39 hours have passed since the beginning of the attacks in Bombay. Loud blasts were just heard at the Taj hotel, and a hundred (!) Indian commandos have invaded Nariman House and are trying to kill the estimated two to three armed militants inside. The whole episode seems to be a lesson in how much damage a handful of attackers with the aim of wreaking the most havoc possible without any regard for their own lives can do. Meanwhile, the rest of south Bombay seems to have settled into an eerie peace. Reports indicate that the attackers arrived on boats from the sea. They are young men, between 20 to 25 years old. One witness who saw the boats being unloaded at India Gate said that they looked well-off. Who are they? What do they want?
What is more worrisome to me now is that Narenda Modi, the Hindu fundamentalist leader who presided over Gujarat during riots that killed hundreds of Muslims, is now in Bombay. He released a statement blaming Pakistan for allowing terrorists to use its sea routes for the attacks, and added that Manmohan Singh’s public statement yesterday was “disappointing.” Before riots break out that could kill many, many times the number of people already affected, political leaders here need to take control, keep people like Modi quiet, and encourage all citizens to remain united and peaceful in the aftermath of the attacks. There is a real potential for widespread retaliatory violence that needs to be diffused. But where are the country’s leaders? They have been far too quiet.
In Chennai, we are far removed from the drama in Bombay, but many of the city's residents are watching the news anxiously. The rains have eased for the moment, but the sky is still overcast, and severe rains are predicted for this evening and night. I hope that this does not lead to further flooding.
28 November 2008
27 November 2008
The nightmare in Bombay continues
I have been watching live reports from NDTV about the terrorist attacks in southern Bombay, and it is surreal, to say the least. As Barkha Datt finished her report in front of the Taj, we heard multiple rounds of gunshots in the background. Up to 200 people are still trapped in the Oberoi building, and as the news cameras watched, people in the hotel rooms waved to outsiders, pleading for help. As the sun set, the military entered the Oberoi, and began shooting at terrorists on the eighth floor of the building. Bombs just went off at the hotel, and fires are raging from some of the floors. There is still no clarity on so many things – on how many terrorists there are, on how many hostages, on what they want, on which organization they belong to.
Fire trucks without ladders have been straining to put out fires on the higher stories of the hotels. Policemen carrying shotguns and wearing shoddy uniforms are facing off against militants armed with hand grenades and AK-47s. As policemen stood with guns outside of places rumored to contain armed terrorists, curious passers-by peered over their shoulders into the buildings, and assembled in crowds in front of the hotels. This was absurd to watch.
Reports from people who have escaped from the Taj describe a nightmare – corpses lying around the hotel lobby and restaurants, terrorists indiscriminately firing machine guns at guests and staff. Guests escaped from rooms by climbing down on curtains and sheets tied together.
While India has faced repeated incidents of violence, I have naively always thought of violence as something that happens to others -- to people in Kashmir or the Northeast, to people who didn't have access to the support networks that I have here. My illusion of safety has been definitively shattered.
Meanwhile, severe rains continue for the third continuous day in Chennai. The streets are waterlogged, and homes are flooded. It is a replay of the last November I spent in Chennai.
Fire trucks without ladders have been straining to put out fires on the higher stories of the hotels. Policemen carrying shotguns and wearing shoddy uniforms are facing off against militants armed with hand grenades and AK-47s. As policemen stood with guns outside of places rumored to contain armed terrorists, curious passers-by peered over their shoulders into the buildings, and assembled in crowds in front of the hotels. This was absurd to watch.
Reports from people who have escaped from the Taj describe a nightmare – corpses lying around the hotel lobby and restaurants, terrorists indiscriminately firing machine guns at guests and staff. Guests escaped from rooms by climbing down on curtains and sheets tied together.
While India has faced repeated incidents of violence, I have naively always thought of violence as something that happens to others -- to people in Kashmir or the Northeast, to people who didn't have access to the support networks that I have here. My illusion of safety has been definitively shattered.
Meanwhile, severe rains continue for the third continuous day in Chennai. The streets are waterlogged, and homes are flooded. It is a replay of the last November I spent in Chennai.
25 November 2008
The long road to here
At work, I'm currently trying to understand the history of spatial planning in India. It hit me as I was reading just how fast and how much the ideologies motivating the Indian government have changed in the last few years. Nowadays, the widely accepted goal of urban planning is to provide the right incentives to make the private sector solve urban problems. But in 1957, when the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was created to implement the city's newly written Master Plan, the first city plan in the country, it went about it in true socialist style -- by acquiring massive amounts of land, developing that land with infrastructure, and then leasing it to private developers and cooperative societies for building housing and commercial space according to the zonal dictates of the plan. Some 150 odd development authorities were set up in cities all over the country, all following the example set by Delhi.
