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27th Poverty Discourse Neo Liberal Urbanism and its Contradictions in India Prof. Shrawan K Acharya Establisehd by Chetanya Kasyap Foundation 27th Poverty Discourse Neo Liberal Urbanism and its Contradictions in India Prof. Shrawan Kumar Acharya Centre for Studies of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Friday, 30th December, 2016 Lokashraya Foundation A 101, Gauri Sadan, 5-Hailey Road, New Delhi-110001 Copyright © 2017 Lokashraya Foundation All rights reserved No part of this paper may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permis- sion of the organization. Lokashraya Foundation A-101, Gaui Sadan, 5 Hailey Road, New Delhi – 110001 Phone: 011-23705511/12 Fax: 011-23705550 Email: [email protected] Website: www.lokashraya.org Neo Liberal Urbanism and its Contradictions in India Neo Liberal Urbanism and its Contradictions in India Prof. Shrawan K. Acharya Centre for Studies of Regional Development Jawaharlal Nehru University Welcome and Introduction Dr. Abhay Kumar, Executive Director, Lokashraya Foundation began the Talk with a welcome address. He welcomed everyone to the talk on “Neo liberal urbanism and its contradictions in India”. He thanked the Chairperson of the Talk Prof. Ashok K. Pankaj , Director, Council for Social Development, New Delhi for having agreed to preside over the Talk. He also thanked the speaker Prof. Shravan Acharya for agreeing to present the Talk on neo-urbanism and its implications on the poor. Dr. Kumar then gave a brief introduction of the Chairperson and the Speaker. Prof Ashok Pankaj in his initial remarks mentioned that the talk on the outcome of neo-liberalism is indeed interesting and very pertinent in today’s cities where large scale marginalization is evicting the poor out of the city and depriving them of their livelihood. 1 27th Poverty Discourse Presentation Prof Shravan Acharya thanked everyone and acknowledged the brief introduction of him given by Dr. Abhay Kumar. He started the talk with a brief history of his academic career and how he spent a considerable time of his life in Amdavad and very recently moved to New Delhi on a capacity as a professor in Jawaharlal Nehru University. He intended to share his experience of dealing with the city development of Amdavad and tried to correlate it with other cities like Kolkata (India) and Beijing (China). The speaker stressed on the point that the development of any city depends on the inherent culture of its inhabitants. For example, the city of Kolkata grew because of the colonial settlement; but for that matter Amdavad as a city grew because of its entrepreneurial inhabitants and initiatives to grow it as an economic hub by the local seths. The speaker mentioned that the growth of the city in India as a whole can be divided in to various phases - pre-colonial which focused only on vernacular urbanization and small scale industries. Later came the next phase of colonial stage, where one have the British urban imageries, physical planning, institutions, modern New Delhi, segregation of the city by the classes and emergence of various dichotomy in the urban form. After the withdrawal of the British, a new stage was initiated - Post independence. In this era, Nehruvian socialism was floated as a concept. There was slow growth of economy with focus on the rural areas. There was a growing consensus that “India lives in villages”. 2 Neo Liberal Urbanism and its Contradictions in India Among all these, few cities were planned by visionaries who came from foreign lands and created cities based on their understanding of European urbanization. In the phase of liberalism/neo-liberalism, more focus was given on macro economic reforms, global integration and high economic growth. The cities were largely aspired by the imageries of the other Asian cities like Shanghai. Indians were more at ease with Asian cities as they knew that creating American space will be difficult. Thus, whenever the country dreamt of something glitzy they visualized Shanghai. But, our planners fail to understand the urban hierarchy of the Chinese city which is different from India. The speaker also mentioned the case of city of Chandigarh which was built by French architect Le Corbusier. The vision was to create a well planned city at the foothills of the Himalayas. It absolutely served the purpose except for the practical limitations of maintaining such huge broad roads at limited government money. It is true that urban development cannot be ignored as it contributes a lion’s share in the economy. Post liberalization from 1990 the share of Urban GDP was 46% and it rose considerably to 58% in 2008. The McKinsey Global Institute (2010) published in one of their reports that the share of urban GDP will further increase to 69% by 2030. The speaker