Change the pace of change

Architect-author Goonmeet Singh Chauhan tells Ayushi Sharma that his book, Invertonomics: Eight Ideas to Transform India, presents innovative yet pragmatic ideas for solving some of India’s most fundamental and chronic problems. He has ways to deal with social inequity, cleanliness, safety of women, education and a sharply declining economy

India has made a remarkable progress in several areas over the seven decades since Independence. But at the same time, it has been beset by some fundamental and chronic problems. There is poverty and inequity, the air in many cities is unbreathable, the streets are littered with garbage, women feel unsafe, levels of basic education are low and the economy is sharply declining. The problems have lasted so long that they seem unsolvable in a lifetime.

Architect-author Goonmeet Singh Chauhan argues that they can actually be solved decisively. To achieve this, he presents a new methodology that he calls Invertonomics in his eponymous book, which inverts problems into economic opportunities. The book identifies eight persistent problem areas and proposes well-resolved and, in some cases, successfully-implemented models for tackling them. It presents innovative yet pragmatic ideas that will have a direct impact on our lives and help us realise the dream of an advanced India. We speak to him to find out how. Excerpts:

How did you conceptualise it?

I have always enjoyed solving problems, especially the stubborn ones. A three-pronged strategy typically works for me. It begins with analysing the problem and its key drivers in a manner where we can measure the critical root causes and their impact. Then, the process of solutioneering begins on how the ‘whole relates to the parts’, and simultaneously, how the ‘parts relate to the whole’. It may seem abstract but the key to problem-identification typically lies in a few parts, while the solution lies in the whole. Once the key stone and the king pin have been identified, the final step begins. The third leg of the exercise is imagining a new ecosystem approach, wherein all parts work synergistically to achieve a newer, brighter and beautiful possibility.

As architects, we have a free hand in creating newness within the limits of a land. Sometimes, we look at urban design and try it to impact the quality of lives of people. But our interventions tend to be more physical in nature. This book is a response to my inner calling to go beyond the physicality so that true transformation can happen. It has ideas that use money, technology and common sense to solve some real, hard problems of our country.

What research went into it? And how long did it take to complete the book?

I started thinking about it 10 years ago. I wanted to write 21 ideas but when I got to the research part and assessing the practicality of each solution, it turned out to be an exhaustive process and every idea took more than a year each to be accomplished. The book project relied on a team effort for research, which was based on three methods — physical measurement and secondary data collection on ground, internet-based research to inform us of interventions that spread across geographies and time, interviews with informed persons in civil society and the bureaucracy to gauge the practicality of our solutions proposed.

Every chapter starts with a general narrative of the problem — for this, we used internet-based research to find out about the history of the problem across geographies and time. For instance, we studied how honking was a public issue in post-World War I London and in Hitler’s Germany. We studied the solutions that various governments and NGOs had attempted earlier; successful case studies that could be scaled up to be applied across a national scale; a lot more. It took seven years to complete the book including an year-long process of edits and updates.

Your book lists some successfully-implemented models that you’ve designed. Can you elaborate on them?

A few of the book’s ideas have been or are being implemented with some initial success and a lot of promise.

• The Wise foundation (World Initiative for Service and Education): This idea looks at establishing free residential schools for underprivileged children, who seek out a living foraging through garbage. These kids would now be housed in free residential hostels-cum-schools and receive love and care. They would grow up in campuses called Sanctuaries, which would be set in suburban fringes of the cities and would impart value based education based on Sewa and Samridhi. These sanctuaries would be set up and run by educational trusts and the entire capital and operational expenditure would be paid by the trust. However, the government would step in as a regulator and funding agency. They would pay a fee for each child like a parent would pay for a residential school. This fee would enable the educational trust to receive a return on investment for the educational trust, thereby allowing this project to scale up. We are imagining a project of one million children across 500 centres in 30 states. The Delhi Government has also expressed its eagerness to adopt this model and are looking to establish the first such school in Delhi soon.
• Clean and dry toilets: Six months before the Commonwealth games, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi took on the challenge of building public toilets of international quality in the city. They were in need of Rs 100 crore for the project and struggled to get provision for the funds.

At this point, we suggested a model wherein new toilet complexes would be created on a PPP model and sited adjacent to existing MCD governed marketplaces within their parking lots. A concessionaire would build on a 2,000-square foot plinth, modern toilets with a frontal entrance into a reception area that would be manned to collect charges and lead to separate, clean and dry toilets with dedicated attendants. These would be flanked by two kiosks for ice-cream/florist/ATMs and on top of this structure would be a coffee shop of 2,000 square feet. The janitors and operations of the entire complex would be managed by the concessionaire. The revenues from pay and use toilets would far exceed the operational expenses and we recommended the concessionaire would pay an annuity to the market association in addition to paying a upfront bid money to acquire the rights to build to the municipality.

The proposal was implemented and 28 new international-quality toilet complexes were constructed and the Municipality earned significant sums in revenues. The project has been hugely successful and can be easily replicated across India.

