Implosion (8 page)

‘Cracks in the Social Structure’

Traditionally, fault lines in India have involved caste rivalries, clashes between religions and communities
,
the activities of secessionist groups (at various times, in areas of the north-east, Punjab and Kashmir) and insurgencies. Of these, by 2013, the most serious was the Naxalite movement, but new ones were emerging, especially over the use of land, which were increasing the risks of social unrest and political upheaval while also creating uncertainty and new risks for business. Yogendra Yadav, a social scientist and political analyst who became a founder member of the new anticorruption Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), has talked about ‘how the plunder of natural resources will affect the existing fault lines’ and worries ‘there are some cracks in the social structure that could take democracy apart’.
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The growing role of the states has been changing their relationship with the centre in India’s federal system, opening up fault lines in the way the country is run. The relationship is laid down in the country’s Constitution but, in practice, regional parties have gained enormous additional ad hoc political clout in recent years since they became members of central government coalitions. Their power was particularly apparent in the 2004 and 2009 Congress-led coalition governments that depended on the support of regional political leaders for their survival. This virtually allowed these regional leaders to dictate what the coalition could or could not do – for example, on land and tax reforms, foreign investment in supermarkets, a river water sharing agreement with Bangladesh.

Pressure on the use of land and rapacious profiteering by real estate and other speculators when land became available for development, have led to bottlenecks that affect economic development and growth. Small landowners, mostly rural and including tribal groups, have opposed their lands being used for mining and industrial development. This, along with the growing impact of the Naxalite rebels, has led to social unrest and protests in both rural and urban areas.

Legislation conferring a right to information that was passed in 2005 has opened up a new fault line – albeit a very constructive one – because, as in other countries, governments can no longer assume that deliberations will remain confidential. Coupled with rising popular pressure against corruption, it has made politicians vulnerable to sudden and unforeseen exposure of corrupt dealings and has undermined the image and authority of the government and of politicians. It has also slowed down decision-making because politicians and bureaucrats have become nervous of being accused, rightly or wrongly, of corruption. This combination of jugaad, chalta hai and emerging fault lines has led to increasingly dramatic and extensive project failures in recent years that have compounded India’s traditional crab-like approach to decision-making and execution. The best-documented and most shaming events were the Commonwealth Games preparations in 2010, and a day in July 2012 when power supplies to half of India’s population were cut for up to eleven hours – said to be a world record.

All international games have their moments of crises before they start, but Delhi’s went to an extreme with its inefficiency, bad governance, shoddy work and corruption. This led to international rejection of ‘filthy and uninhabitable’ conditions at the athletes’ village, just 13 days before the games were due to begin, which coincided with the collapse of a new steel arch footbridge near the main sports stadium. Among many other problems, the flats were incomplete or had quickly become dilapidated after being invaded by construction workers (and stray dogs) seeking refuge from their grossly inadequate labour camps in unusually heavy monsoon rain. The basic problem was that there were too many people nominally in charge, with no top-down coordination and leadership. Those responsible for various aspects of the preparations and operations included Delhi’s chief minister and the central government’s ministers for urban development and sports, none of whom had the calibre or authority to lead such a mega event, especially not Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of India’s Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee. Manmohan Singh and his Prime Minister’s office (PMO) should have taken an early lead, but he played his usual role of standing back from the fray, and the PMO lacked punch. Singh should have been encouraged to step in by Sonia Gandhi, but nothing happened, and Sonia and her son and heir Rahul did not deign – or dare – to become involved.

In 1982, Sonia’s husband, Rajiv Gandhi, who was then a Congress party general secretary, had taken charge of preparations for Delhi’s Asian Games when they had fallen behind schedule.
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As in 2010, there were ‘vast numbers of overlapping government committees and over-spends, with construction workers leading miserable underfed lives,’ wrote Ved Mehta in
Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom.
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‘The whole exercise is being transformed by unscrupulous entrepreneurs with political pull into a money spinning operation,’ Mehta wrote, quoting
The Hindu
newspaper. ‘It has led to widespread hoarding and black-marketing of construction material. pushing up costs and, in the process, filling the pockets of the privileged few’ Yet, 26 years later, India had learned no lessons and the Gandhis stayed away – though, ultimately, the games went well and India won 38 gold medals, coming second to Australia.
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Chalta hai!

Multiple accusations of corruption and extortion led to court cases against officials led by Kalmadi, a flamboyant, wealthy and well-connected politician in the Congress party. He had made a career out of heading sports administrative bodies, including the Indian Olympic Association, and was the chairman of the games’ organizing committee. He was booed at the opening ceremony because he was seen as the leader of all that had gone wrong. The boos reflected the pent-up anger and frustration of Delhi-ites who saw this blustering responsibility-dodging part-time politician as the focal point for failures that had blackened India’s international image.
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He was jailed, pending trial, for ten months in 2011. He was then released on bail and was, unsurprisingly, rehabilitated into some activities of the Congress party though he was no longer socially acceptable. In February 2013, he was put on trial along with nine others on charges linked to a Swiss firm’s contract for the games’ timing, scoring and results system, but there was no sign of action against many others in the Delhi government and elsewhere who were suspected of involvement in corrupt deals.

The other major breakdown of infrastructure occurred when the national power grid failed in July 2012. It was overloaded by at least three states drawing more than their authorized share of electricity. A few days earlier, there had been a similar shutdown affecting a quarter of the population. About one-third of the 174 gigawatts of electricity generated in India annually is either stolen or lost in the conductors and transmission equipment that form the country’s distribution grid, contributing, along with slow project development, to a shortfall of close to 10 per cent in supplies.
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Jugaad usually solves the problem, partially and expensively, with power generated by large private power plants in factories and portable generators in individual homes and shops.

