Smart cities or autocracies

Mumbai woke up on Friday morning to a blanket of smelly smog all over the city and advisories from the authorities asking people to remain indoors if they did not have any reason to step out. Of course, cities don’t work that way and it was business as usual, never mind the coughing and smarting in the eyes. Like all big cities (and many a small town) in the country, Mumbai is quite used to heavy pollution though this nasty one was caused by a fire in a garbage dumping ground in a distant suburb. Everyone is complaining about the civic corporation’s general management of the garbage problem and the handling of this particular crisis.

The same day, the big headlines in the papers were about the winners of the Smart City contest. Twenty cities “made the cut”, the papers said and pointed out that Mumbai (and its surrounding regions) did not make it. No one knows the criteria of the selection process, but many see it as a calculated political snub to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ally, the Shiv Sena, which controls the city’s rich municipal corporation. The civic elections are due in January 2017 and both parties are undecided whether they will fight together or separately. The stakes are very high — the corporation budget is over `33,000 crore — and the complete grip over the running of this rich metropolis gives the ruling party tremendous clout.

Union minister of urban development, housing and urban poverty alleviation M. Venkaiah Naidu has said, channelling Victor Hugo, that “nobody can stop an idea whose time has come and this applies to the Smart City as well”. What does becoming a smart city entail According to the government, such a city would have round the clock power supply, drinking water, e-governance, IT infrastructure, etc. With all its problems, Mumbai can claim to have achieved some of this already. Much more can and should be done, but this is perhaps the only city where power cuts are unheard of.

To boost a garden variety town into a hi-tech smart city, the authorities will do a lot of “retrofitting”, whatever that means. This will require huge funding, which will come via resources provided by the Centre, the states and via the PPP route, which stands for public-private partnership, which will include land monetisation, debt and better resource mobilisation. In short, the governments at various levels will sell off all the extra land they have for commercial use and use the money for this project. The railways, port trusts, defence establishments are among the central authorities which own a lot of land, as do civic bodies. The government says this land is lying useless and needs to be sold off to raise money.

Ordinarily, the Shiv Sena — or for that matter any party — would not really mind this, since it opens up various kinds of opportunities, but for the last few months, the Sena has been raising objections against the idea of the smart city. But this is not merely one more political missile to hurl at its partner, the BJP. The Sena has strong views on Smart Cities and they are worth considering.

An integral part of a smart city will be the creation of a special purpose vehicle (SPV) which will “plan, appraise, approve, release funds, implement, manage, operate, monitor and evaluate the Smart City development projects”. The SPV will be a limited company which will be headed by a full-time CEO and have nominees of the Central government and state government on its board; the CEO need not be a bureaucrat — s/he can be someone brought in from the private sector. The SPV will have operational autonomy and independence in decision-making.

For all practical purposes, therefore, the running of the city will be handed over to an unelected body with representatives from government organisations and the private sector. The local municipality will become more or less redundant.

While this should ring alarm bells anywhere, in Mumbai it has far deeper implications. During the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement in the late 1950s to agitate for the inclusion of Bombay ino the state, more than 100 people died in police firing. Mumbai, therefore, has emotive resonance among locals and the Shiv Sena has long warned against any move to separate it from the state and turn it into a kind of self-governing Union Territory. This will please corporate tycoons the most. The Sena sees the smart city idea as a clever way to hand over control of Mumbai to a non-elected body and thus separate it from Maharashtra; a happy by-product from the BJP’s point of view would be the resultant irrelevance of the troublesome Sena.

But this is not just about the Shiv Sena’s wishes or indeed about the internecine politics between it and the BJP. The very idea of a new, unelected corporate body running a city raises critical questions about the nature of democracy. Citizens often express their anger and frustration at the way cities are run and we would welcome upgradation of services. Municipal corporations are slow, inefficient and corrupt. Roads are bad, water supply is erratic and garbage piles up.

The effort ought to be to improve these services in the existing democratic framework. A municipal corporator is answerable to the constituents and can be thrown out. Citizens can and do protest when corporators or the municipal corporation fail in their duty. A helpline will never be a substitute. The idea of clean water and wifi are very attractive and a government’s effort to provide them should be applauded. One can fantasise that a company running Mumbai would have been nimble in dealing with the smog. But there are serious questions about smart cities that need to be clarified and so far no answers have been coming.