then focused the rest of his Talk on the urban contradictions that has emerged during neo-liberal era by citing an example of Amdavad and its urban development 3 27th Poverty Discourse during the last 2 or 3 decades. He said that the city is divided by River Sabarmati in two halves. The western part is developed with large buildings and on the other hand, in the eastern part of the city large number of slums can be seen. The speaker also mentioned that how the city had expanded from 90 sq kms (1971) to 500 sq km (2011) over the years. Historically the city had the entrepreneurial zest among the inhabitants. The city had grown with minimum colonial impact but Mumbai’s influence cannot be denied. The city had thrived on industry and local commerce with indigenous capital. When most of the industries in the country where losing its foothold, Amdavad had regained her vibrancy with innovation and revival of the industrial base to services. Various revitalization strategies were adopted by the government to flourish the city. The revitalization strategy of Amdavad was to make it vibrant, inclusive and independent city. A considerable private sector involvement was committed. Also, various marketing strategy, branding and institutional reforms were adopted. Various projects were initiated. Firstly, the Riverfront project to develop River Sabarmati was taken up. It was one of its kinds in India being inspired by other European river front project. A large section of the slums had been evicted for this purpose and the poor has been marginalized for the sake of development. Similarly, lake front development project was undertaken in the eastern part of the city. The speaker showed pictures of how the once bustling lake side is now deserted. The hawkers are not 4 Neo Liberal Urbanism and its Contradictions in India allowed inside and many are losing out on employment. Similarly, the city boasts of the BRT that is encircling it and often is a matter of pride for the state government. But if someone notices carefully, the pedestrians and cyclist had been marginalized considerably from the BRT project. The cyclist do not have proper track to cycle; it is only comfortable for the ones who ride cars. The same sort of marginalization is happening due to the real estate development. Few years back large numbers of malls were seen coming up in the city but today most of them have shut down, in possibility due to lack of demand. These entire malls came up because of large scale gambling of the construction barons. In these process houses of the poor had been demolished and they have been rendered roofless. Commodification of culture is another menace of the present neo-libearl urbanization. Vibrant Gujarat-summit, international kite festival and garba festival has been commercialized to a great extent. In the initial years, all these were confined to one’s community but now it has been largely commercialized. Also, presently if one sees the skyline of Amdavad, she boasts off towers with the name of global cities such as New York tower, California tower etc as people have a tendency to connect to these world class cities. The consequences of all these are exclusion and marginalization of the poor. According to the SEWA (2009), the rise in infrastructure development led to eviction of local residents in many cases and also at some sites the inhabitants have 5 27th Poverty Discourse been seriously affected. So, wherever neo-liberal urban development had taken place there has been possibility of loss of residence for many marginalized people. According to some sources, the Sabarmati river front project had evicted about 45,000 people and 746 families whereas only 24 families had been resettled. BRT project which is often described as the pride of the Amdavad city had evicted 2000 vendors who have lost their livelihood. Also, the Riverfront project had totally dismantled the Ravibari weekly informal market and had played with the livelihood of hundreds of people. Of course, the authority had provided space for new market set up within the swanky new riverfront but often the shop owners do not get the impetus to set up shops there due to lack of accessibility. The speaker also mentioned the case of Bawana (Delhi) in this connection where government had given houses to the EWS several kilometers away from their workplace. He once visited the area and found the place deserted. This is a failure on the part of the planners in designing the spaces appropriately. The speaker voiced the concern that modern independent India is doing the same thing with the poor as British did long time back. They were forced to move out and live an exclusionary life. The development in this era is largely motivated by pro market agenda and real estate speculation.

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