Manu Joseph: Why Indian cities may be doomed to remain unliveable

I did try to point out to him on X that right now Bangalore to Bangalore is two hours. I do not seriously believe he can change my quality of life, but he is the only politician I know who at least gets the fantasy right. And I so enjoy reading his tweets that sometimes I look furtively behind my shoulders to see if I am alone.

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Usually, Indian politicians don’t give any hope when they speak of our urban future. They speak of nonsensical things like “smart cities" and “twin cities." The fact is India’s politicians and people have worked together to make Indian cities among the most unliveable and ugly places on earth.

India is obsessed with the image of its airports. Otherwise, across a vast landscape, India is an urban catastrophe. I believe this will not change. There is no hope. I can think of only two phenomena that convey an accurate representation of modern India.

One is the Olympics and the other is any Indian town. The games expose how poorly run India is and how unkind we must be to each other to fare so poorly even against small nations. Our cities convey the same.

Politicians are blamed a bit too much for what is essentially national character. The political stamina that Indians have for useless issues, if a fraction of that emotion were dedicated to our decrepit civic infrastructure, the lack of parks and beauty, our lives would be instantly richer. But that is not going to happen.

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One of the reasons our lives will not improve is that India is unable to change its attitude towards how to treat Indians. India treats all its people as though they are poor. In the administrative subconscious, there is a feeling that this is enough for Indians, they don’t deserve more, they don’t want more.

Just imagine, wherever you are, what are the meetings scheduled in your municipal body today? You think they are going to discuss how to make roads endure, lane discipline, proper medians, working signals and how to make the city aesthetic so that it can serve the well-being of residents?

Traffic is not the greatest enemy of urban life. Many great cities in the world have that problem. Take Bangkok, for example. It has terrible traffic. Even though its efficient metro system makes life somewhat bearable, the fact is that it has very bad traffic, and like in India, its upper middle class prefers car travel despite the jams.

But Thais have such high civic sense and public dignity that Bangkok cannot match the misery of any Indian metro. India has never seriously tried to change the public behaviour of Indians.

India’s most influential people do not seem to believe in the idea of a city. Somehow, they do not appear to crave order or aesthetics or the comfort of ordinary people.

Also, maybe they intuitively feel that the chaos and ugliness of public life also make the poor feel that the country has not left them behind. At any given point of time, visually, India never alienates its poor. Except at fancy airport terminals.

India’s urban mess may also come from what is widely viewed as a political virtue—the fact that modern India was not governed long enough by its cultural elite. There was a lot of democracy very soon.

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The elite can be despicable, but they always know how to live well. Every great city in the world has been a beneficiary of the vision of a social elite and the ease with which they could enforce codes of social behaviour.

The fundamentals of modern India too were created by its elite, but they did not prevail long enough to nurture its cities. Some of India’s early leaders did not think cities were important.

Gandhi, for instance, wanted to bet big on villages. He was a famous evangelist of hygiene, but he seemed indifferent to urban planning. He wanted Indian children to learn handicraft even before their formal primary education (an idea that lurked in the first five-year plan).

The failure of the modern Indian elite is more interesting. For centuries, migration was always something that the unfortunate had to do. People fled nature and persecution. But many developing nations endured a new kind of migration where the luckiest people migrated to expand their luck.

For several generations now, the cream of India has migrated abroad or been in migration mode. It is not as though they hold the secret to improving urban life, but what the elite’s migration did was lower their stake in home, and in reforming home.

All successful nations were transformed by their elite. When a society’s luckiest people do not have high stakes in home, we get modern India.

In this phenomenon also lies our only hope. The Indian upper class never fully enjoyed migration. Now India has prospered enough to hold some attraction for the new economic elite, especially those who do not fully feel they belong in the West.

It costs little to act like feudal lords in India and many find living here better than having to endure Western order and culture. So, they may have a growing stake in making Indian cities liveable. They may want safer roads, and, who knows, even parks, clean air and lane discipline.