The Hindu Business Line : Are we ready to unlearn errors?

The state of urbanisation, like that of school education, needs remedy. But will anyone accept that past policies could be wrong and need change? That is not happening; the attempt is to use the same old medicine but in stronger doses, says P.V. INDIRESAN.

With increasing urbanisation, real estate is eating up land space.

Learning is of two types: One, extend the area of knowledge, reduce the area of ignorance. Two, correct faulty understanding of what has been learnt already. Of the two, the first is relatively less stressful but the latter is difficult to accept. Therefore, let me rephrase my question: Are we the type of learning society that is ready to correct errors of comprehension?

Although India is said to be shining, the UNDP reports that Human Development in India is static. If we factor out GDP growth, we are actually regressing. Are we concerned that in several aspects of Human Development we are no better than Sub-Saharan Africa?

Apparently we are not. Soon after the damaging report came out, the government passed in haste a law to curtail the tenure of the Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences by a few months. The same government had no time to discuss why our education and health systems are deteriorating.

No learning from failures

Years ago, Mr Narasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister, graciously met a score of scientists and educators. When an eminent scientist complained about the poor state of school education, Mr Rao retorted that every single decision of the government had been taken on the advice of experts.

Therefore, he said, the mistake was not that of the government but that of the experts. He was very convincing.

After the meeting, it dawned on me that the real problem was that the government chose the wrong experts. As Mr Rao demonstrated himself, powerful people shut up all criticism and choose only “yes-men”, who mirror their own views, as “expert advisors”; they reject anyone who brings any new idea.

Mr Rao did triumph that day over the hapless but well-meaning scientist but he himself learnt nothing new. Likewise, our government learns nothing from its failures. School education is in the same mess today as it was 15 years ago.

In all the hoopla about special economic zones (SEZs), ordinary people, experts and policy makers have overlooked a far more pernicious encroachment of land.

Because the country is rapidly urbanising, nearly 50,000 hectares of land are being quietly and inexorably gobbled up every year by real-estate developers, almost always in a manner that hurts the poor and condemns them to dehumanised slums.

As years pass by, the numbers of the deprived will surely increase. At the present rate, ultimately, as many as 500 million people are liable to be consigned to slums and 10 million hectares of land will be diverted.

In contrast, the total area notified as SEZs is only 15,000 hectares. That is a one-time diversion of agricultural land and not an annual fare. Even if we consider “approved SEZs”, the area is about 52,000 hectares, once again an occasional and not a continuing event.

Here is a case of “straining at the gnat and swallowing an elephant”. Social activists, politicians, planners and news media have all gone overboard over a relatively small though newsworthy diversion of farmland.

At the same time, they have been blind to a far larger encroachment that is taking place — and will take place whether anyone likes it or not. Inevitable diversion of millions of hectares of farmland to house future rural-urban migrants is truly the primary issue.

We should work out how to manage it in a humane and efficient manner. Instead, many of our policy makers are behaving like a doctor who is agitated by an in-growing toenail when the patient is dying of cancer.

Business too at fault

Frankly speaking, on three counts, business leaders too are at fault. One, though they spend thousands of crores of rupees every year to persuade people to buy their products (the more useless the product, the higher is the spend on advertising), it has not occurred to them to make any effort to educate people to accept modern development. It is strange but true that developed States such as Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka have no problem with SEZs; it is the poorest ones, the ones that need SEZs most — such as West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh — that face maximum resistance. Here is a marketing problem that seems to have no interest for our business houses.

Second, our business leaders and chambers of commerce have shown no interest in maximising lifetime profits from business location. On the issue of business location, their vision appears to be restricted to the current year’s bottom line, no further. They too are choosing yes-men who endorse their decisions, not those who can, let alone will, correct them.

Three, our businesses have shown little or no sensitivity to dislocation of the existing socio-economic structure. As critics of the SEZ programme have pointed out, the problem will not be solved if the matter of acquisition of land is taken away from the government and handed over to entrepreneurs. In that case, current landowners will certainly be compensated handsomely, even beyond their dreams, but far larger numbers of informal dependents on the same land will be left out.

The state of urbanisation as it is developing these days is a serious chronic problem. Like the state of school education, everybody accepts that the situation needs remedy.

But will anyone accept that for the reason the situation has become chronic, past policies must be wrong and need change? That is not happening; the attempt is to use the same old medicine but in stronger doses.

A quick recap

Let me restate the case: (i) The country has to find, ultimately, at least 10 million hectares of land to house migrants from farm labour to non-farm occupations. (ii) Ideally, all that expansion should be excluded from fertile land and confined to degraded land. (iii) Expansion of existing towns and cities will inevitably gobble up peripheral land and that will generally be agriculturally valuable land. (iv) Degraded land is much larger but is available only in pockets and in backward areas. (v) People in backward areas are far more suspicious of modernisation than in more developed places. (vi) The problem is not compensation of displaced landowners alone but of recompensing the entire community for loss of traditional lifestyle. (vii) In the short run, it is more profitable to expand existing cities, the larger the better. In the long run, it is more profitable to develop rural areas.

(viii) Poor transport facility is the primary handicap of rural areas. Once that handicap is corrected, rural areas become more profitable to live and work than cities are. (ix) It is futile to relocate business without relocating employees too. (x) Business expansion needs political closure (in the sense of being acceptable to local population) as much as it does financial closure.

Of these 10 issues, three have not received any attention at all: One, how to acquire efficiently 10 million hectares of land for urban development; two, how to improve rural transport connectivity to remove that primary handicap of rural areas and three, ultimately, how to exploit the economic advantages of rural locations over the periphery of large cites.

How many people will accept that only innovative ideas will resolve these issues? Even if some people are willing to experiment, will others let them do so?

(To be continued)

This is 215th in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on November 26.
(The author is a former Director, IIT-Madras. Response may be sent to: indiresan@gmail.com)

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