A FIVE TRILLION DOLLAR ECONOMY IS NO PANACEA FOR OUR ILLS.

                         

   I drove back from my cottage in Mashobra( Shimla) to Delhi last week. It took me eleven hours- four and a half hours to Timber Trail and six and a half from there to our over rated capital city. In 1980 ( which was 40 years ago in case you too, like me, are numerically challenged) I used to make the journey in eight hours in my beat-up, second hand Fiat which used to heat up every hundred kilometers, requiring its radiator to be topped up regularly like some of my friends in the Gymkhana bar. AND I didn't have to shell out Rs. 350/ in toll fees. In these intervening years, thousands of crores have been spent on a new expressway, on four laning the mountain stretch, on fly overs and under passes. Thousands of acres of fertile land have been acquired, mountain sides excavated, millions of tonnes of soil and debris thrown into stream beds, choking them, thousands displaced from their occupations and businesses, hundreds of lives lost in accidents on these super highways. To what end if it takes me 40% more time to cover the same distance as compared to forty years ago? Its the same, if not worse, in the cities- traffic in Mumbai and Kolkatta moves at the same space as the horse drawn carriages a hundred years ago. In the early seventies I could drive from the north campus of DU ( there was no south campus then) on my Jawa mobike to my uncles's place in Greater Kailash in 25 minutes; today it takes at least an hour. We are nonetheless informed by economists and politicians of all ilks that this is progress.

   It's the same in all other areas of human/ economic activity. Our GDP has grown a zillion times since Independence, but we have more people below the poverty line than we had then, in absolute numbers ( forget the percentage argument, that is simply something economists use to cover the ugly truth). Life expectancy may have reached 70 years but deaths from diabetes, cancer, heart attacks have increased exponentially. Lakhs of crores of rupees have been invested in medical colleges and health care institutions but  more people are dying of diseases ( remember the recent Gorakhpur and Muzzafarpur encephalitis deaths of children?) than ever before. Aldous Huxley put his finger on it many years ago when he presciently observed: 'Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human life left."

  Food production has gone up a hundred times and yet 38% of children below the age of five are stunted/ wasted from malnutrition. GDP has been growing at a remarkable 7%-8% for the last 15 years but unemployment is at a 45 year high. 13000 farmers commit suicide every year even though they are given free power and water, subsidies worth Rs. 75000 crores every year, and periodic loan waivers. Inflation is at an all time low and yet consumption, industrial production and household savings are showing a persistent decline. The country has 900 large dams/ reservoirs but 60%of agriculture is still dependent on the monsoons. We have some of the most draconian laws in the world and yet rapes, lynchings, mob violence, assault on children continue to rise: according to WHO India has the highest number of child abuse cases in the world. We have pledged to achieve a green cover of 30% of geographical area by 2030, to bring an additional one million hectares under trees, but we continue deforestation on a colossal scale- 1.6 million hectares denuded in the last ten years, 16 million trees felled. Our culture worships women but we kill millions of infant girls every year- the national sex ratio is 896 girls for every 1000 boys: in the " progressive" state of Haryana the figure is 833. We proudly boast of India's trump card- the "demographic dividend"- but our education system is in shambles: students in class V cannot read class II texts and 67% of engineers are unemployable, according to a recent industry report. This is not a dividend, it is a primed grenade waiting to explode.

   These are only some of the paradoxes and failures of our pure GDP focused growth. There is something fundamentally wrong with the political/ economic path we have been following all these years. In following the same shibboleths of western economies we have dug ourselves into a hole and devastated our natural environment, all to no effect. Our national character, with the kind of role models we have in politics, industry, media and various professions, is unrecognizable from what it was when we proudly acquired independence in a different era. We have become a deeply divided, inequitable, heartless and lawless society and it shows in our ranking in the World Happiness Index- at 140 out of 155 countries. And the brutal, capital centric and materialistic policies of the present government are only making things worse. We are very much in danger of progressing from Lance Pritchett's description of us as a " flailing state" to a "failed state" in terms of values, principles and character.

   We need to move away from our unhealthy GDP obsession: it has to be balanced with wider considerations: of humaneness, equity, compassion, concern for the environment, responsiveness. Instead of being just a five trillion dollar economy, how about striving to become a Zero Infant Mortality Economy, or an Equal Sex-Ratio Society, or a Universal Health Care Economy, or a Zero Net Carbon Emission Economy or a Nobody Goes to Bed Hungry Economy? How about aspiring to go up on the Happiness or Environment Performance Index with the same zeal we show for the Ease of Doing Business Index?

   If the distortions and perversions that have us in a stranglehold are not corrected-soon- it will not matter if we become a 5 trillion dollar economy or not for, as Milton Friedman famously remarked:  "So what if it meets all criteria of economic success except one: you cannot live there!"

    

SHIMLA-ITES MUST OWN RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MESS THEY ARE IN.

          SHIMLA-ITES MUST OWN RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MESS THEY ARE IN.

