Kanika Datta: Minimum city

SWOT

In the euphoria surrounding India's rapid ascent into world reckoning, one major flaw tends to be overlooked: the swift decline of urban India. The irony is hard to escape: even as self-appointed spokesmen proudly hard-sell the country's growing importance as a destination for foreign investment, India's major cities can scarcely boast of world-class living conditions.

Finance Minister P Chidambaram talks of transforming Mumbai into a major financial hub of Asia""not without reason since the NSE now ranks as the world's third largest stock exchange by number of trade. I feel tempted to encourage him to read Suketu Mehta's depressing and compelling tour de force""Maximum City""on why this just might be a struggle.

What Maximum City does is draw attention to the triple perils of unplanned urbanisation, endemic corruption and short-sighted economic policy. The purgatory that is Mumbai today is proof of that, as are Bangalore, Hyderabad and many of India's older and more charming cities (Mysore, for instance, shows ominous signs of succumbing, as does Nagpur).

Perhaps these are cities struggling under the burden of their accumulated historical deficiencies. Newer cities arguably have the chance to start on a clean slate, so to speak, explore alternative models of urban governance and demonstrate to the world that India too can have its Singapores and Shanghais. There are, however, dismally few signs of this, even as shrinking agricultural employment pushes hundreds of people to the cities and raises the urgent need for urban reform.

One such opportunity that has been egregiously passed up is in Gurgaon. As a city Gurgaon is a little over a quarter century old, carved out of the agricultural hinterland thanks to some aggressive private sector initiative. It is, outside of Chandigarh, the only real city of note in Haryana today. Initially a hub of the auto and auto ancillary industry, it burst into fame over the past decade, powered by the hunger for real estate from scores of multinationals riding the BPO wave. Almost overnight, glitzy buildings, shopping malls, restaurants and nightclubs and upscale residential complexes replaced the wheat and mustard fields.

Probably, Gurgaon has a higher density of multinational presence per acre than most other Indian cities. Yet, this is no world-class city. On the contrary, it is a city of two identities""the glitz and neon global signs thrive alongside rural-standard roads, mounting piles of garbage and a near absence of basic civic amenities such as power, water and even drainage. Left to fend for themselves, most residents pay a premium for private solutions to this larger public problem.

Yet, the development of the new urban estates of Gurgaon was meant to be a unique self-finance experiment that would ensure a more accountable and higher standard of civic governance than other cities. Under this scheme, property owners paid the state urban development authority an External Development Charge (EDC) to develop basic amenities such as roads, water supply, drainage, solid waste disposal systems and storm water drains.

Since these were""and still are""mostly conspicuous by their absence, a civic NGO called SURGE took the initiative to approach the state government to provide a full account for the EDC""how much was spent, its utilisation and so on. When the government declined to do this, SURGE filed a PIL in the Punjab & Haryana High Court in 2002. This took almost three years to be heard, after which the government was asked to provide the relevant details on the EDC.

The revelations proved startling. Of the Rs 1,650-odd crore collected as EDC till December 2004, the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) has spent Rs 616 crore (and this component includes Rs 70 crore, which HUDA has credited to itself). This leaves roughly Rs 1050 crore unspent""more than 60 per cent of the funds collected""a testimony to HUDA's ennui. What has happened to this money? No one can say.

Despite a court order, HUDA has been unable to produce basic details such as year-wise collections and utilisation""nor even how it plans to spend these funds. Besides, as the latest newsletter from SURGE puts it, "There is no explanation of what has been earned on the EDC ...the interest alone may amount to several hundred crores, given that the amounts have been collected over a period of almost 25 years,"

As things stand, HUDA has felt constrained to announce a Rs 855-crore development plan for Gurgaon. Experience suggests that residents should not be too hopeful of a rapid transformation. If HUDA is hard put to spend Rs 1650 crore in 25 years, spending roughly half that amount in a shorter time frame would be a feat of extraordinary proportions. Gurgaon is yet to shake off its "rurban" trappings but, sadly, retains neither of the more salubrious elements of either rural or urban India. Is this the right signal to send to global investors attracted by the India growth story?

The views here are personal