Development authorities in India are now widely known to be some of the most corrupt institutions in the country. The large-scale transfers of money required to acquire land and build housing left plenty of room for siphoning off state funds. Development authorities in the major cities are big, bloated bureaucracies-- the DDA has at least 40,000 employees-- in which bribes are absolutely necessary to do anything. I recently heard a story that when the head of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority tried to instate a rule that all employees had to collect their salaries in person, he faced stiff resistance from the families of people who were long dead who still collected their salaries!
Not only were they corrupt, but the development authorities were also ineffective at controlling urban growth. In Delhi, land acquisition was a slow process, and legal land from the DDA was scarce and expensive. In addition, standards for housing were set very high, making it hard for poorer residents to build houses that conformed to building regulations. As a result, the number of illegal buildings proliferated -- buildings that violated building laws or were built on land not authorized for construction. Entire neighborhoods came up without planning permission, both neighborhoods of the rich in which residents paid for their own electricity and water supply infrastructure as well as the hut clusters of poor. These so-called "unauthorized colonies" number more than 1,500 and house more than 20% of the city’s population.
Failure on such a massive scale is bewildering (as an aside: how far does a plan have to deviate from reality before people start questioning the very basis on which the plans were made?), and it likely explains the fervor with which people here have embraced the idea of market solutions to what are basically problems of governance. Having only spent time in India after liberalization, I can only imagine the disappointment that citizens felt as they watched institutions that embodied the socialist hopes of a young and independent India fail repeatedly and so thoroughly.
Development authorities in India are now widely known to be some of the most corrupt institutions in the country. The large-scale transfers of money required to acquire land and build housing left plenty of room for siphoning off state funds. Development authorities in the major cities are big, bloated bureaucracies-- the DDA has at least 40,000 employees-- in which bribes are absolutely necessary to do anything. I recently heard a story that when the head of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority tried to instate a rule that all employees had to collect their salaries in person, he faced stiff resistance from the families of people who were long dead who still collected their salaries!
Not only were they corrupt, but the development authorities were also ineffective at controlling urban growth. In Delhi, land acquisition was a slow process, and legal land from the DDA was scarce and expensive. In addition, standards for housing were set very high, making it hard for poorer residents to build houses that conformed to building regulations. As a result, the number of illegal buildings proliferated -- buildings that violated building laws or were built on land not authorized for construction. Entire neighborhoods came up without planning permission, both neighborhoods of the rich in which residents paid for their own electricity and water supply infrastructure as well as the hut clusters of poor. These so-called "unauthorized colonies" number more than 1,500 and house more than 20% of the city’s population.
Failure on such a massive scale is bewildering (as an aside: how far does a plan have to deviate from reality before people start questioning the very basis on which the plans were made?), and it likely explains the fervor with which people here have embraced the idea of market solutions to what are basically problems of governance. Having only spent time in India after liberalization, I can only imagine the disappointment that citizens felt as they watched institutions that embodied the socialist hopes of a young and independent India fail repeatedly and so thoroughly.
20 November 2008
Mexico City Mayor addresses basic needs of citizens
From the Mayor that brought you an ice-skating rink in Mexico City comes yet another brilliant policy: free Viagra for all Mexico City men aged 70 and older. The rationale? Mayor Marcelo Ebrard says that sex "has a lot to do with quality of life and our happiness." The mayoral seat in Mexico has been seen as a stepping stone to the Presidency. What better way to prove your worth as a politician than to keep your constituents happy? The government begins handing out pills on December 1st.
18 November 2008
Renting in Chennai
Will you bear with me for a few moments while I complain about the Chennai rental market? First of all, the quality of the housing here is terrible, especially for the price. The rental market here is very tight, and prices have skyrocketed in the last five years. Small two bedroom apartments near the beach go for Rs. 25,000 or more. Government flats, even those in terrible condition, go for over Rs. 10,000. There are no one-bedroom apartments, only unwieldy two or three bedroom ones.
The architecture of much of the newer housing makes no concessions to the unforgiving heat that blankets the city for most of the year. Ceilings are low and windows are placed with no thought to cross-ventilation – if there are any windows at all. And most apartments are dingy, dingy, dingy -- mosaic tiled floors that never look clean despite hours of scrubbing, bathrooms in which the corners are unspeakably dirty.
