It’s time for a model
change to make way for real development.
It takes plenty of
humility and tremendous amount of courage to accept the truth about development
today. What is unfolding in the name of development today is self-destruction
in myriads of ways. For some more time, we may be cruising along this path
without facing life-threatening havoc and collapse on a large scale. However,
unless we step out of our current denial, it may soon be too late. We are at
that juncture in our life time.
Staying in Ahmedabad
for the past 4 months, in what is billed as among India’s best cities to live
in, provides ample proof of this self-destructive pattern. This is my second
stay this city where I started my career in 1997 and stayed for over an year.
Though much bigger in size in these 16 years, it pales before its original self
in most yardsticks of real development.
With a few days of
rains in September, roads are in pathetic state. With the city having expanded
multiple times beyond its means, there seems to be little respite in time to
come in form of road repairs. Roads are in bad shape across the city. In the
Prahaladnagar area for instance, there are crater sized potholes in most places
With waterlogging all around this is a dangerous situation as it’s not even
possible to gauge the depth of the craters.
Due to bad roads, there
is plenty of traffic jam and pollution from engine idling as well as from
deteriorating condition of vehicles due to bad roads. With numerous
auto-rickshaws running on adulterated lubricants, the air gets filled with
their toxic fumes. Public transport is in poor shape as a result of bad roads,
fare price escalation and growing pollution in the city.
Traffic lights even on
the busiest junctions either don’t work or are inconsequential. The city is
flooded by 2-wheelers. With the city’s rapid expansion and growing distances,
this amounts to longer and stressful 2-wheeler rides on the city’s roads. This
is already showing up in people’s health.
At a time when there is
so much talk on the “Gujarat model of development” around the country, the
state of prime areas in Gujarat’s leading city can no longer be brushed under
the carpet.
Food – Where
“development” hits the most
Food is badly affected
by the current model of development. No one can deny that food and water are an
important part of our lives. Most of us cannot survive without them even for a
few days.
Despite great care to
pick up fruits and vegetables, most of them taste bland with a lingering taste
of the chemicals in which that are used to grow and to ripen. It’s quite an
effort to persuade children to pick up fruits at times, which they otherwise
love to eat. There is also a very
limited variety of fruits that’s available, mostly hybrid bananas, apples and
pomegranates. Mangoes, the king of fruits seems to receive the worst treatment.
They are utterly bland and tasteless.
Most of them are transported from far
distances and are hardened either due to packaging or due to their chemical
treatment. Pear for instance, which my younger daughter loves to eat,
disappeared from the fruit market within a month. Good quality Chickoo
similarly disappeared from the shelves in no time. The variety that’s left has
hardened peel and can only be fed by pulping this into a milkshake, which can
then be gulped down.
Vegetables have become
equally tasteless. This is a direct impact of much of the peri-urban areas
where vegetables would be previously grown has been sold out as real estate or
for setting up industries. The worst condition is of tomatoes, a commonly used
ingredient in many Indian dishes. The softer and juicier variety with a much thinner peel has
disappeared from the local vegetable market. Other common vegetables such as
potatoes, ladies’ finger (bhindi or okra), cabbage, cauliflower fare no better.
The crass commercialization of vegetables has distorted the much prized
seasonality of vegetables which ensured that we ate the right kind of
vegetables in different seasons that was a secret to our good and robust health
and long lives of around 100 years.
Rice and wheat face a
similar predicament. Rice, which is the staple food for many people is
tasteless and lacks nutrition. Wheat flour is powdery and devoid of nutrition.
Though Ahmedabad is fortunate to have a variety of pulses (called as kathol
locally), oilseeds and millets available, the variety and taste is much poorer
to what it was a decade and a half back.
The saddest state of
affairs is with the state’s milk supply. This is ironical as superbrand Amul
comes from Gujarat. When quizzed about the condition of mal-nutrition among
even the well-off sections of Ahmedabad, the state Chief Minister Sh. Narendra
Modi is reported to have said that the children have become fitness-conscious.
The mothers run after their children with glass of milk but they refuse to
drink milk. The reason lies elsewhere. Most of the dairy supply is from
reconstituted milk powder and largely from Fiji-Holstein and Jersey cows. This
milk is unsavory and therefore most children refuse to drink milk.
Pasteurisation and UHT (Ultra Heat Treatment) further take away the taste and
nutrition from milk.
Inferior Water quality
– The slow killer
Water quality and
availability is likely to be the death knell of the current model of
development. Piped water may remain a pipe dream in the years to come. Already,
the piped water supply is reduced to an hour in morning and in the evening.
What’s so evident that there is no effort on rain water harvesting that
accumulates in the low lying areas. With rapid expansion of the city in the
past decade, a number of these low lying areas were agricultural areas or had
lakes and ponds.
