Gram By Kilogram

Second, we spend too much time debating on how it should be done—public, private or through public-private partnership. This obviously has strong political connotations in India. For many of us, ideological postures on growth and poverty alleviation are more important than actually achieving them. Ideologies define the method of solution independent of the problem though problem-solving itself has never been a national objective. Third, it took us a long time to understand that good infrastructure coupled with free enterprise is a great substitute for all the leaky targeted programmes for the poor.

It is in this context that the Bharat Nirman programme becomes so important. It’s an enabling approach, something that empowers villages to plan business and economic activities in the same way that cities do. Under this scheme, the government has fixed specific targets to be met over the next four years—in irrigation, roads, housing, water supply, electrification and telecommunication. What is so special about this initiative? This programme is meant only for rural India. Do our cities not need massive doses of infrastructure? Of course they do. However, we are not going to develop as a country unless our rural sector develops. This is where 65 per cent of the people live. Rural India is, and will continue to be for quite some time into the future, the major source of the workforce.

Our pace of industrialisation, and hence urbanisation, is too slow to mop up large sections of the rural workforce. Our service sector requires a specialised labour force that is not always available in the villages. Large parts of rural India are, therefore, in no position to participate in the growth process that one is talking about. The only way to address this problem is to make it profitable for business to move to the vast hinterland outside the cities and towns.

This will also help us to urbanise at a faster pace. Planned cities simply get congested in India. Look at how the big cities are bursting at the seams as slums get bigger and bigger with the continuous stream of people coming in from rural India. If businesses can be carried out outside the big cities, then other cities will develop and this pressure on the current ones will ease. This is nothing new and everyone knows it. However, what is not very well appreciated in India is that from this it does not follow that if the government plans new cities and has funds to do this, then our urban problems will be solved. Cities and towns develop as they become centres of commerce and industry and not because a group of wise government planners have seen the light. This is precisely why the Bharat Nirman is such a good initiative. It enables regions outside the present cities to become business hubs and grow into the towns of tomorrow. Hopefully, this will stop the current trend of the commercial centre also being the political and administrative centre in the state.

However, this is not to say that our current cities can be abandoned for the new cities that will be coming up. What is interesting is that the residents of most of our big cities pour more into the state coffers—through all forms of taxes—than what the state spends for these cities. This essentially means that city residents have very little say in the development of their surroundings in spite of contributing significantly to the state exchequer. The lack of accountability among the city administrators is best brought out by the following story. A highly respected retired government official keeps asking every Indian residing in metropolitan cities if they know the name of the mayor of New York City. They all do. When asked about the mayors of their own cities, the standard answer is "I don’t know". Some of them did not know that Indian cities have mayors! Not surprising when the mayor is simply a ceremonial post with no responsibility.

Along with what the government is trying in the villages, there has to be some fresh thinking about our cities. When we are discussing the direct financing of panchayati raj institutions to get accountability, why are we not seeking accountability from city corporations? If we were to do that, then we will build up institutions that will be responsible for delivering what taxes are supposed to fund. For example, while a chunk of income and sales taxes can go into the overall state coffers, there is no reason why city residents cannot be told how their property taxes are being spent. And, who best to do it than the city mayor.

In other words, we must not think of infrastructure only when it comes to big-ticket and big-money items like national highways or airports. We desperately need a mechanism by which smaller investments can be made to maintain and develop the big-ticket items. In all our infrastructure planning, there is a lot of resources being spent on "new" infrastructure but very little time, effort and money being spent on keeping the inner city roads clean, safe and usable at all times. It is easier to organise a one-time expenditure for building something new than to put in place a system that will maintain and add to the initial capital expenditure. This is where institutions become very important. But we are not thinking about them at all.

(Gangopadhyay is director, India Development Foundation)