Development or Self-destruction

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.