Can we make basic services more like cell phones?

It was noted with great ballyhoo earlier this summer that more Indians have cell phones than toilets.

To which I had the stunning response: So what? Or to be more precise: cell phones are easy. Once you build the infrastructure, adding new customers is a matter of adding customers indefinitely, or at least, as long as the bandwidth holds up. Toilets, however, are hard. The value of your fifty-buck porcelain bowl isn’t in the porcelain. Take away the multimillion-dollar piece of public infrastructure it’s attached to, and you’ve got. . . a chair.

Or, a chair with a nice view.

Along these lines, I’ve seen a number of articles recently that suggest ideas for cutting the infrastructure line on the budget and focusing on “distributed” solutions to the continued failure of developing world governments to provide basic services. “Water ATMs” in Mumbai, where women and kids don’t need to queue up at the public tap for the brief window of during the day — generally sometime between godawful and unspeakable — when the water runs. Solar power to run irrigation pumps in rural India, skipping the creaky grid entirely. And yes, bio-digester toilets.

Are there downsides to giving up on big public infrastructure projects? On the one hand, there’s a permanence to major infrastructure that is at least symbolic of a social compact. On the other hand, when that infrastructure is slow in coming and erratic in its functioning, it’s hard not to think broadly about alternatives.

 

It’s not every day you see people’s homes being demolished. Thank God.

Over the course of less than a week, I watched hundreds of people’s homes bulldozed in Hampi, a world heritage site set in a haunting boulder-strewn landscape in India. It’s stunning: you can tell why folks considered this place sacred from at least the 9th century on. The centerpiece is the massive Virupaksha temple, one of Shiva’s most holy temples.  Its surroundings got a bit, shall we say, profane over the years: a jumble of backpacker guesthouses and tchotchke shops that provided a nice living for a few hundred families in the shadow of Virupaksha.

No more.  The initial demolition took place last fall (the Guardian did a heartbreaking piece about the evictions in May). After a standing as a ghost town for nearly a year; the bulldozers rolled in this week for the coup de grace.

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Here’s how you destroy hundreds of people’s livelihoods in a single week. First, you knock out all the windows, doors, and roofs, to force people out. This leaves the remaining residents picking their way through rubble piles in a creepy, but brightly painted, ghost neighborhood. Then, you bring in the bulldozers. As residents scavenge rebar and children carry home unbroken bricks, barefoot laborers break the rubble into chunks that can be thrown into the back of a truck. Load by load, lives and livelihoods disappear down the road.

Now, life goes on for the people left behind: repainting their businesses, games of cricket in the streets, and shuttling the streams of tourists to the guesthouses across the river, where you can’t hear the bulldozers, and you can’t smell the dus

Photo of the Day: Seeing People, Seeing Policy

At the risk of meeting the coal industry’s standard of child porn, here is a family that was begging on the street by my office. There are an estimated 26 million homeless in India, of which 3 million are literally on the street. The rest have some sort of roof over their heads, barely.

Gangs that kidnap, buy, and maim children are not the stuff of Slumdog Millionaire storytelling, so the politics of giving to beggars is agonizing. Anyone who has anything dismissive to say about liberal guilt can bite me. I’m guilty and proud. That is to say, I’m not guilty about feeling a duty to use the resources that our unequal world has bestowed upon me in a responsible way.

So: beggars. On the one hand, the thought that I would indirectly reward someone for successfully stealing a child makes me sick. On the other, there is a hungry human being standing in front of me. To not give for the greater good is to make their hunger a tool of my social policy.

The “right” answer is a) the most responsible thing to do is to give to organizations, and b) there are no right answers.

Photo of the Day: Little Kids, Big Loads

There were a whole lot of kids hauling stuff on my street today.

They seemed a lot better-natured about their chores than I was when it was my turn to mow the lawn.

I think some of it probably crossed the line into child labor, which is illegal.

There are an estimated 200,000 kids in Bangalore working anyway. The government has a program to “rescue” working kids and put them in school. The programs are residential, because otherwise the kids don’t make it to class much.

Funny, that.

 

Okay, so it’s not exactly laying in front of the bulldozers. . .

. . . but hiring private security guards to patrol the streets to prevent illegal construction is kind of bourgeoise-guerrilla in its own way.

The construction in question is a “signal-free corridor” (in American English, “big-ass highway”), which the Bangalore Development Authority is trying to build through Koramangala. Here’s the deal: Bangalore was not build for cars and Lo, the Lord hath sent a plague of Tatas and Suzukis raining down on the People of Karnataka. Private vehicle registrations has nearly tripled in the last decade. The BDA’s response has been straight-no-chaser Urban Renewal:  highways, overpasses, underpasses, and road-widening. It’s hugely controversial, and usually the BDA wins. But then the irresistible force of the BDA ran into the immovable object of the Koramangalan Pissed-Off Neighbors.

Koramangala is the Bangalore equivalent of, say, West Hollywood. The Koramangalans moved to their hood for a certain je ne sais quoi. Je really don’t sais quoi, since it looks a lot like the rest of Bangalore in terms of urban form, but with more Taco Bell and KFC.  In any case, it’s not what most Americans would picture as a suburb, where highways are not out of place. In Koramangala, the main roads are 4- to 6-lane arterials with stores and stoplights, hustle and bustle. Did I mention the KFC?

