TRADER FRACAS IN DELHI – GOVERNMENT, THE ULTIMATE CULPRIT

TRADER FRACAS IN DELHI – GOVERNMENT, THE ULTIMATE CULPRIT 

The simmering trader situation in Delhi exploded last week. A Supreme Court directive to seal 44,000 illegal shops got triggered on November 1. This is a problem without a solution. On the one hand, the law has to be followed - the official City Plan says these areas are residential. On the other hand, traders are legitimate stakeholders in the city, their voice must be heard.

Ironically, while the shop sealing story has everyone’s attention, the new Master Plan for Delhi is quietly being prepared. This less-publicised activity is the real issue. After all, how can a polluted river be cleaned if the source itself is the pollutant. At the heart of Delhi’s trader problem is the urban planning process. We need to ask, “What makes the plan so sacred? How come there is so much violation of our urban master plans?”  

Our urban planning process has three serious flaws. First, plans are not drawn up with sufficient technical expertise. City planning is not a trivial task. Unfortunately, our planning departments have become diluted over the years, and weakened by political and bureaucratic interference, where everyone is an “expert”. We therefore get an output that is destined to have people tearing their hair out, except that the consequences are only felt ten years down.

Second, plans are not designed to be flexible and organic. A Master Plan is not something that Moses brought down from the mountain. We create 20-year plans as though we can predict precisely how the city will grow, when in reality we have little clue of its future challenges. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have the Internet or the cell phone – innovations that have a deep impact on cities. We need five-year plans, no more, and with an inherent flexibility to adapt to changing realities. This means that the right kind of data needs to be tracked and fed into the plans through the right kind of processes.

The third flaw is the enforcement mechanism for the plans. All violations to plans - in zoning or building construction - are localised problems. These neighbourhood violations cannot be regulated in a centralised command-and-control manner. Our cities don’t have 100,000 problems; they have 100 problems multiplied 1000 times. 

Underlying all these flaws is one central missing ingredient: the voice of the city’s occupants themselves. We cannot have plans prepared only by the experts, without an elaborate consultation process with the city occupants. We cannot have flexibility if we do not allow ground realities coming from the city’s occupants to continuously update the plans. And finally, we cannot enforce unless we allow neighbourhood communities to have a voice in this process.  

We have our paradigm wrong. The central issue is the attitude of government, acting as a know-it-all, do-it-all big brother. This is similar to when we were caught in a mixed economy mode and wondering why we were not able to make our way out of that mess. In the same manner that we could never get the right balance of free enterprise coexisting with state-run economic activities and oppressive regulations, we can never get superior urban planning outcomes with government playing urban planning bully, offering token toe-holds to all others.

This demands a massive mindset change, both outside government and within it. For those of us outside government, it is time that we took responsibility. It’s easy to violate when we can blame an anonymous and remote government, rather than ourselves, especially if we have participated in establishing the guidelines. Fifty years after Independence, it is time that we realised that the British Raj is over, this is our country. 

However, the mindset change from government must come first, to open the process of governance on all fronts - including planning. Many bureaucrats and politicians tell me, "You have a romantic view of public participation. Most people are selfish, and care only about their own interest, not about the larger common good.”

I concede that most people are selfish and are concerned only about their own issues. But this is precisely the energy that is necessary for public participation to work effectively – we don’t need only do-gooders to make it work. It’s no different from the way the market works - millions of self-interested actions resulting in superior outcomes. What we need is for government to establish the rules to ensure that these public processes work effectively. Again, no different from the market regulations which ensure that outcomes are transparent and fair. 

If you think I am dreaming, think again. Politics is changing across the world to create more opportunities for citizen involvement. Earlier this year, the UK saw the release of the ‘Power Report’ (www.powerinquiry.org) on the state of democracy and politics. The report states that “democracy faces meltdown in Britain as the public rejects an outdated political system”. One the report’s three recommendations is to “allow citizens a much more direct and focused say over political decisions and policies.” 

There is a strange paradox in our country, where we are invited to vote on things unrelated to government – cricket outcomes, singing sensations – but not on public issues. We can decide who the next Indian Idol will be, but we cannot choose our Indian Ideal. We are all Prestige citizens in our country - pressure cookers, bottled up with our wonderful ideas and no place to express them.

 In the trader fracas in Delhi, there are no bad people. There are only price takers and price makers – the traders responded to a set of signals over a period of decades. The price maker is the government. And so the ultimate culprit is the government. Not willing to let go, wanting to keep all the power to itself. As the Delhi case shows, this can explode in your face, with disastrous consequences. Better to acknowledge that you cannot govern cities by yourself, and change the rules of the game.

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The writer is Founder, Janaagraha. ramesh@janaagraha.org