Barun Roy: The two faces of Marxism

ASIA FILE

What's the difference between Shanghai's Pudong district and Kolkata's Rajarhat New Town?

Both are designed as extensions of existing metropolitan cities; but while one is a dazzling example of world-class urban growth and construction, the other is waiting to become yet another half-baked Indian city.

Pudong, across the Huangpu River from old Shanghai, turned 14 in June but already accounts for 25 per cent of Shanghai's GDP. In 2003, its foreign trade reached $ 58.1 billion "" half of Shanghai's.

More than 10,000 foreign-funded enterprises are established there. Twenty-six transnational corporations have chosen the place as their regional headquarters and over 100 others have built R&D centres. Pudong boasts the country's tallest building. Soon it will own the world's tallest.

Rajarhat New Town, admittedly, is only five years old, so a comparison may seem unfair. But five years is a long enough time for any project to reveal the first outlines of its future.

Yet, all that Rajarhat has got to show till now is a highway running through it as a new link between Kolkata and its airport, and some isolated apartment blocks under construction, or constructed, but mostly uninhabited.

Nothing else exists. All one sees is a vast expanse of wasteland and muddy swamps, still in the process of being filled up.

On the other hand, by the end of its first five years, Pudong had two magnificent cable-stayed road bridges, built from scratch, connecting it with old Shanghai, plus a ring road around its all-important finance and trade zone, a gas works, a water treatment plant, a new harbour, a power plant and a sewage treatment plant.

All the major Chinese banks had branches up and running in the new town. Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche had moved in with a factory, sending a message to other foreign investors. The first group of Pudong's fabulous skyscrapers had risen above its skyline.

At this point there may be people who will argue that China could do all this with Pudong because it runs a dictatorial government whose will is law. Perhaps. But haven't Marxist communists ruled West Bengal for the past 25 years likewise as a fiefdom, imposing their will against all opposition and commanding the allegiance of bureaucrats and workers alike at all levels of the administration?

No other state government in India has been this lucky. With that kind of support, West Bengal's Marxist rulers could have turned the state into a mini China if they wanted to. Jyoti Basu, the inspiration behind Rajarhat, could have been a Deng Xiaoping.

The trouble is, they don't have the imagination, the motivation, the discipline and the determination that the Chinese have. In their scheme of things, Rajarhat is just another residential suburb of Kolkata, not a possible economic growth centre.

But even as a residential area, is Basu's dream city, which his loyalists would want to be named as Jyotinagar, going to be different? I doubt it.

They have filled up all but one of the large water bodies that used to exist at the place, thus killing the opportunity of developing it as a unique nature city, like Malaysia's Putrajaya. They haven't even planted trees yet to create future green belts, nor laid out the roads around which the future city is expected to grow.

So, what can we expect but another tightly-spaced and undistinguished agglomeration of middle-class homes "" another nondescript Salt Lake "" growing by fits and starts and reflecting the typical, constricted thinking of our official urban planners?

In its next five years, between 1996 and 2000, Pudong had an international airport in full operation, a subway line extending into it from the old city, two more bridges and half-a-dozen road tunnels crossing the Huangpu, and the 88-storey Jin Mao Tower soaring proudly into the sky, with Grand Hyatt, the world's highest hotel, on its top floors.

And the foreigners came swooping down, to live, to work and to invest. Chinese and foreign architects joined hands to transform a derelict, former farmland into a scintillating, 21st-century urban centre whose quality resides among the world's very best.

The rest is history. There will always be people ready to question any growth figures that come out of China.

But can anyone doubt the reality of the magnetic levitation train that now transports passengers from Pudong's airport to downtown Shanghai, a distance of 30 km, in just seven minutes?

Or the 5-km long, 100-metre wide Century Avenue with its restaurants, boutiques, open-air cafes and green belts adorned with sculptures, which runs through Pudong's financial, shopping and cultural districts and people describe as China's Champs-Elysee?

In 14 years, Pudong has evolved into a city of 1.6 million people, with 100,000 new residents moving in every year. After five years, Rajarhat remains an amorphous, uninhabited void.