   Last year it was a water crisis, this year it is the traffic chaos and accidents. Post the bus accident in Khalini area of Shimla on the 1st of this month which claimed the lives of two young girls and the bus driver, it would be amusing- were it not so tragic- to observe the knee jerk reactions of the citizens of Shimla: Ministers rushing to the hospital, residents vandalising parked cars, the High Court issuing notices on children safety, inquiries being ordered and so on. Deja vu again, for we have seen it all a dozen times before and more than 1300 people continue to die in Himachal every year in road accidents. Everyone blames the state government, and rightly so, for ALL governments have been criminally negligent and culpable in making Shimla the mess it is today.

   But the bitter truth is that the residents and citizens of the city are equally to blame and they cannot adopt a holier than thou posture, or pose as hapless victims of government apathy. Over the years they have been vocal and active participants in the degeneration and uglification of this once lovely city and have stoutly opposed any effort to preserve its natural assets or improve its functioning and infrastructure. They consequently live in a mess of their own making and have lost the right to complain.

  Take, for example, the issue of rampant, illegal constructions, of which a recent survey recorded more than 20000. Instead of pressing the government to demolish them the citizens have repeatedly forced the govt. to regularise them: so far there have been five such regularisation ( retention) schemes; the sixth one, passed by the previous Congress govt., has been struck down by the High Court but the present govt. has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court ( it is telling that the present govt. is a BJP one- when it comes to rank populism politicians are like peas in a pod!). Such rampant vote pandering only encourages more violations.The National Green Tribunal's orders banning further constructions in the city are openly flouted, the limit of two and a half storeys does not even merit a fig leaf, and people are building what they want, where they want for the next regularisation policy is only an election away. Hundreds of illegal home stays ( the latest tax evading racket) add to the chaos, congestion and parking woes.

  Shimla is being asphyxiated by the sheer volume of traffic on its roads which can neither be expanded nor widened because of the topography. A population of about two lakhs boasts of 1.25 lakh registered vehicles, a density higher even than that of Delhi. Add to this another 5000 tourist vehicles and 600 buses entering the city every day. Everyone happily goes about buying cars, with no thought given to where they will be parked. Rules require  every building to have parking areas/ floors but these are only shown in the building plans: once approved they are converted to regular floors. Houses are constructed on 60-70 degree gradients, without proper access, and the cars simply left on the roads. The govt. is of course culpable for even approving such building plans, but surely the citizens too have to bear responsibility here: they cannot break the laws deliberately and then blame the govt. alone for the inconvenience and accidents. All reports indicate that the Khalini accident happened because the road was reduced to half its width because of illegally parked vehicles. Half- hearted attempts to declare some arterial roads as one way are resisted, everyone wants a permit for their vehicles to ply on restricted roads, attempts to cap the number of taxis or to install meters on them are met with protests, nobody wants to walk, as in the old days.

                                             

                                                  ( SPOT  THE TREE IN  SHIMLA.)

   The slopes and forests are littered with plastic and waste; Shimla's nallahs, which once flowed the year round and charged innumerable springs and cascades, are now smothered in garbage. A recent clean-up initiative by the district administration and some  NGOs resulted in about twenty tonnes of waste being excavated from these water courses. Not all this garbage can be ascribed to tourists: the residents are equally responsible. All attempts at door-to-door collection or segregation have failed. It is, after all, much easier and less expensive to just chuck the bloody thing down the hillside. The monkey menace in the town is directly attributable to this open dumping of rubbish, but the good burghers will not admit to this; instead they demand that the monkeys be either shot as vermin or exported for medical purposes! Water harvesting has been made mandatory but it is neither adopted by the building owners nor implemented by the government.

   It's the same with Shimla's rapidly disappearing green cover. Blessed with perhaps the world's largest urban forest, the city is losing it all to construction and road building. Its only remaining forests lie in the 17 green belts ( comprising 400 hectares) which were notified in the early 2000's, and where no construction of any kind is permissible- without these forested areas the town would look like the seventh rock from the sun. And yet many citizens continue to resist these restrictions in the green belt, eyeing their commercial potential. They are supported by a vision-less and spineless govt. which has tried everything to open up the area for construction activity. Fortunately, the High Court and the National Green Tribunal have ruled in favour of keeping these areas closed.

   Finally, it appears that civil society does not exist in Shimla. One cannot, of course, expect any  expression of concern at this deterioration from the bureaucracy, cocooned in their privileges and conduct rules, but one would have expected some push back from its prominent citizens, the many retired officers and veterans, NGOs like INTACH. But sadly, the former are more interested in their bridge at ADC and golf at Annandale and Naldehra, and the latter at being on the right side of the government lest the invitations to govt. functions dry up. Which is a tragedy in itself. Democracies and civil society are sustained by its citizens and not by just the government of the day. If the citizens do not demonstrate civic values and ethics, if they do not observe laws and rules, if they do not hold a government to account, then they have only themselves to blame when things begin to go wrong. As you sow so shall you reap. A Biblical adage the citizens of Shimla would do well to remember before it is too late.