The Indira Canteen scheme of the Congress government aims to open subsidised, low-cost canteens in all the 198 wards of Bengaluru. Surprisingly, it has met with virulent opposition from residents’ welfare associations (RWAs) on various grounds. But before we discuss the opposition and the underlying reasons, a few facts about the city today are in order.
Bengaluru has grown almost 300% over the past 25 years. This growth has largely been fuelled by the furious expansion in the IT industry and its centralisation in the city. Bengaluru accounts for more than one-third of the country’s IT exports and employs more than nine lakh people directly in the IT industry. This rapid urbanisation has a two-fold nature — the great agrarian crisis has pushed small farmers and landless workers from rural areas to the pull of low-skilled jobs in the city.
This unprecedented boom in both organised and unorganised employment has resulted in a severe crunch on the city’s public utilities and infrastructure. Its expansion has been made possible by the great armies of construction workers, security guards and domestic workers who have also made Bengaluru their home in the past two decades. There are two distinct ‘Bengalurus’ in existence today. The glitzy malls, high-end retail outlets, the opulent gated communities and the alien glass façades of the IT high-rises co-exist with great shanty towns of migrant labourers and the micro-economy of street vendors. An often forgotten fact behind the success of the spanking new metro rail is that the project was built on the toil of woefully underpaid migrant workers, many of whom lost their lives in the process. Their toil has sadly been made invisible in our city.
The Indira canteens aims to fulfil a real material need of this section of the population. The RWAs cry foul that these 40x40 canteens are encroaching on the city’s shrinking public space. The High Court also recently directed the State government not to use parks or playgrounds for the canteens. Let us examine the basis for this opposition. The first question obviously is the definition of public space. Once the canteen becomes a reality, does it reduce itself to a “private” space? Will the canteen exclude the “public” from using its services? Obviously not. The canteens will in reality open a hitherto “exclusive public space” to the working class. The public spaces such as parks and playgrounds in our localities have remained exclusive to the upper caste/middle classes. These spaces will now be opened up to the working class.
A cursory survey of all the parks and playgrounds clearly shows that outlets of the State-owned Nandini, HOPCOMS and BangaloreOne have already “encroached” on these spaces. It would be amiss not to mention the temples that have encroached on our parks and playgrounds. There has been no opposition to these, so why the crusade against the canteens? Isn’t it another public utility as well?
Sociological studies across the world have shown the positive causal linkage between economic inequality and crime rate. Growing inequality in our city has meant the emergence of “exclusive” gated communities, and a virtual collapse of mixed housing projects (between castes and communities) on one hand and a sharp increase of shanty housing on the other. The spectacular growth of the private security industry, ironically manned by the same invisible worker, is a clear symptom of the growing inequality and the consequent anxieties of the middle and upper classes. All the talk of shrinking public space is mere bluster, hiding the real and material class anxieties of the haves scrambling to maintain their hold on public spaces. It is time to call this bluff. The working class needs the canteen now.
Satyanand is a social activist and secretary of the All-India Trade Union Congress, Bengaluru
