in ruin and a rank 'newcomer' like Mumbai is over-important in the urban scheme. Similarly, Chennai and Kolkata on the east are newcomers bursting at the seams. With twin coastal expressways, and free trade, it will be boom time for every port city and town. As far as matters of governance are concerned, both the central and state governments will have to yield substantial powers and resources to the mayors who will be required to run each of these cities and towns. Instead of the village vision of panchayati raj, the focus in a free market economy will have to shift to municipal administration. It is only in cities and towns that the division of labour is maximum — you cannot be a plumber, electrician, tailor, barber, dhobi, receptionist, taxi driver or chowkidar in a sleepy little village.
It is for this reason, basic to wealth creation, that cities have always been magnets for poor village folk. If we really want to help our peasantry, we should urbanise aggressively and rescue them from poverty and caste. Failing to do so will mean their 're-enserfment' as cheap agricultural labour. Urbanisation, in contrast, will lead to their moving away "from subsistence to exchange", as Lord Bauer aptly put it. It is in the exchange economy of urban India that poor peasants will find niches from which they can achieve for themselves a far better life than the precarious toehold on existence they have in village India today. The liberal vision is, therefore, the polar opposite of the Nehru-Gandhi vision, which saw the future in terms of "millions of self-sufficient village republics". The liberal vision is 5,500 free trading and self-governing cities and towns. The writer is an economist Comment: Hiranmay Karlekar wrote an edit-page lead-article in The Indian Express, nearly 20-years back, captioned, Let a Hundred States bloom, advocating ceation of smaller states. India is still aeons away from that vision. TNM
No comments:
Post a Comment