Why Indian cities can never be smart
On August 27, Union urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu declared 98 cities that are going to become the first smart cities in India.
The list also included the Punjab cities: Ludhiana, Amritsar, Jalandhar and Chandigarh. (Incidentally, this smart cities project is not a new one. It was introduced by the earlier government under the name of JNNURM (Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Rural Mission) and is largely funded by the World Bank).
The reasons for this project, in my opinion, is a neo-liberal agenda of imperialism.
In the current era, finance capital is stuck in a global economic crisis. The economic crisis of 2007-2008 has not ended, and to come out of it, the global finance capital has to be invested somewhere. The developing countries are the only destination for it.
However, the Indian government and many other developing countries were compelled earlier to open their economies, but in this current era, the scale of imperialist loot has been aggravated on a wider scale. The current crisis has enhanced the policies of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation in many new public sectors too.
So under the pressure of these policies, many new sectors of the developing countries have been opened up for the private sector, and recently many cities were alloted to foreign countries for the "development" of these cities as smart cities.
For example: Banaras has been given to Japan, Badodra to China, Allahabad, Ajmer and Vishakhapatnam to the US, Nagpur and Pondicherry to France, and three other cities to Germany.
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| The smart cities project doesn't allow the poor to be a part of it. |
The smart cities project is a crude example of this imperialist loot. Under this smart cities project, the need for land and the privatisation of services in cities were a prerequisite, so that the foreign capital could come easily in these cities in the form of big shopping malls/complexes and many other private services.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail is also a part of this project. So the hunger for land was achieved by proclaiming the acquisition of public land (where a large population of slum dwellers are situated). This is how the story of slum demolition started in many cities of India which include Bhuvaneshwar, Chandigarh, Ranchi, Gwalior, Mumbai, Dhanwad, Delhi and so on.
In this era of neo-liberalism, finance capital is not coming into the production sector. Rather, it works through the channel of speculation, especially in share market transactions (that is, through various types of new speculative monetary instruments like derivatives). So owing to these characteristics, a large part of it is invested in the service sector.
The service sector is contributing the largest share in GDP, but this sector is highly volatile in its nature, because sunk costs in this sector are very low and nor does it contribute to employment as much as the manufacturing and primary sectors.
Owing to this volatile character, foreign capital can easily come and go from India, which we can understand from the 2008 crisis, and AIG-type of foreign corporations can leave India without any prior information and retrench their employees on large scale.
This is the case with many other service providing corporations. That's why the service sector is the main target for FDI in India. So these new service-oriented smart cities would consume the luxury goods and start a new culture in which only the rich class would live without any "hindrance" from the poor and unemployed youth of slums, which are thought to be "dirty" and prone to "violence".
The new smart cities would focus on the automotive industry, service sector, beautification and infrastructure development projects. The automotive industry comprise of MNCs, which would further reduce the demand for labour in these smart cities.
So the smart cities project doesn't allow the poor to be a part of it. Also, after the opening up of the small scale sector for foreign trade in India, the inflow of foreign goods has reduced the demand for goods from this sector which has led to the termination of major units in this sector and also led to the reduction in demand for labour in the cities.
Now the authorities in these cities are thinking that this "excess" labour (which is living in slums) is a burden on them from both angles (on one side, in terms of land and on the other, in terms of population pressure). Under the smart cities project the working class is bound to live in the outskirts of the city as it was done in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
As a result of the harsh conditions of the Indian agriculture and a shortage of agro-based industry, people from rural India are migrating towards the cities. On the other hand, owing to a weak manufacturing sector, the cities too are not able to absorb the rural migrating population.
That is why unorganised sector jobs are increasing in the cities, in which the people are ready to do the works on meagre wages. The majority of the migrating population consists of rural Dalits.
Let us look at the smart city project in Chandigarh. First, the Chandigarh administration had underestimated the slum population of the city. According to the National Building Organisation (NBO), in 2001, 2,08,057 lakh people were living in Chandigarh slums and the administration had a plan to rehabilitate just one lakh of them.
Under the Chandigarh Housing Board's (CHB) small flat scheme of 2006, 25,728 houses had to be built, but the CHB built 12,864 and in 2014 the authorities said that they have no further funds for this scheme. All the rehabilitation houses were built in the outskirts of Chandigarh.
Now the city administration wants a "reasonable size" of the labour force, for which they are giving fake slogans of "Housing for All". Chandigarh - the capital of Punjab and Haryana - is one of the first cities in northern India which is selected for the smart cities project.
