Urban India | Bengaluru’s garbage, Mumbai’s gated democracy, Delhi’s smog

When doctors tell patients to move out of their own city, the joke isn’t on pollution. A nation that cannot build liveable cities cannot call itself developed

Do we really need to wait for Viksit Bharat before we can breathe in our own cities? Is that when Delhi doctors will stop advising people to leave the city for medical reasons? Will Bengaluru’s lakes learn not to catch fire, or Mumbai’s suburbs remember they were once meant for humans? Of course, these cities are only examples of the various other urban challenges we have in our midst.

The only thing that moves efficiently in urban India is apathy — from citizens who’ve stopped expecting better or asking for their basic civic liveability conditions, and from leaders who treat civic decay as a cosmetic issue, to be fixed with a tweet or a photo-op. The irony is that we speak of becoming a developed nation while being unable to perform the simplest act of civilisation — keeping the places we live in liveable.

When a city stops caring for its commons — its air, its streets, its neighbour — it also forgets how to be a society. Every winter, Delhi (NCR) becomes a metaphor pretending to be a city. The air thickens, the light turns brown, and doctors begin to sound like travel agents. A leading pulmonologist recently advised patients to leave Delhi for six to eight weeks if they could afford it.

That, right there, might be the most honest portrait of development in modern India — we produce unicorns and billionaires, but can’t have liveability in our cities. The annual smog crisis no longer shocks anyone. Politicians and bureaucrats perform outrage, citizens post sky pictures, and the rich buy larger purifiers or simply move abroad. The poor, who do not have the luxury of filters, simply inhale the price of everyone else’s progress.

In Bengaluru — the city once known for its greenery, cool breeze and quiet intelligence — has turned into a permanent traffic jam with a postcode. The city that sells digital solutions to the world cannot figure out where to dump its garbage, while even tall political leaders seem fearful of a supposed garbage mafia. Bengaluru has become an urban studies case nobody wants to study. Especially its own political class.

Mumbai too, that old dream of co-existence, is losing its character. It was once a city where the rich, the poor, and the famous were bound by the same monsoon and the same local train delays. Now, it’s a series of gated bubbles stitched together by exhausted workers. Encroachments rise where pavements once were at least imagined to be. The suburbs, once alive with the energy of the middle class, are now slow-moving nightmares — noisy, airless, faintly hostile, and more ghettoised. The city that was once inclusive has become a gated democracy with sea views. A city, for its old timers, is increasingly morally decadent and corrosively corrupt.

For the rich and the powerful, these things hardly matter. They live on air-conditioned islands of their own making, insulated by money, technology, and influence. When the smog or rain gets unbearable, they always have another home from which to post memes about it.

The irony is that these are also the only people who can change things. But they will not. They complain about the air with the tenderness of people discussing a relative’s illness — sorrowful, but never actionable.

Recently, a friend from South Mumbai (SoBo, for those who think that north of Worli needs a visa) complained about how bad the air had become and how their children’s international school had upgraded its buses to air-conditioned ones so the kids wouldn’t inhale pollution. That, apparently, was progress. The same friend spoke passionately about 'middle-class values’. I sometimes wonder — middle class, and who?

The irony is our own FOMO. We blame governments for bad roads and air, but our own civic sense is often the first casualty — we treat cities the way we treat each other in traffic. We keep speaking of other things without worrying about our society. The Sensex keeps rising, which is nice for people who can no longer step out to enjoy what they’ve earned. Gold prices too are doing well — proof that people are getting richer in cities they can barely live in. As healthcare bills quietly outpace salaries and the broken health insurance system, we’ll still have the comfort of memes and slogans, which, in our imagination, are the cheapest form of protest.

What does Viksit Bharat even mean?

Surely, it’s not about building roads to nowhere and towers no one can afford to live in. It’s also not about exporting software while importing oxygen. Hopefully not about measuring prosperity by market indices instead of the quality of daily city living. We speak of five- and 10-trillion-dollar dreams and digital revolutions, but development means little when the air itself has become a tax on life.

Without liveable cities, our development is just an illusion with a good PR agency. Our cities decay not just from citizen apathy, but from rulers who believe they live above the mess — literally and morally.

What India needs is not another speech about progress but an urban rebirth — one that begins with the basic act of letting people breathe, walk, and exist without crises. But civic decay is not an accident; it thrives on corruption and the quiet complicity of those who benefit from it. Maybe we’ve reached a stage where greed passes for aspiration and moral blindness for modernity.

We can build statues visible from space, but not footpaths visible from the street. Pedestrian-first planning, clean drains, uncluttered streets — all the simple things we keep promising but somehow find beneath our ambition. We prefer the glamour of GDP and the dopamine of new infrastructure announcements.

In Delhi, a new seasonal industry thrives — the temporary escape. Families migrate to the hills in November, post photos of blue skies, and return just in time for the next round of choking.

It’s the New Indian migration — not from poverty, but from prosperity. Soon, every city will have its own season to live in, and a season to migrate, at least for those who can afford.

And that is the real irony. For decades, the poor left their villages for a better life in the city. Now, the rich leave the city for a better life in the village.

Progress always did have a dark sense of humour.

Srinath Sridharan is a corporate adviser and independent director on corporate boards. X: @ssmumbai.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)