Builders' Banditry

Some time back some of us looking to buy property in Delhi, made a round of Dwarka, the only place in the city where we had some hope of buying property within our means. Although the place is filled with flats –occupied and unoccupied, it was nearly impossible to identify any property based on newspaper advertisements. So we did the next best thing, approached property dealers- and Dwarka has more property dealers it would seem than any other kind of shops. But though we wore out our foot wear visiting their dinghy offices, we could not identify one dealer, who would be willing to complete a transaction without accepting a portion of the payment in cash which would not accounted for. Partly constrained by our principles and partly by our purse for we could get a loan only on the declared value of the property, we gave up the chase after a while. None of us still own any property ; at least not in Delhi.

The sight of the uncouth and decidedly unprofessionally attired and ill mannered persona of those manning these “offices” and their equally loud and garish office décor should have alerted us that we were not dealing with any one acquainted in the least with real estate or property matters but with goons and thugs. But it did not. In fact it is the newspapers that have alerted me to this fact. The constant stream of news connecting property dealers with killing and murders is too obvious to ignore. The news of an NRI investor being duped of his property by a land mafia is just one more story in a long line of stories which connects dubious property dealers with crime and greed. A couple of months ago, the television channel CNN-IBN had done a sting operation aimed at restoring another property that had been ‘captured” from the owner by the local land mafia.

Scarcely a day passes when one does not find some property dealer or the other accused in some murder or extortion or other kind of deception. Recently one of the high profile cases involving a property dealer was that of Gurgaon property dealer Vijay Bharadwaj confessing to the killing of a Assistant Commissioner of Police in the Delhi Police. The shortage of land in the National Capital Region, particularly Delhi, the long connection between land, muscle power and greed and the fact that profession is still unregulated and is entirely in the unorganized sector has meant that chaos has ruled in the profession. In Delhi’s urban villages, where municipal zoning rules do not apply, all one needs to set up shop as a real estate agent is a rickety table and chair put with a ceiling fan droning lazily and a small television set perched up to help the attendant pass time as he waits for clients.

The government has for long pondered about regulating and licensing the capital intensive industry- at least in Delhi and the NCR region where the nexus between builders, property dealers and land grabbers seems particularly rampant. The Real Estate Management Regulation & Control Bill is maeant to license builders and property dealers and has provisions for penal action and includes even cancellation of license to operate, among several other stringent measures for those found guilty of flouting the norms. However will the bill be ever introduced in reality ? Or if ever introduced, will it ever be passed ? Remember the fate of the Womens’ Reservations Bill ? It took forever to be introduced and now that it is introduced , it is languishing in benign purgatory as vested interests try their best to scuttle it. The builder property dealer lobby may be less loud but no less effective in scuttling bills that are inconvenient. Meanwhile the pillaging and plunder will unfortunately continue !

A Colonial Democracy

Reading about the reports about the Gujjar agitation and the fact that apparently the Rajasthan government is seeking out alternate Gujjar leadership, I wonder some times about the nature of our democracy. Democracy is meant to be an inclusive process, listening to different and even divergent voices and then arrive at a decision that, even if it does not please every body, at last is accepted by every body. This listening, consulting, decision making process is what is meant to separate out democracy supposedly as the most superior of governance mechanisms. But is democracy working? And if it is, then why are so many people angry?

Reflecting on how the State handles dissent today, not much of a difference is discernible between the Colonial times and now. The first response when any voice of dissent is heard is to repress it and crush it; hoping that the uncomfortable voices will eventually die out. Of course many do…. Many voices die down. But some don’t and in fact over some times, some voices get amplified. Then when things go out of control, you get people over for talks.

That looks very much like the cat and mouse game that Mahatma Gandhi and the British used to play. Gandhiji would launch one agitation or the other, he and his associates would be promptly packed off to jail, there would be a public outcry and then once a certain line was crossed, Gandhiji would be called for talks. More often than not, the talks would break down, after a while another agitation would be launched and then the whole cycle would repeat itself all over again.

