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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | New Arrivals Strain India’s Cities to Breaking Point by Lydia Polgreen

New Arrivals Strain India’s Cities to Breaking Point by Lydia Polgreen

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published Published on Dec 2, 2010   modified Modified on Dec 2, 2010

Mahitosh Sarkar came here from his distant village in West Bengal 12 years ago looking for a better life, and he found it. He abandoned the penniless existence of a subsistence fisherman to become a big-city vegetable seller. His wife found work as a maid. Their four children went to school. Their tiny household, a grim but weather-tight room in a dilapidated tenement, had a color TV and a satellite dish.

But these days Mr. Sarkar is counting losses, not blessings. His 10-year-old son died along with more than 70 others when their tenement collapsed on Nov. 15. His wife is in the hospital with a broken leg. All of their possessions, including that color TV, are gone.

The crumbled remains of the illegal building in which the Sarkar family lived in a riverside neighborhood of East Delhi have become an emblem of India’s failure to come to grips with its urban explosion.

After decades of being primarily a nation of farmers, India’s countryside is emptying out, as millions leave their stagnant villages and flock to the cities. But India’s urban infrastructure has not kept pace, and that failing now threatens to undermine the nation’s ability to vault its multitudes out of poverty and share the fruits of its nearly double-digit growth more widely.

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030, 70 percent of India’s jobs would be created in cities, and about 590 million Indians would live in them. To provide enough housing and commercial space, it said, India must build the equivalent of the city of Chicago every year.

But it has no such plans, and the cities already here are buckling under the strain of their new arrivals. From Mumbai to Bangalore, Delhi to Chennai, roads are perpetually choked. Sewers, water lines and electricity are lacking. Perhaps most important, housing is desperately short, especially for impoverished new arrivals, leaving India with more slum dwellers than anywhere on earth.

“We require a radical rethinking about urban development,” said K. T. Ravindran, a professor of urban design who frequently works with the government on urban issues. “It is not that there are no ideas. It is that there is no implementation of those ideas.”

Like those of many Indian cities, Delhi’s building codes and zoning laws were written for a much smaller city in a different time, with policies that actively discourage growth.

The number of floors in most neighborhoods is capped at five stories, and in many areas fewer. The government largely controls land, and government approval for new development is difficult to obtain, even to house the wealthy and middle class, never mind the poor.

The dilapidated state of Indian cities is in some ways by design. For decades, Indian governments tried to discourage migration to cities by making city life unaffordable and unbearable for new arrivals.

These policies were driven at least in part by a Gandhian belief that India should be a rural nation, and more broadly by a centrally planned, socialist approach to development. But rural Indians have voted against these notions with their feet.

A recent report on urban slums published by the Center for Policy Research and the Centre des Sciences Humaines concluded that these measures “have made formal housing expensive and unattainable to a large share of the population, reinforced both chronic urban infrastructure shortages citywide and squalid, precarious living conditions in urban slums.”

Indeed, cheap rental housing outside of slums, like the tiny room Mr. Sarkar and his family shared, is almost impossible to find because it is very difficult to create such housing legally.

“If I want to build for the poor, the current building codes wouldn’t allow me to do it profitably,” said Sanjeev Sanyal, and economist and expert on urbanization. “There is a demand that is not being met, and the only way to meet it is by breaking the law.”

The building’s owner, Amrit Singh, appears to have flourished by bending the law. He had more than 25 criminal cases pending against him, according to the Delhi police.

His misdeeds included selling adulterated cement, the police said, and dealing in stolen goods. According to local news reports, he also bragged of having bribed building inspectors to avoid penalties for adding floors to his rental buildings.

Local residents said the building was notorious for its shoddy construction, and Mr. Singh well known for flouting building rules.

“The government didn’t do anything,” said Ratan Haldar, a social worker who helps migrants in the neighborhood. “They make rules but never implement them. Officials take bribes and ignore the rules. People died as a result.”

No one who lived in the building dared complain, however, because housing is so scarce in Delhi that they knew they would just end up back in a slum or on the street. That is precisely what happened to the residents of another building Mr. Singh owned, which was evacuated after the collapse.

Narayan Sharma, a 35-year-old carpenter from Bihar, stood shivering and barefoot in a downpour beneath a flimsy tarp surrounded by bundles of his family’s belongings. He had rented a room from Mr. Singh for about $50 a month and was grateful to have it. Life in Delhi beat the one he left behind, he said. His children could have much bigger dreams than he ever did.

“I am illiterate because I could not study, I had to work,” he said. “I am giving so much importance to education for my children so they don’t have to live the kind of life I am living.”

As miserable as living conditions in city slums and tenements might be, they are much better than the ones villagers leave behind. Abysmal as urban infrastructure is, a recent government report said 65 percent of villagers lacked toilets, while only 11 percent of city dwellers did. Cities also have much better access to piped water and proper sewage.

At a city morgue, workers prepared the flimsy wooden caskets of those who died in the building for the journey back to the villages from which they hailed. The bodies of 27-year-old Shahen Shah, from rural West Bengal, and 13-year-old Iftikhar, from Bihar, would be loaded on trains heading east. But few of those who survived the collapse plan to follow. Even the most precarious perch in the new India is too precious to be abandoned for the old.

“Our life is here now,” said Manoj Sarkar, Mr. Sarkar’s 20-year-old son. “We cannot live anywhere else.”


The New York Times, 30 November, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/asia/01delhi.html?scp=2&sq=India&st=cse


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