Colonial creations

The message as Chennai limps back to normal from the grip of flooding that is bound to have countrywide consequences is that India does not need smart cities. It needs cities that are livable. Also, India does not need e-governance. It needs governance. The ambition to run is always admirable but those who nurse such soaring hopes should first practise walking.

Whether or not we admit it, most of our cities are colonial creations. Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai do not become indigenous growths just because late in life they had fancy indigenous names thrust upon them. New Delhi, the country’s capital, is of course not just colonial but an ostentatious flaunting of imperial might. A stupid and ignorant lieutenant-governor who wanted the bungalows pulled down to make way for blocks of flats on the grounds that they were colonial, did not realise that the entire metropolitan project is colonial. Parliament, Rahstrapati Bhavan, the courts and secretariat all speak of British power.

The other three cities were not quite so unambiguously colonial. Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai came to terms with native life.

They had their European and Indian quarters, and the two were usually worlds apart. Kolkata was called the “City of Palaces” and “Second City” (of the British empire, after London) but those epithets referred to the European areas. Jackals roamed the Indian areas and the British incorporated a pair of scavenger cranes in the crest of the civic corporation because the vast piles of putrefying garbage attracted flocks of those birds. Of course, there was no hard and fast divide as in French-ruled Pondicherry where a ditch separated what were openly called the White and Black Towns. Rich Indians — princes, barristers and tycoons — could live in the European areas.

Tamils might not have been allowed into the Adyar Club but they built spacious bungalows in Chennai’s Adyar. Parsee villas were perched on Mumbai’s Malabar Hill. In Kolkata, Bengali businessmen and barristers lived among the sahibs in Alipore and Old Ballygunge. But cities did not have a holistic vision or a composite identity. The infrastructure catered basically to the white areas. As a result, every single facility is under tremendous pressure today. Storm water pipes that were meant to cater to a thousand people must now provide for a hundred thousand. Roads that were built to take a hundred cars must now bear the weight of a hundred thousand. The need for sewers, water, electricity and housing has multiplied many times without supply keeping up with demand. Mumbai’s mammoth traffic jams, Kolkata’s insanitary and malodorous bustees and, now, Chennai’s deadly floods bear witness to the neglect of urban architecture since the British left.

Chennai has fared especially badly because neither of Tamil Nadu’s two main political parties has been able to win a second term in the state Assembly since 1991. As a result, the city has suffered from a fitful vision and on-again, off-again execution of plans and projects on the anvil. For the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the post of mayor of Chennai was the training ground for M.K. Stalin, the party’s heir apparent. Elected mayor in 1996 he served in that capacity up to 2001. Then the rival All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government abolished direct mayoral elections. That meant a complete discontinuity of projects. Successive governments were more keen on overturning its predecessor’s plans and policies than on working together on a long-term vision for an improved infrastructure.

Just as Poes Gardens where the Tamil Nadu chief minister lives boasts fine avenues and well-kept pavements, Pallikaranai was among one of the worst affected areas in Chennai during the flooding. This was because the government had allowed builders to destroy the marshland that served as protection against inundation in spite of reports that go back to 2005 highlighting the potential danger. Those who asked for action were sometimes threatened with defamation suits. An IAS officer, Vijay Pingale, was reportedly transferred only a few days before the disaster because he warned that Chennai was about to be flooded.

Kolkata, too, has faced a similar peril ever since the natural marshes of the Salt Lakes to the east of the city were drained to create Salt Lake City. Many of the canals along the road to the airport have also been filled in to become car parks or pander to the chief minister’s passion for beautification so that we have flocks of wild horses and other statues and even an imitation of the clock tower and Big Ben from London’s Houses of Parliament (Mamata Banerjee is crazy about turning Kolkata into London in a most superficial way) instead of natural drainage.

Institutionalised sycophancy being far worse in Tamil Nadu, filmstars readily participate in public shows to create larger-than-life heroes of politicians like Jayalalithaa. That prevents differing points of view being expressed, and suppresses the free exchange of opinions between rulers and ruled.

Politicians are free to pursue their egoistic cults, and reap handsome benefits from the contracts system. Contractors are powerful folk. I read reports of a joint commissioner of Chennai Corporation being transferred only a few days after he fined the city’s contractors over the poor quality of roads he had built.

It’s the same in all our cities. A contractor once boasted that he had an arrangement with the municipal inspectors. They measured the depth of the tarmac only in the spots he indicated after a stretch of road had been relaid. That way his full bill was sanctioned and the same repairs were necessary after the next monsoon. It can’t be very different in Chennai.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author