Subir Roy: Deve Gowda ko gussa kyun ata hai

VALUE FOR MONEY

The Maharashtra government is the latest to join the queue of state governments""West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh have already made formal requests""willing to offer whatever Infosys needs to set up development centres in their states. Infosys already has one development centre in Pune on 110 acres. The Maharashtra government is willing to offer more land. Its aim is to promote the city as a focus of high technology and IT development, which it already is, as an alternative to Bangalore. Pune has a salubrious climate also and is facing severe infrastructure bottlenecks, the way Bangalore is.

So it is quite likely that if Infosys decides to expand operations in Pune, it will offer the city the same type of advice that it did for Bangalore. Otherwise, it will be difficult to live and work out of Pune, the way it is getting hugely difficult simply to travel from one part of Bangalore to another through the traffic. But H D Deve Gowda, the head of Karnataka's ruling coalition partner Janata Dal (S), didn't like the advice one bit. So it is worth examining what N R Narayana Murthy and Ramesh Ramanathan of NGO Janagraha had to say in their presentation to Gowda and government bigwigs.

Their presentation noted that Karnataka already leads in local reform. What it needs is to set right the urban-rural divide that has grown in the process. The rural governance structure has forged ahead while urban decentralisation has barely begun. Hence there is a mismatch between urban areas bursting with economic energy sans the right governance structure and rural areas with appropriate governance but sans the energy.

So what is needed? The presentation proposed a complete revamp of municipal law, direct election of mayor, citizens' formal participation, mandatory quarterly disclosure, an integrated transport authority and housing and other programmes for the urban poor. The presentation also laid great stress on the need for a regional planning structure with three levels""municipal, ward, and area. This should be part and parcel of comprehensive regional planning. It is difficult to see why anybody should object to such ideas, except that state-level politicians are loath to give up powers to local bodies. And, they see most of their power flowing from rural areas, but today the urban areas are the engine of growth. The presentation notes upfront that policy makers are giving up their traditional bias against urban areas and their historical denial is beginning to change. But it seems this has a long way to go.

If Deve Gowda was resentful about being told what to do to set urban governance right, his greater face-off with Infosys was over land. He questioned the company's need for such a large amount of land""over 800 acres""and pointed out that there were so many other companies that were happily working out of facilities created by property developers. He is not for doing away with property developers where you can. This is consistent with the policy followed by his government.

One of the most questionable early decisions of the present Karnataka government was to grant substantial entertainment tax concessions to multiplexes at around the time when the Forum Mall, developed by the Prestige group, opened in Bangalore. The PVR multiplex in it naturally benefited. Why multiplexes, patronised by the high-spending techie crowd, should need tax concessions was not at all clear, unless the idea was to do your part for a sweetheart deal with developers of multiplexes. The nexus between Indian property developers and politicians, embedded in the hugely distorted land market in India, is a basic reality. To live with it is one thing, to publicly facilitate and root for it is another.

The odd news report on the controversy has observed that you tend to get land from the government cheaper than the market, while drawing attention to Infosys asking the government for a lot of land. Government acquisition of land is indeed an important issue and infrastructure projects in developed countries have been held up for years and years because of local protests. Among the most famous is the delay in setting up Narita airport in Japan. There is a lot to be said in being reluctant to break up vibrant local communities. All that the government needs to do is to say sorry, take land elsewhere. But the current Indian reality is that in Karnataka, and elsewhere, poor people are leaving villages for cities in search of work because poor farmers are hit the most by depleting waster resources.

Lastly, the issue of government land coming cheap. The reality is that increasingly the government is able to procure land only at near market prices. Doing otherwise leads to protracted litigation. It is well within the government's powers to improve its land acquisition process so that commercial organisations get land only at market prices. Wipro is currently in protracted negotiations with the West Bengal government over the price at which it will be allotted the land it has sought. You have to invariably turn to the government when you need large consolidated tracts as only the government can put them together. It is for the government to formulate a people-friendly policy and work it honestly. What is wrong is using a policy when it suits you, and setting it aside when it doesn't.

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