The exceptional triumph and masterly stroke of the recent SAARC diplomacy in New Delhi, has been acclaimed and widely written about and we may move to other issues. Our attention may now rivet to group of countries, commonly clubbed as Asian Tigers but generally speaking not much in consideration in our scheme of things.
It is abundantly clear that the biggest focus of the new regime would be governance reforms. It may therefore, be in the fitness of things to lay weightage on finding the best partners around the world, for developing our infrastructure projects. While SAARC initiative must continue, it would be expedient and pragmatic to look beyond and be guided by pure economic sense rather than just the geo-political calculations. It is in this context that close cooperation with the East Asian countries is suggested as of great significance for urban renewal in the country.
Now looking at the Indian scenario, are our cities liveableIJ The urban population that was 25.85 million (10.84%) in 1901 rose to 285 million (27.78%) in 2001. The last decadal growth has finally shown the changing scenario — while the rural population increased by 90.06 million, the urban population enlarged by 91 million and this might be the new irreversible process, i.e., urban population will increase more in coming decades. As per the latest census figures, 377 million people in India live in urban areas, which figure is higher than the combined population of USA and UK.
It is further estimated that this may swell to 550 million (42%) by 2030. Continued urbanisation, therefore, appears to be the inevitable process of economic development. Clearly the proportion of people living away from agricultural activities is rising as agriculture is not able to support them, triggering large scale migration to cities in search of livelihood and better living conditions. The burgeoning population has put severe pressure on existing infrastructure in the cities, causing housing shortage, water and power crisis, congestion, poor public transport, public health and waste disposal problems, environmental degradation, and severe strain on delivery of services like sanitation, health and education. Earlier, realising that our resources and skills were not commensurate to the task at hand for developing infrastructure projects in the country, we took resort to the PPP mode with some good result. Therefore, if we can get things done (public works) through Indian business houses, we should not be naïve not to get our infrastructure projects done by highly efficient, technically qualified and experienced agencies of these Asian Tigers who have revolutionised their own infrastructures. It is not that we have no collaboration with them but in comparison to their extra-ordinary success story, the partnership is much smaller in scale than it could or should be.
We have remained enamored too long with the West, perhaps due to historical reasons but also because of a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis our erstwhile rulers. So success stories from nearer home are found less inspiring and worth emulating than the firangi experiment; lest we forget, we have this deplorable weakness for the White skin that often determines our responses to various situations and demands. Thus, while we may have heard of Asian Miracle we refuse to be impressed. The Asian Tigers like Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan showed how they could revamp their economy through rapid industrialisation and achieve parity with the Western countries in terms of generating national wealth and in raising all other indicators of human development. leaving aside other aspects, we may just focus on how well they have changed their urban landscape and made their cities world-class. let us agree that they did things differently and built up robust high-income economies through competitive advantage and export-led rapid strides with growth rate of GDP maintained at or above 7% to 8% per annum — Shiv Khera speaks of successful people doing things differently.Others in the league like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, besides of course China and Japan showed similar grandiose growth. Why don't we learn to do things differentlyIJ
Summing up, our cities like our rivers present a pathetic picture of shabbiness and decay and in sharp contrast to the cities all around the developed world. No doubt, it is also a reflection of the general level of under-development that the country is faced with. Nevertheless, we have some pockets of excellence in every major metro and big city but we are not able to expand that to more areas of the urban sprawl. From roads to mass urban transport, to Railways, to water supply, to waste management and hospitals, our urban living desperately awaits improvement through appropriate technology, modified to suit our specific needs and finding the funds. It is here that we may want to rely more on these countries. The fact remains that these nations transformed themselves through global value chain. The rich experience of Asian Tigers should be a huge inspiration for us and a resource that we have not tapped yet.