Second of all, not even the basics are guaranteed. Water is a constant problem in the city. Apartments with connections to Metrowater (the Chennai Corporation’s water provider which provides clean and fairly regular water for many citydwellers) are highly prized. But many apartments rely on groundwater, brought up from borewells. This water can be brown colored, and is often extremely salty. In places like Besant Nagar, the water is so salty that it corrodes metal pipes, pots, and pans and makes people’s hair fall out. Most apartments are not vermin-free: an apartment, especially on the ground floor, is subject to visits from rats, bandicoots, and cockroaches, and a small army of mosquitoes is currently conducting daily evening time offensives in my apartment. During the monsoons, constructions built in low-lying areas or on lakebeds regularly flood.
But the most noxious part of the entire process is the landlord. Lease agreements are negotiated here in an atmosphere of complete distrust, perhaps unsurprising in a country where taking someone to court for a violation of a contract is simply not a viable remedy. Landlords ask for 6 to 10 months of rent as an advance before they will agree to even prepare a lease, and if you break a lease within 11 months of moving in, you forfeit a month’s worth of rent. Costs for any repairs the landlord takes care of are usually cut from the advance before it is returned to you when you leave. And the timely return of an advance is not guaranteed.
I think that this atmosphere of distrust is part of the reason why you see so many rental advertisements in the papers that openly state that they rent only to Brahmins – perhaps they suspect that fellow-caste members would be less likely to cheat them out of rent or advance money.
That, and the fact that people here openly discriminate on the basis of caste. One potential landlord asked me whether I planned to cook eggs in the apartment – eggs were not permitted because he conducted pujas (religious ceremonies) in the home. This same gem of a landlord also told me that he once threw a tenant out who claimed to be a teetotaler when he found him smoking a cigar (I did not mention that technically, the tenant could still have been a teetotaler). Oh, and he refused pointblank to take care of any repairs.
Landlords also frequently police apartments for suspicious activities. I’m not talking about stopping tenants from selling narcotics or running a prostitution ring. Do you drink? Smoke? Bring home visitors of the opposite sex? Are you having pre-marital sex? Stay out late on a regular basis? Laugh loudly? All of these are fair game for a landlord’s questions and complaints. As a single female looking for an apartment, I was asked repeatedly whether I planned to have male visitors (what's a good answer to that question? Lots, if I'm lucky?). One landlord told me that he liked me a lot, but he had a policy of not renting to spinsters because they cause him too much trouble. That's right. In Chennai, at the age of 27, I’m already a troublesome spinster.
The architecture of much of the newer housing makes no concessions to the unforgiving heat that blankets the city for most of the year. Ceilings are low and windows are placed with no thought to cross-ventilation – if there are any windows at all. And most apartments are dingy, dingy, dingy -- mosaic tiled floors that never look clean despite hours of scrubbing, bathrooms in which the corners are unspeakably dirty.
Second of all, not even the basics are guaranteed. Water is a constant problem in the city. Apartments with connections to Metrowater (the Chennai Corporation’s water provider which provides clean and fairly regular water for many citydwellers) are highly prized. But many apartments rely on groundwater, brought up from borewells. This water can be brown colored, and is often extremely salty. In places like Besant Nagar, the water is so salty that it corrodes metal pipes, pots, and pans and makes people’s hair fall out. Most apartments are not vermin-free: an apartment, especially on the ground floor, is subject to visits from rats, bandicoots, and cockroaches, and a small army of mosquitoes is currently conducting daily evening time offensives in my apartment. During the monsoons, constructions built in low-lying areas or on lakebeds regularly flood.
But the most noxious part of the entire process is the landlord. Lease agreements are negotiated here in an atmosphere of complete distrust, perhaps unsurprising in a country where taking someone to court for a violation of a contract is simply not a viable remedy. Landlords ask for 6 to 10 months of rent as an advance before they will agree to even prepare a lease, and if you break a lease within 11 months of moving in, you forfeit a month’s worth of rent. Costs for any repairs the landlord takes care of are usually cut from the advance before it is returned to you when you leave. And the timely return of an advance is not guaranteed.
I think that this atmosphere of distrust is part of the reason why you see so many rental advertisements in the papers that openly state that they rent only to Brahmins – perhaps they suspect that fellow-caste members would be less likely to cheat them out of rent or advance money.
That, and the fact that people here openly discriminate on the basis of caste. One potential landlord asked me whether I planned to cook eggs in the apartment – eggs were not permitted because he conducted pujas (religious ceremonies) in the home. This same gem of a landlord also told me that he once threw a tenant out who claimed to be a teetotaler when he found him smoking a cigar (I did not mention that technically, the tenant could still have been a teetotaler). Oh, and he refused pointblank to take care of any repairs.
