Comunidad y Sociedad. Desde el siglo pasado los sociólogos se han

Almost no major US city is the seat of government.

What if you made Satara Maharashtra’s capital?

What if you made Satara Maharashtra’s capital?

6 August 2005

6 August 2005

Why have some cities done better over the past decade while others declined? Why has Delhi improved so dramatically while Mumbai has rolled downhill? Why have Gurgaon and Noida blossomed as new high-tech BPO destinations, while Bangalore is so choked? Why has Chandigarh

survived while, less than 150 km north of it, Shimla has become a multi-storey slum and a looming seismic disaster?

Here is a hypothesis: cities controlled by those whose voters belong there boom. Cities ruled by those whose voters live elsewhere are bled to death.

Delhi works because its chief minister has to only get votes in the city to get re-elected. Even with limited statehood,* where the elected government has no control over land, law and order and what is known as the NDMC zone (mainly Lutyens’s Delhi), the focus does not shift. Politicians are driven by votes, and by prospects of making money. In a set-up like Delhi, both opportunities are within the city.

Imagine, for example, if Delhi was a part of Uttar Pradesh or Haryana. The state government, then, ould have collected the majority of its votes in the countryside where factors other than Delhi’s traffic, pollution, power or water supply would play out. Its stake in the city would have been limited. But not now. Even in an east Delhi slum, a migrant day-wager from eastern Uttar Pradesh now generally votes on the basis of whether his quality of life has improved or worsened in Delhi, rather than follow caste in the manner that his family back in the village may.

Chandigarh is a different case study. While old-timers may rue the arrival of some DDA-type apartment blocks and violation of the very exacting—and dreary—architectural norms inherited from Le Corbusier, by and large the city has grown and pr ospered. What if it had been given over to Punjab or Haryana? It is the city’s Union Territory status, along with the institution of local-level democracy, an elected municipal corporation, that has saved it from the ravages of state-level politics. Shimla has no such luck. It is the colony of Himachal Pradesh.

Mumbai and Bangalore are prime examples of cities getting reduced to no more than colonies o the states to which they belong. Whatever the size of these cities, the number of MLAs they send to the assembly is a fraction of the majority. So a Deve Gowda, Dharam Singh, Sushilkumar Shinde or Vilasrao Deshmukh is not heartbroken if the city rots. The resources that the city generates, particularly taxes, sale of real estate and bribes are happily moved to the countryside because that is

here the votes are. In our post-May 2004 Rural versus Urban discourse, this has become even more convenient. You ask Gowda or Dharam Singh why Bangalore is languishing and the instinctive

answer is a question: but what about the poor in the villages?

Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil personifies this. Through the peak of the Mumbai crisis* he has been missing in action. Could he have ignored his constituency similarly? His only ‘contribution’ to Mumbai has been the closure of dance bars so he can probably impress his voters back home because he stopped at least one ‘immoral’ activity in that big, bad city of the rich.**

If some focus has now returned on Bangalore, it is because of the collective pressure from the captains of its tech industry, media and the Congress high command. In Mumbai, just the magnitude of the calamity, the humiliation of having to air-drop food packets in India’s largest, richest metro, will force some change. For how long, nobody can say. Already the state’s politicians are complaining about the flooded interiors getting ignored because of the focus on Mumbai.

Many of Mumbai’s angry opinion leaders have been asking for drastic action. Free the city from the clutches of the state’s politicians, make it autonomous, give it a mayor with the powers of a Giuliani or Bloomberg. Or, that it should simply refuse to pay taxes. None of this is going to happen. In no state will political interests allow their crown jewels to go away. Forget Maharashtra and Karnataka, do you even imagine Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu letting Hyderabad or Chennai become Union Territories?†

You have to find a solution. Politicians will neither invest time, money or emotion in their cities, nor allow them to break free of their control. But can you at least take them and their governments away from them? In the US, for example, almost no major city is the seat of the government of the state to which it belongs. The capital of New York state is quiet Albany and California’s is not Los Angeles or San Francisco but nondescript Sacramento. Chicago is not the capital of Illinois, it is Springfield. What if you shifted the capital of Maharashtra to, say, Satara or Sangli and Karnataka’s to Hubli or even Mysore. It would decongest Mumbai and Bangalore, save them from some VIP culture and also result in the building of more cities. An added, but significant, bonus will be the opportunity for politicians to make lots more money in real estate as land is acquired and prices boom around the new capitals. This is one reason Gurgaon and Noida have been allowed to bloom so

nicely by politicians in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. This could also address independent India’s one big failing, its inability to build new cities as the Chinese have done.