To Locate The Scam, Use GPS

As homes in low-lying areas were flooded in Bangalore and commuters in Gurgaon were holed up in buses and cars in traffic jams that lasted up to 12 hours, residents of the two cities must have wondered in late July if life in the future could be different if their cities were on the government’s list of ‘smart cities’. They need not despair that they are not on the list. As the five-year Smart Cities Mission enters its second year of execution, it is gradually becoming clear that what we are likely to end up with are islands of “modern” glass-fronted building complexes in newly created business districts in 100 selected cities. These new enclaves will have been designed by an array of Indian and foreign consultants, and built by companies, not municipal corporations. The one “smart” thing about these enclaves will be that electricity, water, sewage and traffic flows will be digitally monitored and controlled with software developed by leading global companies such as Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.

Remember the barrage of IBM ads on TV, with the message “Smart Solutions for a Smart Planet”? This is where they come in. For the urban homeless, the resident dealing with erratic water supply and overflowing drains, the student relying on a creaking public transport system and the harried commuter on choked roads, this Smart Cities Mission will change nothing in their lives.

In its manifesto for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had this bizarre proposal to build 100 “new” cities. Soon after the party swept to power, it did talk about this for a while before realising it made no sense. Then, out of the blue, the government came up with this smart cities idea.

One of the stories in the aura that surrounds Narendra Modi is that when he was chief minister of Gujarat, he was available at 6 am every morning for anyone who could come with a new idea, provided it was pitched to him in three minutes. It does look like a set of consultants and software firms sold him the smart cities idea in one such interaction.

The very idea of smart cities and the entire process by which the Smart Cities Mission is being planned, organised and executed is very strange.

First, we had this “competition” between cities to be selected by the Centre for the programme. Then the cities had to seek advice on the competition from, of all organisations, Bloomberg Philanthropies (http://www.smartcitieschallenge.in/). After that, they could employ consultants from an identified list (it had McKinsey, Deloitte and others). Yes, the state governments had to engage with residents of the cities in drawing up the proposal, but that engagement “should use smart processes”. Lucknow, for ­instance, used online consultations!

A ‘special purpose vehicle’ (SPV) in each city, outside the municipal corporation, will execute the project (imp­lying no accountability to elected members of the urban local body). The SPV will be a company with a CEO and a board comprising representatives of the Centre, the state government and the urban local bodies. The SPV will get funds from the Centre and the states, but a much larger amount has to come from public-private partnerships and market borrowings. It will also access other central government schemes; in other words, the flow of funds to other urban areas in the states may well be squeezed as the favoured “flagship” programme gets all the attention.

In the first two rounds, 33 cities with a total capital expenditure proposal of Rs 73,000 crore have been chosen. But what are these cities going to do to ­become smart cities? From a study of the proposals, the newspaper Mint has come up with some very revealing details (http://tinyurl.com/jpz8azh).

The smart cities will have both a pan-city and an ­area-based plan, i.e. on one particular part of the city. This is where the exclusionary nature of the mission begins. The focus is almost entirely on the area-based plan. In fact, as much as 81 per cent of the total outlay in the proposals for the 33 cities is on area-based plans.

There is a further concentration within this area-based spending: over 60 per cent will be on just two sectors—land and housing, and ICT—and of this, as much as 37 percent on land and housing. You will be disappointed if you think this means a large amount will go into housing, a critical area for our cities today. Among the 10 cities to spend the most on land and housing in their area-based development, only three (Bhubaneswar, Surat and Agartala) will see more spending on housing than on commercial development, and two (Indore and Faridabad) will have nothing whatsoever on housing. Most the expenditure in this category will be for commercial development, business districts, etc. Each city, then, is to have its own Bandra-Kurla Complex as in Mumbai, but a shinier one monitored and controlled by ICT. (This monitoring also raises questions about these systems being used for surveillance of citizens.)

So this is what India’s smart cities are going to be. Islands of modernity with gleaming office towers, which “run” on sophisticated software solutions that monitor traffic, power, water and sewage.

According to the Mint analysis, residents of the larger city, who get just 19 per cent of the total spending, won’t see anything better. The bulk of the capital expenditure will be on mobility (flyovers?) and ICT (digital control of traffic jams on the flyovers?). Sanitation and waste management, two of the biggest challenges in urban India, are at the bottom of the list of spending priorities.

Our cities are in a mess, but that should not mean we need consultants or multilateral financial institutions to distract us from what we really need to do. What we need are thoughtful—not ‘smart’—solutions to the problems of housing shortage, inadequate water supply, solid waste (mis)management, poor sewage, and mobility oriented ­towards private ­transport. We need a greater degree of citizens’ ­participation in planning for the city, which should inculcate civic sense as well. We need to end the hold of land sharks and dismantle the political-real estate nexus, which has led to a disfiguration of much of the urban landscape. We need more revenue ­collection powers for urban local bodies­—the list of the obvious is endless.

In the end, we need a sensitive—not ‘smart’—city where rich and poor both have rights to housing, water, transport, open spaces and all that goes into making a decent life. We need cities where people don’t have to live on the pavements and under bridges, where no municipal workers have to jump into drains to clean them, where traffic management and road sense is such that children can walk, cycle or take the bus to school without risking being run over.

The Smart Cities Mission won’t give us any of this.

A scam is not just one where pockets will be lined; it is also one where false promises are made. The Smart Cities Mission is one such scam of a government that projects a false sense of modernity, and that too in the fake image of a liveable city in 21st-century India.

(Hyderabad-based C. Rammanohar Reddy is former editor, Economic & Political Weekly)

Slide Show

Population estimates for the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, founded in 1882 and spread across 535 acres, vary between seven lakh and 10 lakh. It provides the ecosystem for an informal economy comprising numerous ­household enterprises that employ mostly local slum-dwellers. Leather, textiles and pottery are dominant sectors, and a lot of the manufacturing is for export. The total annual turnover was over US$1 billion in 2010.