Sixty years and more after independence, what is the difference? Be it the Maoists or the Naxalites, the numerous underground outfits of the North East and now the Gujjars, as long as the movement is perceived to be small and inconsequential, the weapon of choice is the jackboot to stamp out the fire. If that doesn’t happen, either because there is a capable leader in the background like Col. Bainsla or strong grassroots support as is the situation with many of the underground groups, then they get called for talks after they have already caused a lot of mayhem.

In contrast, look at the khadi clad Medha Patkar and her Narmada activists or the Telengana activists who are pursuing their goals through peaceful means. No body gives a damn about them and the speeches that they make for they do not yet block traffic, stop trains and damage public property. So in the eyes of the State they and their cause can rot to high heaven.

We pride ourselves on being the world’s largest democracy and that is fine. We do hold elections every five years or some times even oftener and these elections do provide an opportunity for governments to be voted in and out and that is a lot more than what many of our neighbors might be able to say though Bhutan and may be even Nepal might be playing catch up.

But the nagging question before is: what eventually is the essence of democracy? The process of holding elections alone or also the (implicit) commitment that one man one vote is more than a slip of paper or a punch on the electronic voting machine – one man one vote equates into one man- one voice too. That each individual and his or her voice counts- that democracy is not synonymous with majoritarianism,- that the one with the largest demography may get to rule – but they rule in a spirit of bi partisanship on key issues by forging , maintaining and sustaining consensus through listening, accommodation and inclusion. Unfortunately we have not got there in the last sixty years …. May be, we will be there in the next sixty years.

Our Stifled Students

There was a time when Indian Students routinely went abroad to study if they could afford it because the country did not have the facilities for higher education beyond a point. This was practically de rigeour in the pre independence and practically every one who provided the top level leadership to the Freedom Struggle had studied abroad. The favored country of choice then was the UK. After independence, many institutions of higher learning began to be set up, notably the IITs and the IIMs and higher education began to be accessible and affordable to many. In fact, one of the achievements of the quasi socialist economy was the relatively easy affordability of good quality higher education for many- sadly though; quality primary education was never much of a priority. With good quality of higher education available in the country, the necessity of going abroad to study began to slowly decline -unless one was doing very specialized courses.

Today, the waters have got muddy again. As India moves to an increasingly free market economy, the institutes of higher education are no longer as cheap as they once used to be. Although as government run institutions, they have limitations on the extent of their autonomy, even so, they are using the limited freedom they do have to increase their fees in order to remain viable. As grants to the extent necessary are not forthcoming from the government and they have to retain their faculty as well as their competitive edge, perhaps no one can blame them.

With costs rising and the seats available in Indian institutions constantly on the decline, it is once again time to look abroad for a large section of the middle class. To cite an example, the total strength for IIMs for 06 was 1300 approx. The seats for general category was 800 seats [without obc reservation]. The total calls for Group Discussions and interviews for the 1300 seats were 6000 approx, thus in the putting candidate per seat in the second stage of the selection at a ratio of 1:4.The applicants for 06 for the 2006 CAT were172000. Hence the overall competition was 1:133 and for a general candidate 1:213. And here we are not even talking about several aspirants who did not even get to the stage of applying for CAT, simply because the pressure was just too great to put up with. Competition to get into higher education in the country of more than 1.1 billion people is fierce with stratospheric averages needed to obtain the few places available in India’s “Ivy League” colleges. For instance, the cut-off average mark to pursue an undergraduate economics degree at Delhi University’s top commerce college last year was 97.8 percent.

Many foreign universities are aware of the business opportunities available are queuing up to woo Indian students. After all if the elite institutions are increasingly inaccessible- partly because of costs and partly because of the quotas, the choice becomes restricted for most to private Indian Universities; many of dubious merit or accessible foreign universities. Singapore is a good example. The syllabus structure and academic systems in Singapore are almost similar to the ones followed by Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) in India. Hence, Indian students easily adjust to studies in Singapore.

