In any State Budget speech, during any year, one can find a few things that are good to do, a few things that leave the listener startled, and a large number of other things in between. That’s how it has been for decades, and the only thing that usually changes is that each budget is a little bigger than the previous one.
What’s missing in this is vision. What are the priorities of the government? What are the metrics by which to judge if those priorities are being met? What is the policy in each sector by which budget allocation decisions are made? What is the government’s stance towards markets and society?
As long as the answers to those things are not clear, it really doesn’t matter what goes into a budget. And it surely doesn’t matter in the final year of a government’s term — if anything substantial was to have been tried and achieved, that should have mostly happened by now.
Which is why I feel this year’s exercise is too little, too late. I’m glad that there is more money to go on improving footpaths in Bengaluru, but if a vision to improve 1,500 km of footpaths had been articulated in 2013, we could have had a lot more walkable streets by now, and we would not be talking about a few dozen more each year. Similarly, while I am happy that the government plans to add 3,000 new buses, I also know it will take much longer than one year to do this, and more than half the buses will be only to replace old ones.
Having a vision would also help us understand the importance of time in different sectors. Having neglected some problems for years, we have no option but to pretend that they can now be magically sorted out in months.
“Construction of 50,000 houses through the Slum Development Board” reads one entry — can you guess how long the board took to build its last 50,000 houses in the city?
‘Innovative township’
Some of the stuff is also comical. “Development of Innovative Township spanning 166 acres” says one line. What would be so innovative, may we ask? And if innovation is needed in a new neighbourhood, why not make that a part of the existing ones. We’re always searching for the next thing to promise — it’s a way of forgetting the ones that were never kept.
I do not believe that the city is doomed, and I reject the cry we hear once in a while that in 15 to 20 years the city will collapse under the weight of its problems. It’s unlikely, because there are communities throughout the city that are doing their bit to make things better. What is missing is political leadership which sets the tone for real change on a large scale, and says, “this is the kind of city we want to have”. Instead we have projects, and projections of future glory.
In a few months all this will be forgotten. No one really tracks a budget, and many things that were proposed in past budgets didn’t actually happen. This one is not very different. A bit of this, and a bit of that, and another year spent waiting for the real thing.
(Ashwin Mahesh is an urbanist, and was an urban research strategist for the government of Karnataka during 2010–12.)