With increased
precipitation this year, the road side garbage and sewage water gets all mixed
up to create a scary scenario. Schools had to be called off for consecutive
days because of the waterlogging on the roads and in the neighborhoods. On days
people can’t even step out of their houses. This leads to gradual contamination
of ground water, which was already saline in several places due to overuse and misuse
of the natural water system.
This water is not even
suitable for bathing purposes. It is already leading to a variety of skin
problems and hairfall, even among women and children prematurely. This same
water is filtered and used for drinking. This water, devoid of the natural
nutrition can only be mechanically drunk, as it’s devoid of taste.
It’s all in the mind
With collective
efforts, the situation could improve. Certainly, Ahmedabad has several pluses
that make it a relatively better city by Indian standards. What’s most
disconcerting though is the degree of denial and even intolerance to discuss
these issues among city’s elite, decision makers and influencers. It has been
shocking that such intolerance can be found in a leadership development institute
in the city where I briefly worked.
This exposed me to the
murkier side of Ahmedabad. In one discussion, where it was highlighted by the
leadership trainer on the effectiveness of meeting in person, I asked some of
the participants about its implication on the number of car trips. The
participants were small and medium industrialists. I asked them if they would
venture on the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) for occasional trips. BRTS
incidentally is one of the showcases of city’s development. I shared how CEOs
and mayors in large cities took the public transport and some even cycled to
office. I also mentioned how the traffic
jams are becoming more frequent and longer.
The response was an
eerie silence at the very mention of public transport. One of the ladies’ who
runs a steel making unit immediately withdrew from the conversation leaving
behind a blank stare. On my feet, I explored other options of allowing car
poolers on the BRTS routes. This was again cold shouldered by a group that was
attending a program called “Exploring Potential, Achieving Dreams”. A
world-class city where people across the board use public transport is not the
stuff, their dreams are made of.
Instead, as some of
them shared in the subsequent sessions, they would rather grow into a 1lakh
crore company where every employee had a car and a flat to themselves. In a
visualization exercise, one thing common to many of the dreams was a fleet of
swanky cars or a mention in the Forbes magazine list of most wealthy Indians.
Not surprisingly
though, the same set of participants with those swanky car dreams reported in
the following week that they were feeling depressed. No wonder, they had been
so busy destroying themselves with imbecile dreams egged on by a
“self-proclaimed” spiritually inclined leadership coach.
In another meeting with
a director of a large steel-furnace manufacturing company, the discussion
veered towards how China was producing 650 million metric tonnes of steel,
which was more than half of total world production and ten times more than
India’s production with similar population. He shared how Chinese authorities
serve evacuation notice of 36 hrs. and this is followed without any resistance.
The director also
mentioned how the Chinese production was for captive consumption to indicate
the rate of growth. I wondered if such a rate of production was sustainable, if
at all it was desirable. I was reminded of Jonathan Long’s book titled “When a
billion Chinese jump” on the destructive ecological impact of Chinese “development”
and what would happen if India followed suit, but chose to keep quiet.
It was at the mention
of “this development was the only way that we could feed the 30% of starving
Indians that I finally broke my silence. I asked if all the coal-mining and
pollution was not affecting the food security of hundreds of million Indians.
There was a muzzled silence once again.
There is still hope
Can Ahmedabad
turnaround from its path of inevitable self-destruction ? It looks unlikely
that this change will come from within the ruling classes in Ahmedabad. The
2002 riots and the paranoia that has followed since has been useful for its
feudal class to muzzle the voices of dissent from the common people.
It’s with Narendra
Modi’s rise to the centre of Indian politics that Ahmedabad and the “Gujarat
model of development” and specially Ahmedabad is likely to come under closer
scrutiny. It’s sores and blisters have long been hidden through cosmetic
surgery.
One way for the city to
recuperate is to release its peri-urban areas by stopping any further
concretization and even de-concretise, wherever necessary. The government needs
to buy back the peri-urban land and dedicate them for agriculture and for
pastures so that the city’s food supply can be revived. The city needs to promote
urban gardening on small plots and terraces to meet its food requirements. It
needs to revive its water bodies with a network of storm water drains so that
the run-off can be collected for use. The rejuvenated peri-urban areas can be
used for this purpose.
Lots needs to be done
on the transportation front. Basic things like traffic signals must function.
The planning for the entire network of the BRTS must encompass demand
management measures and feeder services for last mile connectivity. Without
this there is no respite to the burgeoning fleet of private 2-wheelers and
4-wheelers that’s piling upon the city roads.
In time, we can hope
for a far more better city that we can be truly proud of as one of the best
cities to live in, not only in India but in the world, albeit, a much smaller
than what it is today. Rather than taking pride in ever expanding cities
rolling into grey-goo megalopolis, we shall soon discover that small is indeed
beautiful.