While the idea of students going overseas to study in an increasingly borderless world is nothing special, the fact that students should have to go not because of lack of facilities but due to lack of seats is ironic. After all, a large number of these are not scholarship awardees but those who are paying fees – perhaps with a student loan that is increasingly becoming available. Each migrating student is not only not contributing revenues to a foreign university – revenues which could have stayed in India, but also considering that most such students are leaving the country with a sense of disenchantment; the chances of their returning to the country to contribute to their own country’s economic growth are minimal. The thought of Indian students studying undergraduate medicine in far away institutions in the former Soviet Union or China is a case in point. Without going into the merits of the quota system and the percentage of quotas, there is a case definitely for increasing the number of seats available in India for higher education without compromising quality, so that students do not have to go abroad for courses for which the seats are so few that the break neck competition breaks and shatters students irrevocably.

As I was stepping out of my house the other day, I spotted a man hovering uncertainly outside our gate. As I asked him if he wanted to meet any one, he introduced himself as our newspaper vendor and said that he had come to collect his monthly dues from our neighbor on the 2^nd floor. As I was began to say that he had gone off to kerala with his family, the man interrupted me by asking “ Accha to woh Gaon gaye hain ?”

The concept of gaon- the village is deeply rooted in the urban psyche; it is assumed matter of factly in Delhi – that every body who lives in Delhi, does not actually “ live” there – that they actually live else where and that the gaon- the village is where the roots are, where the spirit is set free and that the body is the only entity trapped in the great soul less city that “New” Delhi is.

As a child, I remember those trips to my gaon –actually more often than not it was a city – Kolkata but in the collective thinking of people; every one in Delhi comes from some distant idyllic village and so every other summer, armed with my father’s LTC , we would hop on to the train and go off to Kolkata where my mother’s relatives lived or a little rarely to the actual village Sukhpukur( The pond of happiness, no less), near the border town of Bongaon where my father’s brothers- my uncle had settled after hopping across the border shortly after 1947.

In May, when the schools close in Delhi, the sheer impossibility of getting a train ticket out of Delhi tells its own story of the enormous numbers of people who descend into the city in search of a livelihood and then every summer head off like homing pigeons to the places where they really belong. Their transient watering holes in town are the Bengali Association, The Tamil Sangam, Andhra Association, the Maharashtra Mitra Mandal and numerous others. Delhi is the hunting ground of every one and home of no one – a nature reflected even its governance structure- Shiela Dixit the Chief Minister was once a Member of Parliament from U.P and Kiran Choudhury , a former Deputy Speaker of the Delhi Assembly is now a cabinet minister in Haryana.

If Delhi is the crime capital of India, I wonder if it is because the city is every one’s abode but no one’s home. No one has a sense of pride or ownership over a city where hardly any one has roots. One’s heart is after all in one’s gaon – and as the saying goes- one’s home is where the heart is.

Delhi has also been described as a heartless city, and I wonder if this is because no one owns it except for a multiplicity of bureaucratic agencies who exercise administrative jurisdiction over it. Less than a month ago a 52-year-old freelance journalist lay bleeding at the busy crossing for nearly an hour after his bike was hit by a speeding mini truck, without any sort of medical help coming his way and finally the victim bled to death on the road. Would this have happened in most of small town and rural India.

The sad fact of the matter is that no matter how cosmopolitan our cities might be, the social integration of a composite culture has not happened. And so when you scratch us below the surface, we are all Tamils or Malayalis or Bengalis or whatever. It is and always will be a case of “ Mera Gaon, Mera Desh” in Delhi at least for a long while to come.

A City of Villagers

As I was stepping out of my house the other day, I spotted a man hovering uncertainly outside our gate. As I asked him if he wanted to meet any one, he introduced himself as our newspaper vendor and said that he had come to collect his monthly dues from our neighbor on the 2^nd floor. As I was began to say that he had gone off to kerala with his family, the man interrupted me by asking “ Accha to woh Gaon gaye hain ?”

The concept of gaon- the village is deeply rooted in the urban psyche; it is assumed matter of factly in Delhi – that every body who lives in Delhi, does not actually “ live” there – that they actually live else where and that the gaon- the village is where the roots are, where the spirit is set free and that the body is the only entity trapped in the great soul less city that “New” Delhi is.

