Too little, too slow, just for show

State, Market, Society

All countries want to ‘develop’, but in countries where many people are poor, the urgency for seeking progress needs to be much greater, and most political leaders understand that. Since Independence, we’ve seen many promises to transform the states and the nation, from several leaders. But the long list of initiatives, missions and schemes they have rolled out across many different areas of focus -- health, education, science and technology, manufacturing, and more -- has not lifted us into the middle rungs of the world’s nations, let alone the top tier.

Some change is visible, of course. But that’s no more than what has happened in many other countries over decades. In fact, some nations have developed much faster than others, improving the lives of their citizens and creating a better space for themselves on the world stage. Meanwhile, our Human Development Indices are growing more slowly. This is partly concealed by a large population, which makes some outcomes look large -- e.g., India is the world’s fifth-largest economy -- but when we assess them in per-capita terms, the numbers tell a very different story.

Why? The poor quality of politics is, of course, an important reason, but it’s still worth asking how this has contributed to a persistent development deficit. As I see it, this happened in three ways. We did -- and still do -- too little, and even that was done very slowly, and we usually completed the celebrations long before any strong outcomes were achieved!

The problem of doing too little is evident at all scales. Bengaluru’s footpath-improvement programme is over a decade old now. It was motivated by two things -- one, that if footpaths were better, some trips that people made in their vehicles could instead be done on foot. And two, if we are spending lots of money on building footpaths, we should at least make sure that the money produces some value by building them right.

But years later, there aren’t more than 20 streets on which a pedestrian can walk continuously and comfortably. During the same time, we have built another 500+ kilometres of ‘footpaths’ on which one cannot walk anywhere. The ‘too few’ and the ‘too slow’ are related, in fact. If we had set out to improve walkability on 1,500 streets instead of 15 streets, a very different approach to development would have emerged from it.

We declared early that all of this is part of how a ‘smart city’ should look, completely forgetting that completeness is an important part of anything that is smart. Officials and political leaders insisted that after the first few ‘pilots’, we would get on to a much faster path. But that was always going to fail, because of how small the first imagination was. It has been suggested to every government since 2009 that they should take up a programme of pedestrian improvements over 2,000 km in the city, but they’ve been uniformly happy to manage one pedestrian street, another one they wish they hadn’t done, and a score of roads with better footpaths.

Or, take the case of buses in the city. It is well-known among transport planners that we need to double the bus fleet, which means that there is a deficit of about 7,000-8,000. And even after buying that many, we’ll need to keep buying two buses a day -- yes, every day -- to replace old ones and keep up with population growth. Yet, we’ve not had a single year in the last two decades in which we came anywhere near this rate of additions. No wonder there are so many private vehicles; BMTC doesn’t adequately serve most areas outside the ring road, where more than half the region’s population now lives.

When things go as slowly as they have, there are two options. One is to correct our course, and steer towards larger and quicker results. But that option was available in the beginning itself, and was not taken. The second course, which governments find much easier, is to celebrate the small gains and make them seem bigger than they actually are. Why work hard for progress when ‘announcements’ are so much easier?

We can see this in other sectors, too, and at state and national scale. Half the homes in our metros don’t have piped water supply or sewerage, but at the pace of construction of this infrastructure in most cases, it will be at least two decades before they’re all reached. Half the children don’t graduate from school in most large states, but until very recently, we were proposing to build one ‘model’ school in each district. The national highways’ expansion programme dates back to Vajpayee’s government, but there are still stretches of Phase I that are not complete. 5G? A lot of places are still to get 4G.

There’s a cycle of deflection hard-wired into such failure. When citizens, development activists and experts seek a significant improvement in something, they’re often told that it is already going on.

If it’s pointed out that it is too slow, we’re told that after the pilot, the pace will pick up. If we point out that the pilot itself is now several years old, that is explained away by saying that one needs to give these things time. And when it’s pointed out that many others are doing things faster, you’ll be told that somehow, our nation, state or city is different.

If being different means that we do too little, too slow, and just for show, that’s a kind of difference that we can do without. India is not South Korea, of course. But that’s the point. We should be asking why it is not, because if we don’t, then at some point on that journey, we’ll find ourselves along new lows repeatedly. “We are not Bangladesh” is coming up next.

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