How can invertonomics be used widely in India, including the remote and underprivileged areas?

Invertonomics imagines a rejuvenated Bharat and proposes three mega interventions in India’s rural hinterland.

• Office of Bharat: The office of Bharat would be like a central business-cum-administrative district centre, one each for India’s 650 districts. This 100-acre development would have within it a new administrative set up including civil administration, police, district courts, disaster management centre. Social infrastructure such as educational facilities, health facilities, cultural complex, sports centre, vocational training centre and business centres including an international logistics oriented agricultural mandi, ware housing, cold storage, food processing plants, commercial office centre, rural hotels, hostels, rural shopping centre etc. A new centralised powerhouse like this will spur the dormant administrative, commercial and socio-economic energies of our hinterland into action. This nucleus would infuse capital into the district economy and act like a catalyst of commerce and social change.
• Cocoons: The Cocoon Corporation of India shall provide postpaid containers (called cocoons) to the farmers to store their produce and support with facilities for digital trade of their agri-commodities. This facility would help the farmers and allow them to fetch a better price for their produce and significantly empower them financially both in terms of revenue as well as the ability to raise capital at lower interest rates. The corporation shall also run a proper logistics centre to ship these cocoons (containers), which are rodent, dust and weather-proof, and even refrigerated in case needed for their trade destinations. The platform would radically empower farmers, making agriculture the engine of rural economy once again, not remittances from rural folk living in cities.
• Residential development around the office of Bharat: A true socio-economic revival shall happen around these offices of Bharat as new residential developments, schools, hospitals, cultural complexes, etc, will enable jobs, livelihood and quality life for the rural folk. It will decongest our cities too as villages would become preferable places to live, learn and work.

Long-term solutions such as sensitising the public through education and awareness campaigns have always been there. Do you think this approach would lead to faster and more effective means of modifying citizen behaviour?

The book promises to change the pace of change. So far, we have been cutting butter with a chainsaw, while all we need is a butter knife called invertonomics! I feel citizen behaviour can be altered using a three-pronged approach, including creating an inspired citizenship wherein individuals act in the interest of collective good.

• Money and technology: Invertonomics uses a carrot and stick approach by offering each individual monetary incentives or disincentives for expected citizen behaviour. For assessing individual behaviour, it uses non-invasive technology to gauge behaviour in the public domain. For example, to manage the incidence of honking on our roads, the book proposes an auditory charge of Rs 1 for every instance of honking beyond a threshold of say 30 free honks a month. It further levies a charge of Rs 10, say for honking near a hospital or a night within a colony. It also incentivises the least honkers by measuring their relative performance to peers in the same city. Such positive citizens may receive recognition or rewards or corporate discounts, while non-compliant citizens would pay hefty fee. They would also receive surrogate tutorship on how to improve their citizenship by adjusting to acceptable behaviour.
• Measurement, transparency and connectivity: More complex issues like safety in cities and equity would require an ecosystem level shift, which shall be achieved using measurement of some key parameters, tabling them in a transparent, technology-driven manner and then publishing the data real-time on public platforms so that all the stakeholders are connected with that data. Such awareness and collective intelligence of the ecosystem shall raise the median performance of all systems and accelerate the transformation to higher ground.

In a country as diverse as ours, how difficult do you think it is to catalyse change?

When demographics are diverse, one has to work out simple and binary solutions where expected behaviour by citizens is understood by all. Like the Odd-Even scheme of the Delhi Government was easily understood by an auto driver as well as a financial analyst because the expectation was binary. The compliance was high.

In India, we tend to obfuscate the law and the poor citizen often finds himself on the wrong side of it, forcing him to use unfair means to extricate himself out of the situation. This phenomenon has led to the incremental lowering of the median of citizenship, with citizens adopting a sort of flexible morality that suits their convenience. Invertonomics proposes the use of very simple laws and the new ecosystem would lay down binary expectations. Also incentives in terms of money are easily understood by all. Money is like a universal language that possibly rivals music in its universal appeal! Money-based systems shall ensure that things operate in a demography-agnostic manner, successfully.

You’ve mentioned in the book, “In India, we are in a negative cycle as far as citizen participation for common good is concerned. This shift can only come from policy change and legislation aimed towards the creation of definitive goals.” How do you think this can be acted upon in India, where it might take years to change policies and laws or create a new one?

Change is always bottom up. While it’s affected through top-down instruments like new legislations, new institutions and a new ecosystem, the demand for it is always propelled by the need for it. It takes civil society and thought leaders to articulate a vision that gradually alters the popular narrative. Thereafter, the course of transformation can either take an incremental route or an accelerated route, depending upon the willingness of the political dispensation and the strength of the advocacy to take a hard look at issues and seek convenient and strong resolutions.

We need conversations around inspired citizenship, and local-level leadership to demonstrate action in areas, which can be handled locally like segregation of garbage, pedestrian safety and much more. For this, we have also set up the Invertonomics Foundation for India, which promises to take up issues from the book and pursue them to make sure that they get implemented and how.