As a child, I remember those trips to my gaon –actually more often than not it was a city – Kolkata but in the collective thinking of people; every one in Delhi comes from some distant idyllic village and so every other summer, armed with my father’s LTC , we would hop on to the train and go off to Kolkata where my mother’s relatives lived or a little rarely to the actual village Sukhpukur( The pond of happiness, no less), near the border town of Bongaon where my father’s brothers- my uncle had settled after hopping across the border shortly after 1947.

In May, when the schools close in Delhi, the sheer impossibility of getting a train ticket out of Delhi tells its own story of the enormous numbers of people who descend into the city in search of a livelihood and then every summer head off like homing pigeons to the places where they really belong. Their transient watering holes in town are the Bengali Association, The Tamil Sangam, Andhra Association, the Maharashtra Mitra Mandal and numerous others. Delhi is the hunting ground of every one and home of no one – a nature reflected even its governance structure- Shiela Dixit the Chief Minister was once a Member of Parliament from U.P and Kiran Choudhury , a former Deputy Speaker of the Delhi Assembly is now a cabinet minister in Haryana.

If Delhi is the crime capital of India, I wonder if it is because the city is every one’s abode but no one’s home. No one has a sense of pride or ownership over a city where hardly any one has roots. One’s heart is after all in one’s gaon – and as the saying goes- one’s home is where the heart is.

Delhi has also been described as a heartless city, and I wonder if this is because no one owns it except for a multiplicity of bureaucratic agencies who exercise administrative jurisdiction over it. Less than a month ago a 52-year-old freelance journalist lay bleeding at the busy crossing for nearly an hour after his bike was hit by a speeding mini truck, without any sort of medical help coming his way and finally the victim bled to death on the road. Would this have happened in most of small town and rural India.

The sad fact of the matter is that no matter how cosmopolitan our cities might be, the social integration of a composite culture has not happened. And so when you scratch us below the surface, we are all Tamils or Malayalis or Bengalis or whatever. It is and always will be a case of “ Mera Gaon, Mera Desh” in Delhi at least for a long while to come.

Rule of the Lordships

When India got independence from the British in 1947, the hard line communists made a derisive comment yeh azadi jhoothi hai and were derided for it. The communist thought that power had merely changed hands from one set of imperialists to another- that the white rulers had been exchanged for rulers of another color – brown.

ooking at the Supreme Court’s disdainful dismissal of a PIL brought by the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties that sought to bring judges of the apex court and high courts under the purview of Right to Information Act, it looks in hind sight that the communists were right after all. The Supreme Court armed to the teeth with the Contempt of Court, at least under the current Chief Justice at least seems to keep a scornful and arrogance distance from commoners as an elite group.

The reluctance of the Chief Justice to subject the court and its justices to scrutiny under the Right to Information Act, especially in the matter of declaration of assets is otherwise beyond comprehension. Even more incomprehensive is the Chief Justice’s smug assertion that Judges declare their assets to him. If that were enough than every departmental head could be authorized to handle their subordinate’s affairs and there would be no need to maintain vigilance departments any where !

The modern Indian judicial system has its origins in the Calcutta High Court.

The High Court at Calcutta, formerly known as the High Court of Judicature at Fort William, was brought into existence by the Letters Patent dated 14th May, 1862, issued under the High Court’s Act, 1861, which provided that the jurisdiction and powers of the High Court were to be defined by Letters Patent. The High Court of Judicature at Fort William was formally opened on 1st July, 1862, with Sir Barnes Peacock as its first Chief Justice.Appointed on 2nd February, 1863”

Like most institutions the British left behind , be it the civil service or the military or the judiciary or even the Government of India Act 1935 which to a large extent forms the backbone of the constitution, Jawaharlal Nehru who reportedly once described himself as the last Englishman to rule India; he left them unchanged. And because the changes in these institutions were not intentionally made, they remained frozen in time or actually degenerated into grotesque caricatures like when you see those turbaned and liveried waiters serving in the Rashtrapati Bhavan and Raj Bhavan functions, with the viceroy’s crest replaced by the Ashoka Chakra. To see Brown Sahebs and Babus soaking it all in after being sworn to uphold the Constitution of India which still describes India as a Socialist Republic among other things, positively reeks.