Earlier, the Chandigarh deputy commissioner (DC) said that the city would be slum-free by March 2015, but it was not made possible. The CHB's data says that there were 18 colonies/slums in the city. However, two or three colonies are left out from the biometric survey list.
In this smart cities race the authorities have already demolished nine labour colonies in the city from 2009 to 2015. Seven out of these nine colonies were demolished in just 20 months. Colony number five was the largest colony which was the living place for approximately 60 to 80 thousand people and it was demolished in cold month of November 2013.
In colony number five, out of 15 to 20 thousand dwelling units, just 6,925 units were covered under the biometric survey. The reality of fair biometric survey is also under question. Before the demolition of colony five the administration had just allotted houses to 2,500 families, but later on out of the 6,925 families surveyed, nearly 4,200 were rehabilitated.
After six months, another five colonies named "Pandit", "Kuldeep", "Mazdoor", "Kajherhi" and "Nehru" were demolished. The rehabilitation ratio in these colonies was even worse than that for colony five. The timing for the demolition of these colonies was very important.
The parliamentary election was held on April 10, 2014 in Chandigarh, but the result was yet to come (it came on May 16). These colonies were demolished on May 10, 2014. The slums were demolished after people had voted, and then they were termed as the unauthorised citizens of this "smart city".
This act has exposed the vote bank politics of the Chandigarh authorities. No party came to the support of the affected families except the Ghar Adhikar Sangharsh Morcha (GASM). They have organised many protests, marches and road blockades in the city which were helpful in increasing the number of families rehabilitated in different colonies, but the administration was adamant about demolising the colonies.
But the people's resistance has made the Chandigarh administration realise that the demolition of slums is not an easy task. After the demolition drive on May 10, the city administration issued a demolition notice to another nine colonies, but again a large protest was organised by the GASM, but this time the Chandigarh Police adopted the strategy of not letting the protesters reach the protest spot of sector-17.
So they started picking up the slum dwellers and lathicharged on whosoever tried to go on the protest spot and picked up nearly 100 inhabitants. But on account of the tremendous popular pressure, the newly elected MP Kirron Kher had to intervene and considering the popular anger, and in order to save the image of the BJP, she put the demolition drive on hold.
The BJP was, however, against the demolition drive earlier. After watching the anger among the people, the city administration also started to build approximately 5,000 houses in the Maloya colony. But still, the authorities are not building complete houses as mentioned under the Chandigarh Small Flats Scheme 2006.
After three months, the demolition notice was sent to the Madrasi colony in sector-26. The GASM members, along with the colony residents, met the Kher, but this meeting exposed the cruel face of the sitting Chandigarh MP and deputy commissioner (Mohammad Shayin) when they took a sharp U-turn by confusing the slum people about not demolishing their colonies.
But owing to the earlier protests, the number of families being rehabilitated increased in this colony. However ultimately, the authorities demolished this colony on September 12, 2014, though a day before, the MP had said that the authorities would not demolish the colony.
Instead, the police, on September 11, picked up the two leading members of the GASM from the Madrasi colony, which were planning for another protest. And they were sent to Budail Jail the same day. They were just booked under the section 107/151 of Indian Penal Code (IPC), and after the demolition they were released.
After that, on June 25, 2015, another notice was published in the newspaper that the Dhanas Kachi Basti would be demolished on June 30. However, this colony was not being eyed by the Chandigarh administration because this was built on a semi-public semi-private land.
The notice didn't even satisfy the legal procedure required. Then on June 29, the people of Dhanas basti organised a gherao of the DC office in sector-17. This protest was mainly organised by the CPI (ML) (Liberation).
But when the DC refused to cancel the demolition notice, police started to lathicharge the inhabitants. The police fired rubber bullets and tear gas on the people which led to serious injuries for many including women and children. Nearly 40 people were arrested during that protest and they were booked under various sections of IPC.
Next day, the arrested people were sent to the Budail Jail. After this violent struggle the DC put the demolition on hold and after a week the people arrested were released. Before their release, the GASM organised a protest for their release on June 30 in sector-17.
The protesters' demands were; release of all the slum inhabitants and dropping of all fake cases, treatment of the injured people to be borne by the city administration and that the demolition drive in Chandigarh should be stopped immediately, and that colonies should not be demolished until people got houses.
This is the story of a city which is going to become a smart city by crushing its real inhabitants (that is slum dwellers) who had made huge sacrifices to build this city. But now the administration says that they are not the citizens of this city, they are "illegal" inhabitants who have acquired the public land. So the question arises: is making a city beautiful and smart more important than valuing the working masses of the city?