Landlords also frequently police apartments for suspicious activities. I’m not talking about stopping tenants from selling narcotics or running a prostitution ring. Do you drink? Smoke? Bring home visitors of the opposite sex? Are you having pre-marital sex? Stay out late on a regular basis? Laugh loudly? All of these are fair game for a landlord’s questions and complaints. As a single female looking for an apartment, I was asked repeatedly whether I planned to have male visitors (what's a good answer to that question? Lots, if I'm lucky?). One landlord told me that he liked me a lot, but he had a policy of not renting to spinsters because they cause him too much trouble. That's right. In Chennai, at the age of 27, I’m already a troublesome spinster.
14 November 2008
Quote of the day
From Niall Ferguson's article "Wall Street Lays Another Egg" in Vanity Fair:
"There, in a nutshell, is one of the key concepts of the 20th century: the notion that property ownership enhances citizenship, and that therefore a property-owning democracy is more socially and politically stable than a democracy divided into an elite of landlords and a majority of property-less tenants. So deeply rooted is this idea in our political culture that it comes as a surprise to learn that it was invented just 70 years ago."
"The more Asia was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow. The Asian savings glut was thus the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance, and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. It was the underlying cause of the hedge-fund population explosion. It was the underlying reason why private-equity partnerships were able to borrow money left, right, and center to finance leveraged buyouts. And it was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash by 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job, and no assets."
"There, in a nutshell, is one of the key concepts of the 20th century: the notion that property ownership enhances citizenship, and that therefore a property-owning democracy is more socially and politically stable than a democracy divided into an elite of landlords and a majority of property-less tenants. So deeply rooted is this idea in our political culture that it comes as a surprise to learn that it was invented just 70 years ago."
"The more Asia was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow. The Asian savings glut was thus the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance, and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. It was the underlying cause of the hedge-fund population explosion. It was the underlying reason why private-equity partnerships were able to borrow money left, right, and center to finance leveraged buyouts. And it was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash by 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job, and no assets."
12 November 2008
PPP Madness!
The Ministry of Urban Development and the Council of Indian Industries organized a conference in Delhi yesterday called "Public-Private-Partnerships -- The Learning Curve." According to news reports, the tone of the conference seems to be in line with much of the discussion in India around PPPs, which sees them as the quick-fix solution to pressing gaps in infrastructure financing in the country. Among successful cases PPPs cited by experts at the conference was the example of solid waste management in Chennai. This seems odd to me: Chennai in recent years has relied on private contractors for trash collection in parts of the city. But contracting out parts of infrastructure provision hardly addresses the infrastructure financing gap that everyone is talking about. Indeed, I have yet to see any evidence that contracting out public services in India actually reduces costs. Different kinds of PPPs provide different benefits for the government, but discussion around PPPs tends to be so superficial that the distinctions between different relationships between the public and private sector get lost. Indeed, PPPs like the Chennai solid waste management example still leave government with the massive role of monitoring the quality of private sector operations. Both the government and the public need to understand that there is no quick fix to the problem of urban infrastructure, and no alternative to improving the quality of governance in India.
Innovative data gathering and data presentation
I have a fascination with data -- how it is collected and how it can be presented well. Two data-related articles this week which caught my attention: First, UNESCO released a map of "hidden water," a high resolution map that shows where underground aquifers of freshwater are located throughout the world. Freshwater aquifers, which can be rechargeable but are not always so, contain 100 times the amount of fresh water available in surface sources at any given time. The UNESCO map shows just how many of these aquifers are located across country borders, underscoring the pressing need for global legislation on managing these water sources. Second, Google announced that it may be able to improve upon current methods to predict outbreaks of the flu by a week to 10 days by using data about where people are searching for information about flu symptoms and treatments. Google Flu Trends charts the frequency of such searches over time and across the US. A very clever use of all the data that Google has in its possession, but which also leads me to wonder how all this data could be used if Google were not so benevolent.
06 November 2008
Waste towers and a reconception of waste management
BLDGBLOG reports that a group of architects in London have proposed a series of "waste towers" across the city -- easily accessible recycling centers that can also provide energy for surrounding areas. These waste towers prompted BLDGBLOG to think about even more decentralized systems of recycling that would change the Western lifestyle and attitude towards trash. Meanwhile, how can Indian cities not make the same mistakes that Western cities made in trash management as they grow? An Indian solution to decentralized waste processing would likely look different from this proposed solution -- perhaps a decentralized system that is low-tech, low-cost, and labor intensive might be more appropriate to the financial and social context here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)