The soul of India lives in its villages, Mahatma Gandhi said. London governed India’s soul then. Delhi and the State capitals now govern India, but not quite in a way that allows people to participate in decision-making.
By declaring that the new capital of Andhra Pradesh (A.P.) is Vijayawada and its surrounding region (Vijayawada, Guntur, Tenali and Mangalagiri) and by wanting all major government institutions there, A.P. Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has, like in other Indian States, favoured centralised governance.
The logic for choosing the Vijayawada-Guntur region to be the capital can be traced to the outdated industrial location theory (ILT) according to which industry sites are chosen to minimise the transport cost of raw materials and finished goods. It is no doubt that Vijayawada and Guntur are centrally located in A.P. and are well-connected, and this helps minimise transport cost for visitors to these regions. But ILT does not consider other critical issues.
Indirect costsFirst, the theory factors only direct costs, not externalities. The region chosen is surrounded by some of A.P.’s best farmland, and a part of it will be lost to the new capital. According to Ashmore, Marshall and others, air pollution from large cities like Mumbai and Ahmedabad has caused wheat and paddy yield losses of 15-40 per cent, amounting to lakhs of tonnes, in a 60-70-kilometre radius around each city. Air pollution from thermal power plants is similar to that from cities; hence crop yield losses around power plants can be extrapolated to estimate losses around cities. A 2013 environmental impact appraisal of the 1,760 MW Ibrahimpatnam thermal power plant located near Vijayawada estimated that the plant’s air pollution-related crop yield losses in a 10-km radius around the plant amounted to Rs. 200 crore per annum. Extrapolating this to air pollution-related crop yield losses in a 25-km radius around the new capital would mean a loss of Rs. 1,000 crore per annum to local farmers. And as the new capital grows, it will attract migrants, and the city’s carbon emissions will increase by at least one million tonnes per annum. The cost of raising plantations that can sequester these carbon emissions is Rs. 3,500 crore.
Second, ILT does not factor costs for social conflicts. The energy required for a smart city is six million tonnes of oil equivalent costing Rs. 35,000 crore, i.e., a third of A.P.’s 2014-15 budget. To mobilise these funds, a public-private partnership may be sought. Private parties who invest for profit will want to transform newer parts of Vijayawada and Guntur into gated communities with super malls, leaving the older and crowded one-towns in Vijayawada and Patha-Guntur as they are. The uneven development of the Vijayawada-Guntur region is likely to cause social conflict in future — one with a cost.
Third, ILT may work for a single node like a centralised capital, but not for smart governance or decentralised democratic participative governance. In a centralised capital, higher-level government functions are centralised in one location. In the model of smart governance, government functions are dispersed throughout the State enabling people to travel shorter distances to district, taluka/mandal towns for work with the government, rather than to the capital, thus minimising transport costs. More importantly, the State’s polity and all its regions will feel that they have been included in the process of governance.
Tasked by the Union government to identify sites for the new capital, the Sivaramakrishnan Committee recommended dispersing government institutions across the State to allow for distributed and equitable development of all of the State. For instance, departments related to industry, agriculture and mining could be located in Visakhapatnam, Prakasam and Rayalaseema respectively. Accepting this recommendation to decentralise is the first step in smart governance.
The second step is to move to democratic participative governance. Indian law empowers local self-governments — panchayats, municipalities, etc., to take decisions about local matters. Local self-governments have not discharged their mandate adequately because of lack of clear jurisdiction and adequate funds. If this is corrected, governance can be transformed from a top-down for the people model of centralised governance done from State capitals to a bottom-up by the people model, where every village and town governs itself.
Smart governance experimentsSmart governance experiments have been done in many parts of the world. Participatory budgeting first began in 1990 in Porto Alegre in Brazil. In the first quarter of every year, communities hold open house meetings every week to discuss and vote on the city’s budget and spending priorities for their neighbourhood. Later, city-wide public plenaries pass a budget that is binding on the city council. Within seven years of starting participatory budgeting, household access to piped water and sewers doubled to touch 95 per cent. Roads, particularly in slums, increased five-fold; schools quadrupled and health and education budgets trebled. Tax evasion fell. People used computer kiosks to feed suggestions to the city council’s website.
Participatory budgeting is now being done in 1,500 towns around the world — in Europe, South America, Canada, and in Pune, Bangalore, Mysore and Hiware Bazar in India. Hiware Bazar, 25 years ago, was like any other drought-prone village in Marathwada, Maharashtra. Today its income has increased 20-fold and poverty has all but disappeared.
In the early 1970s, British scientist Stafford Beer designed a cybernetic system that did real-time monitoring of Chile’s economy and allowed production decisions to be taken at different levels — by shop floor workers, by people in the entire production facility, by representatives of production facilities in a city and finally the cabinet’s economic committee. If an issue arose on a particular shop floor, workers were given a certain amount of time to fix it. If they failed because the issue was beyond their control (raw material shortage for instance), an algedonic meter sounded an alarm and the decision shifted to a higher level. Two 1970s-generation computers and telex lines were used for this.
Before Right to Information (RTI) became law in India, public boards with information on daily receipt and disbursement of food grains were ordered to be put up outside ration shops in Madhya Pradesh. Immediately after, food grain shortages in ration shops disappeared. Fifteen years ago, plants in A.P. were ordered to put up public boards outside their main gate with information on their compliance conditions and zones that were most vulnerable to catastrophic accidents. To make RTI more effective, a non-computerised information search engine has been designed in India.
Thirty years ago, Narsappa, an illiterate farmer who was aggrieved by Harihar Polyfibers’ effluents, was told by the plant’s management that their effluents were being treated and that he had no cause for worry. He asked why the locations of the plant’s fresh water intake and effluent discharge points could not be switched. Narsappa’s question is still unanswered.
Grassroots decision-makers in Brazil and Chile are like Narsappa. Participation of people like him in smart governance or gram swaraj will make India a vibrant society — much more than using expensive toys like online air quality monitors from Singapore, the output data from which is not actionable in Indian cities.
(Sagar Dhara works with Cerana Foundation on energetics of human societies and environmental risks. His e-mail address is sagdhara@yahoo.com)