The interesting thing is that in that very fountain had of imperialism, the United Kingdom, things are changing as public pressure builds up. By agreeing to pay income taxes, giving up the royal yacht, changing some royal rules, and limiting the number of royals receiving government money, the Queen has sought to placate growing public criticism of the monarchy. Closer home, in Bhutan voluntarily and in Nepal involuntarily , monarchies and feudal cultures are being dismantled. But in India, “their lordships” that sit in judgment over affairs pertaining to a billion plus people and determine their fate in some small measure at least will bear no scrutiny on their actions and conduct through the common man’s scrutiny conducted through lawful means permitted through the law of the land. They are the new jahanpanahs and will not tolerate any lese majeste!

Democracy Rides a Bus

For close to a month now, the newspapers in Delhi have been busy covering the fracas caused by the decision of the government to introduce the Bus Rapid System on a fast track. The intent of the government might have been good; but the experience from the phenomenon proves one thing that of course should have been obvious long ago - that technology is a great too but no panacea. Ultimately technological solutions have to operate in society and society is inhabited by human beings, not robots who will dance to a piper’s tune.

I missing link in the government’s high powered group, the Delhi Integrated Multi-modal Transit System (DIMTS) Delhi Integrated Multi-modal Transit System (DIMTS) has got experience in several fields and has obviously got strong political backing but it does not appear to have thought of including a behavioral psychologist or an anthropologist in its technical team who could have assessed and evaluated the traffic usage pattern in Delhi and offered some recommendations as to whether the BRT would or would not work.

If one looks at the history of the BRT, one finds that it was

“first invented in Curitiba, Brazil in 1974. Other cities that are now using BRT are Bagota Quito, Perreira, Guayaquil, Guatemala City, Los Angeles, Ottawa, Miami, Leeds and Adelaide. Cities like Tokyo, Taipei, Seoul and Lagos have taken up the BRT system now. In India, the system has been partly taken up in Indore, Pune and Ahmedabad, other than Delhi.”

Although the success stories over all seem to be quite a few, and Delhi definitely needs some urgent solution to its traffic woes, simply because a committee containing some scientists of the IIT generate an idea and a group chaired by the Chief Secretary endorses it, it does not mean that it will work. Besides Delhi could have learnt from the experiences of Pune. Pune got the country’s first BRT system, which was implemented one-and-a-half years ago. What was presented as a panacea for Pune’s continuously worsening traffic condition has only worsened the traffic situation there. The much-publicized new traffic mode created major controversy in the first few months of its implementation when the city saw five casualties on the BRT stretch. Lack of awareness about the new system and inadequate traffic sense were the main culprits.

This is not the first time that a traffic project has been handled in such a ham fisted manner. A couple of years ago, the government introduced cycle tracks in many parts of the city, to keep cyclists off the main road. A patch of the road was converted without any fanfare into a cycle track meant exclusively for them. All well except that the cyclists never knew, since no publicity was ever provided. So the cyclists continued cycling where they always had on the main roads; dodging trucks and buses and cars like always.

After a while, with the tracks remaining unused by the cyclists, as was inevitable, the tracks became the haunt of road side motor mechanics who would park their vehicles in the track as they awaited repair. With heavy vehicles routinely using the tracks, soon the tracks were developing potholes and with in less than a year they were no more recognizable as cycle tracks. The scheme was then given a quiet burial but it is understood that with the Commonwealth Games coming up and the government wanting to spruce up the city as best as it can, the cycle tracks are being introduced again. One has to wait and watch if the planning is any better this time round.

The lesson for us in democracy is that sadly the common man who is the most important stakeholder is seldom consulted or his ideas sought for. A bunch of experts sprout up and it does not matter who is in power for each regime has its favorites; these experts practically lay claim to messianic wisdom and come up with “solutions” which the am Aadmi” is not expected to understand and over night it is implemented at a huge cost to the tax payer. Ultimately the issues like the BRT reveal only one thing that democracy is for us Indians only one thing- land up elector’s ID in hand once in five years at the polling booth and then go home and get doped. The benign leaders we elect will look down beatifically and take care of us with the wisdom they alone have.