Disasters of distorted urban development by V.R. Krishna Iyer

The purpose of development should not be to develop things, but to develop Man.

— from the Cocoyoc Declaration, adopted at the UNEP/UNCTAD symposium on “Patterns of Resource Use, Environment and Development Strategies”; Cocoyoc, Mexico, October 1974.

The western model of development by means of aggressive industrialisation and insane consumerism has invaded urban India, and converted innocent, elegant spaces into technologically driven factories and slews of concrete skyscrapers.

All over the urban areas we find waste, garbage, factory refuse, medical leftovers, plastics, municipal filth. Much of it is miasmatic, foul and toxic. There are not enough parking lots or traffic-worthy roads, but avalanches of automobiles spell intoxicated affluence. The roads have pits, potholes, pools, and ditches that can kill. Two-wheelers and three-wheelers race trucks, buses, and cars rashly and recklessly. Avenues and highways have gone lunatic. Safety laws have gone to sleep. Municipalities are guilty of not avoiding chaos. They permit lawless buildings, seldom repair public paths, streetlights and drains.

Practically every Third World country has adopted in its big cities western-style business houses, star-hotels, luxurious apartments, and fashionable institutions, all inspired by the mantra of globalisation, privatisation, marketisation, and money-making. Whole societies have developed expensive eating habits, and are apathetic to health, community development, preservation of a clean environment, and ecology. They seem to be allergic to social justice and human rights. The glitterati elbow out the literate in the new wave of change.

This has become the dominant pattern of progress, providing an illusion of modern advancement. Since peak profit-earning is the primary goal, happy, healthy havens with basic biosphere considerations receive low priority. Consequently, lifestyle itself becomes lascivious and lucre-oriented. Hardly any importance is given to the elimination of waste and garbage and to pure air and water. The fundamental rights to a life with dignity, and to well-being, integral to humanism, are neglected. This leads to ill-health, moral degeneration, corruption, and other malignant factors.

India is no exception to this torture and terrorism. Its cities, as they opulently advance hi-tech fashion, suffer the syndrome of injustice gone berserk, aggravated by greed. Urban development ignores the spread of hill-high garbage and chemicals in food and drink. This is a death sentence on hygiene and sanitation, humanity and destiny.

The Gandhian concept of development rejected the idea that it should aim primarily at the creation of material wealth or the satisfaction of insatiable, endlessly multiplied needs.

“Insofar as we have made the modern materialistic craze our goal,” wrote Gandhiji, “so far are we going downhill in the path of progress.”

This distortion of development is manifest in the bizarre ‘affluenza’ of urban aberration in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Kochi, and so on. Concrete jungles traumatically crowd even micro-metropolises and urban centres. They spread stench, choke the atmosphere, negate clean environment, spoil the biosphere, paralyse traffic, and wipe out beautiful habitations. A Municipal Corporation with culpable indifference to development is hostile to the public weal.

Currently the city of Kochi is the victim of a garbage macro-crisis. It faces the imminent peril of fatal fevers. There is even the potential for a plague outbreak. This has been caused by the functional flop of the Municipal Corporation in approving plans for construction. The industrial capital of Kerala, blessed by nature to be a lovely coastal city, is now noxious with heaps of waste all over it. Hospitals overflow with patients, and other medical services are unable to cope with massive rates of infection that threaten people’s lives.

Plague is not progress. But that is the price the city’s population has to pay for remaining taciturn when building rules were being violated, making a mockery of sanitation and hygiene needs. The elimination of mosquitoes and flies remains a challenge.

Is there no land for life-saving projects to transform waste into wealth? Smart City, which is for the foreign rich, easily gets territory by means of compulsory acquisition. But a clean city where the have-nots must survive too, is dismissed because the poor have no power. A corrupt conquest of authority by the plutocracy is colonialism reincarnated, and Smart City is on the qui vive for foreign capitalist enterprise as a new-generation East India Company. Unless a radical reversal of developmental ideology occurs, with people as the focus, and the right to life as a fundamental right of all is given paramountcy in the process of humanist progress, any town or city will fall prey to deadly diseases, traffic paralysis, and slums of horror.
A warning

Kochi is a warning. The alarming situation there seems to have made an insufficient impact on a goofy government and a callous City Corporation, notwithstanding outstanding Left activism in state power. The proprietariat governs, the proletariat perishes and corruption corrodes and carps. The administration — even if the Chief Minister and some colleagues are alert and upright — is regrettably untrained in the complexities of the technology of modern-day governance. Politics promotes rivalry for power and money, totally unmindful of the human condition of the citizenry. Kilkenny cat politicking and internecine squabbles can ruin any good government. And then a crisis creeps in and gradually develops on account of continued mismanagement, taking things beyond repair through blitz operations.

Beyond the creative potency of our Constitution lies ubiquitous corruption that is at the root of bureaucratic barbarity. Contractors bribe those in office, deluge every cell of public business with graft and nepotism, and make money. Even the judiciary is slowly succumbing.

In Kochi every street stinks; every brick of high-rise building breathes a bribe; every road with its pits, pools, and potholes alarmingly prove collusion between the itching palms of the builder-business mafia and bureaucrats with hidden agendas.

Cover-up strategies engineered by manipulators of power are never within the reach of the law. Why is this charming Queen of the Arabian Sea a shock and a shame today? Why are denizens fighting the dumping of city waste and refusing an alternative plan to dispose them scientifically and profitably? The new craze for meretricious projects that attract foreign capital irrationally inflates land prices with the realtor mafia operating to debunk waste elimination plants that can avoid damage to the neighbourhood. The land brokers and realtors fear that a garbage plant in the proximity may depress land values.

If only the state had imaginative creativity and anticipatory activism, land prices and real estate rackets could have been controlled and a collapse of clean Kochi avoided. Waste, given creative conversion, can become wealth. Emerson said: “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.” If the state has the genius, biogas, compost, fertilizer and other useful products can be made out of garbage, trash can be transformed into riches, carbon could be converted into diamond.
(Courtesy: The Hindu)