On the same night as the biggest black-out, a fire on an express train killed 32 people. Two months earlier, 29 people had died in two train collisions.
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Although very different occurrences, these infrastructure failures stemmed from the country’s generally laid-back approach to tackling and curing problems, in the hope that they would go away. In both cases, there was a lack of focused political management. The railway minister at the time was Mukul Roy, a minor politician from West Bengal, who spent most of his time in the state, doing the bidding of his political boss, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister, who herself had earlier been an absentee railways minister. Like Banerjee, Mukul rarely visited his railways ministry office in Delhi.

Sushilkumar Shinde, who had been minister of power for three years, was not wholly responsible for the grid failures because power supplies are managed by individual states. He should, however, have put more effort into tackling India’s overall energy crisis, which had been left to fester by the government, from the prime minister downwards. In particular, insufficient effort had been made to speed up delayed coal deliveries from the badly run government-owned Coal India, which had caused power stations to cut output and even shut down. Management of coal production had also been disrupted by a crisis over corrupt mining licenses. Shinde could have used his political clout to demand more action on these fronts.

Notes

1
.   Parliament Session Wrap, PRS Legislative Research,
http://www.prsindia.org/parliamenttrack/parliament-updates/parliament-session-wrap-budget-2013-2746/

2
.   
http://www.prsindia.org/parliamenttrack/vital-stats/

3
.   K. Shankar Bajpai in conversation with JE, October 2012

4
.   K. Shankar Bajpai, ‘The closing on the Indian Mind’,
The Hindu
, 29 May 2012,
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3466593.ece

5
.   ‘Inclusive Growth for the Bottom of the Pyramid’, The C.K. Prahalad Memorial Lecture by Prof Gautam Ahuja, 9 January 2011,
http://www.pravasitoday.com/prof-c-k-prahalad-memorial-lecture-by-prof-gautam-ahuja-at-pbd-2011-complete-text-and-video

6
.   The Ambani story was told by Hamish McDonald, an Australian journalist, in
The Polyester Prince
, Allen & Unwin NSW, Australia 1998, which the Ambanis arranged to have withdrawn from publication in India. It was reprinted in two modified and extended 2010 editions:
Ambani & Sons
, Roli Books, Delhi, and
Mahabharata in Polyester
, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.

7
.   
The Polyester Prince,
Allen & Unwin NSW, Australia 1998, p. 52.

8
.   Ibid., p. 47.

9
.   ‘An Ambani Story gets a makeover’,
Mail Today,
pp. 20–21, by JE, 3 October 2010,
http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=3102010
and on
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/ambani-sons-%E2%80%93-revived-from-the-polyester-prince-they-pulped/

10
.
India Calling,
Anand Giridharadas, HarperCollins India 2011,
http://www.harpercollins.co.in/BookDetail.asp?Book_Code=2740

11
. ‘Indian telecoms – The right connections’,
The Economist
, 18 December 2003,
http://www.economist.com/node/2304669

12
. S.A. Aiyar, ‘Jugaad is our most precious resource’,
The Economic Times
, 15 August 2010,
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-08-15/news/27567823_1_jugaad-frugal-engineering-innovation

13
. George Tanham,
Indian Strategic Thought
, Rand Corporation, 1992,
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=sOsCAAAACAAJ&dq=Tanham+%E2%80%9CIndian+strategic+thought%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=A qarUNraCMHprAfWkoDQDA&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAg

14
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/india%E2%80%99s-fdi-changes-reveal-weaknesses-in-industrial-policy-making/

15
. In conversation with JE, September 2013

16
. Yogendra Yadav, speaking on ‘Fault Lines of Democracy’, at a King’s College India Institute (London) conference, ‘Making Sense of India’, in Delhi, September 2012

17
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/history-repeated-as-delhi-judders-leaderless-towards-the-commonwealth-games/

18
. Ved Mehta,
Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom
, Penguin Books India, 1995;
Yale
University Press, 1996,
http://www.amazon.com/Rajiv-Gandhi-Ramas-Kingdom-Mehta/dp/0300068581

19
. ‘The games end well – in a week of other incredible India scams’, Riding the Elephant blog, 15 October 2010, http://wp.me/pieST-15y

20
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/boos-and-cheers-clear-the-air-for-a-vibrant-commonwealth-games/

21
. ‘World’s Greatest Power Thieves Keep 400m Indians in Dark’, Bloomberg TV, 1 June 2011, Power Secretary P. Uma Shankar gave the statistics in an interview.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-31/world-s-greatest-power-thieves-keep-400-million-indians-in-dark.html

22
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/creaking-india-hit-by-power-and-railway-failures/

4
Planning the Unplanned

India’s cities have a rich architectural and cultural legacy. It ranges from the Mughal tombs and British-era imperial government buildings of New Delhi to the Rajput palaces and forts of Rajasthan, and the Hindu temples of the eastern coastline. But the legacy is being lost in modern India because of a lack of planning controls and corruption. This is partly a result of the lucrative powers of patronage and a laid-back approach that assumes planning can be fixed when the need arises.

Huge swathes of India’s towns and cities have grown unlawfully without official permissions, especially in the 2000s, to meet the needs of rapid economic growth. They have done so without the necessary infrastructure of roads, water and power supplies, and sewage and drainage facilities. About 75 per cent of the country’s cities have no master plan,
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and there are few sustained programmes of infrastructure development and maintenance. This has brought India to the brink of a national crisis. Between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of water supplies are lost in transit in most Indian cities, and less than 30 per cent of officially recorded sewage is treated in adequate facilities.
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