The Koramangalans answered the signal-free corridor with a lawsuit challenging the procedure by which the project was approved. They got a restraining order, which the BDA proceeded to ignore. Enter security guards. Next: Occupy Koramangala?

The fashionable narrative about the whole hullabaloo is that the opponents of signal-free corridors are enemies of Progress, selfishly standing in the way everyone else’s automobile dreams. But they are raising important arguments in favor of multi mobility: that if you widen the roads enough for everyone to drive, there won’t be many buildings left standing for them to want to drive to.

Photo of the Day: Play

This two-year-old lives with his family on the ground floor of an under-construction building around the corner from my apartment, between the chandelier shop and the mosque. Construction workers usually live in the projects they are building; of the many hazards of growing up in a construction zone is occasional building collapse. Last fall, three children (13, 7, and 11 months) survived the collapse of an under-construction building that killed two workers only because they were playing next to a pile of cement bags that caught the slabs of the floors above.

Photo of the Day: Sweet Doggie Dreams

Bangalore generates about 1,700 tons of solid waste a day. Household waste is typically piled on the street either loose or in used plastic shopping bags. Trash pickers go through it by hand, pulling out plastic bottles, cardboard, and other reusables or recyclables. Everything left behind is collected each morning by street sweepers with brooms. They load it into pushcarts, cycle-carts, and souped-up rickshaw contraptions, and wheel it to transfer points. Ultimately, lorries haul it to the landfill.

Here, a dog rests on a nearly full sweeper cart, presumably dreaming the sweetest of doggie dreams.

Human Traffic(ing)

I’ve been taking photos out the side of my auto-rickshaw on the way to work. I love it because there’s nowhere else you can hang out of a moving vehicle a foot off the ground while going 30 mph, and where everyone is driving about a foot away from each other and usually in some degree of au plein aire.  It’s a set of conditions that may be maddening for getting from point A to point B, but awesome for photography.

Bangalore streets are aggressive, competitive, polluted, and exhausting for everyone involved. Full of people who, like commuters everywhere, see each other as traffic. At the same time, there’s an intimacy to it that is at the essence of the urban — that “being together of strangers”-ness (to quote Iris Young) that gives cities their heartbeat.

The meta may be a mess, but the micro is something else entirely.

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Photo of the Day

A new apartment building is going up on my street, which means that entire families are sifting sand, mixing cement, and carrying loads of bricks on their heads. This boy, who is peering out of the fencing around the property, is probably not old enough to work yet, but I’ve seen kids maybe a year older than him caring for younger siblings as their moms work.

Drill First, Ask Questions Later

The typical way to deal with dysfunctional urban governance in India – assuming you have the money – is to opt out. You buy a diesel generator. You drill a well. You live and work well outside the city center to avoid the traffic. . . at least until the city you left behind swallows you up. Or, in the case of Gurgaon, a swanky suburb of Delhi, the water runs out.

Gurgaon’s water table has been dropping by over a meter a year. Most of the natural lakes in the region are gone. The monsoon has been disappointing this year, so many residents are now relying on water tankers. Such residents, who bought “villas” on “sprawling greens” in a region with no surface water, are rightly (if somewhat hypocritically) alarmed.

And they just scored a win in court. The State high court just prevented the local development authority from issuing new development permits if the developers cannot certify they won’t use groundwater in the construction.

Okay, so it’s a partial victory – the target of the suit is the short-term construction impacts, not the long-term impacts of building Southern California in North India. That being said, it’s another sign that the while the sun may not be setting on the Wild West days of Indian real estate development, it’s at least starting to feel like midafternoon. Here’s what those crazy tree-huggers at the Economic Times had to say:

This ban may come as a jolt to many but the real issue at stake is larger than just construction in Gurgaon. It goes to the very heart of what kind of urbanisation we want in India. Should urbanisation proceed heedless of basic issues like where the water is going to come from and where the sewage will flow to? Clearly not. Urbanisation of this kind might seem like development in the short run but is obviously not sustainable since it puts an unbearable strain on natural resources.

Gurgaon isn’t alone in pulling the plug on the bring-your-own-straw party.

In Bangalore, anyone could drill a well without a permit until, hmm. . . let’s see. . . last week. Some parts of town are now at 176% exploitation – that is, sucking up water nearly twice as fast as it can be recharged. Like the Haryana ruling, however, the new rules are a small step on a long, hot, dusty road. Because water draw will be metered and capped, the main effect will be felt by the private tanker operators (and the customers that depend on them. Permits will provide much-needed data as well as to create an opportunity for low-level functionary to pocket what they consider much-needed bribes. (Think I’m cynical? Check out ipaidabribe.com .) Unfortunately, the registration fees are quite low (between about $1 and $10), so what it it won’t do is create a disincentive to opt out of the public system. And it stands true in the U.S. as well as India that when everyone opts out and games the system, pretty soon you don’t have a system to game anymore.