Budget fantasy and ground reality

Beyond the standard address of poverty, farm sector and industrial growth, the swell of monumental thinking lifts the Budget’s rhetoric with false effervescence into unrealised areas: the world of yet unbuilt infrastructure, the experiment with international standard highways, high-speed rail, new cities, shipbuilding and ports

March 04, 2015 12:17 am | Updated June 05, 2021 04:24 pm IST

Once while waiting in line at the railway station in Lucknow, I was approached by a tout who said he could get me a discounted train ticket on the Handicapped quota. All I had to do was limp in front of the train conductor. Despite my protest that I didn’t have a handicap, he insisted he had gotten many such tickets, and that both of us would benefit from the deal.

The railway Budget obviously can’t account for such petty corruption; instead it announces — with much fanfare — its technological hopes for the new century: 1,200 kilometres of new track, 17,000 bio-toilets, surveillance cameras in ladies’ compartments, wheelchairs for senior citizens, wi-fi and mobile charging facilities at stations. While all these suggest greater convenience to its users, there is little by way of serious train engineering advance.

Basic issues

The Indian rail network is the fourth largest in the world. However, much of it was built by the British, with only a fifth of additional track being added after Independence. Since then however, the number of passengers has increased seven fold. And although much of the system has been upgraded, from steam to diesel and electric power, rail technology remains antiquated and frozen in a 19th century time warp.

The most basic industrial design has created throughout the world an efficient functioning train compartment in light steel, with wide panoramic windows and comfortable seating and storage. The Indian train, by contrast, is a ramshackle vessel of heavy gauge clanking steel that raises dust along the countryside, with people hanging on doors and others perched on the roof. Train transport is a symbol of an unmanageable commuting demand in an overpopulated country — a place where hygiene, comfort, safety standards, or luxury rarely enter the requirements of ordinary travel.

Instead of addressing these basic issues, the Budget promises either petty electronic conveniences or outlandish ambitions: bullet trains and increased speeds of 200 kmph on long distance corridors. Are these even possible in a country where every inch of land in the rural areas is thickly populated, as is often noted in grim headlines: Six labourers crushed on rail track off Patna?

How then do you introduce new ideas into a system that must move 13 million passengers every day, without bringing the system to a halt? Is there some other form of high speed transport for us, something between the steam engine and the bullet train, perhaps a form of air dynamic or underground service, waiting to be invented? In a country where population densities and sheer numbers decide the fate of most public enterprises, the railways is only one of the many departments that is defeated by the statistics.

Belief and reality

The defeat shows in the larger Budget itself, and its aimless drift into generalities. Its primary problem is the combination — an unsure mix of grand optimism and cautious reality. Beyond the standard address of poverty, inflation, rural development, farm sector and industrial growth, the swell of monumental thinking lifts the Finance Minister’s rhetoric with false effervescence into unrealised areas: the world of yet unbuilt infrastructure, the experiment with international standard highways, high-speed rail, new cities, shipbuilding and ports. Without a previous record in any of these areas, no one can question his motives, only his ambition. The Budget becomes an exercise in building belief.

Obviously then, such false belief needs to be tutored by ground reality. Even Arun Jaitley’s rural thrust seems to be misdirected in promoting useless aspiration. No longer the quiet low-lying mud dwellings of the 1960s and 1970s, the urbanisation of rural clusters has led to a serious decline in village life. Most villages are now brick-walled slums without drainage, water supply or ventilation and closely resemble their decrepit city cousins. The current migration from village to city is therefore from one slum to another, and calls for government investment in serious technical upgrade in health, sanitation and home construction technology, rather than mere electrification.

City and village

When little remains of rural India, obviously a return to the Gandhian model is impossible. And any attempts at globalised industrial corridors will quickly do away with the last vestiges of village life. The unusually vast expense on physical infrastructure needs to be reviewed in light of available technology and resources. Nehru’s India may have required the physical infrastructure of connection to the big city, but given the current dissatisfaction with rural life and failed agriculture practices, the building of new roads will merely hasten the migration to the city.

In taking the city to the village, the government is moreover committing the larger sin of cultural homogeneity. Two decades earlier it was possible to distinguish the city from the village; today, both are similarly congested ramshackle slums. A decade earlier, it was possible to tell apart cities from each other: Delhi, a Colonial garden suburb, Mumbai, a marine town, Allahabad, a cantonment sprawl, Jaipur, a sandstone citadel. Every one of them is now condemned to a parasitic sameness. Cities, all cities, now have something of the character of war, a charged theatrical spectacle, an incomplete stage-set of decaying structures, perpetually smoking, smouldering and choking. Condemned to the mantra of growth at any cost, the Budget makes no provisions for improving current life, nothing on urban transport, nothing on pollution, nothing on the country’s dead rivers ….

In such a denuded setting, it’s hard to trust a government perpetually sounding the horn of global aspirations: 14,000 crore on roads, 10,000 crore on rail, 70,000 crore increase in infrastructure, another 25,000 crore on Rural Infrastructure Development Fund for schools and medical facilities in the rural areas. Impressive statistics aside, the failure of many such previous programmes in villages should lead the government down an altogether different, wholly unconventional, path. Without incurring undue expense on the construction of village schools — already without teachers and toilet facilities — a more inventive home schooling programme may be the answer, where the physical connectivity of roads and the impossibly long distances between school and home are replaced by the Internet classroom.

Making innovation work

Of the 4.6 million kilometres of roads in India, only half are paved. Is this an indicator of work to be done, or reason to search for alternative forms of transport? More than ever, the government’s new Innovation Mission needs to be directed to difficult Indian social, cultural, and economic situations, transporting 18th century living patterns directly into the 21st century. Where innovative ideas can work is in the absence of confining conventional frameworks. When rural connectivity can be achieved through the computer or the innovation of local transport to traditional markets, the connection of villages across four-lane highways is nothing but a misappropriation of funds.

If the success of the ‘Make in India’ programme is to be linked to the Prime Minister’s new approach to promoting alternatives in solar and wind energy, the production of electric cars, biotechnology, etc. then the proposed emphasis on innovation must begin by first questioning all conventional wisdom. Is there a benefit to long-term expenditure if the project doesn’t offer any long-term advantage? If more cars, more buses, more people will make a road system obsolete in 10 years, could a more novel approach to movement be tried? Could the tourism budget be directed at innovative planning rather than following international hotel models? Indeed, should the government attempt a mixed-use city without roads and cars, if it doesn’t have a solution to the current polluted city?

With a vast range of unique urban, rural, social, engineering situations, the Indian state and its supporting private entrepreneurial partner have stood on the sidelines for half a century and watched helplessly as others race across the finish line. Now, the Modi government offers a new perspective: if we are second rate, the important thing is to achieve, even if by borrowed means. All the various models of infrastructure — highways, bullet trains, smart cities, BRTs — have been tested long enough in China, Japan, Canada, Colombia and elsewhere to make them foolproof applications in India. What stands in the way is the manageable hurdle of culture, tradition and some foreign resources. And a hard sell to some angry farmers whose livelihood is to be whisked away from beneath their feet.

At one time, India’s poverty — and fabled riches — defined its relationship with the world. Now, its second rate, copycat status will make it a truly global player.

(Gautam Bhatia is an architect and sculptor.)

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