NCR - a sorry state!

Hello friends! Good to be back after a long break ……starting to like this long-distance relationship with “blogspot”, only to reconnect after few months.  Today is a day that we got our 13th president – Pranab Mukherjee secured more than 2/3 majority of this country to become the first Bengali president of India! Reason to be proud? Maybe for some, but it’s hard for me to get excited about someone as hard-working and capable as him to be serving this country in one of the least demanding roles in her polity, after spending a lifetime “so near yet so far” from serving as a deserving Prime Minister. We may argue with his ideology/decisions, but please give it up for a hard-working statesman who has pursued his beliefs and served both party and parliament steadfastly for more than 4 decades. There are some that may see this as a deserving honour/retirement gift from Indian politics, but this country desperately needs motivation, capability and good work ethics more in the PMO and North/South Blocks than in the Rashtrapati Bhawan! Anyways, now to come to the subject of this blog……to something that deeply disturbs and enthralls me and many more who try to live this middle-class, MNC-working life in the National Capital Region (NCR). Here is THE region which receives the overwhelming majority of FII’s (through Mauritius) and FDI’s (lakhs of crores) coming into India from foreign investors to set up local corporates and business subsidiaries. This is a region whose civic and government bodies have much deeper pockets than almost any other part of India. This is a region that benefits the most from New Delhi being the political capital of India. And this is also the region which has the highest real estate pricing (residential/corporate) and the fastest growth rates (hence ROI for investors) across all of India. Yet this is ALSO the region which has one of the lowest literacy rates in the country…A region to have the most cases of violence against women…The region with one of the worst law and order situations in the whole country….A region where real estate prices DO NOT obey any established rule or principle of economics….where crumbling infrastructure goes hand-in-hand with towering buildings….one of the few places in the world to have 20-floor buildings without power, and running on diesel generators for the most part…..millionaire flats overlooking broken roads, burn out streetlamps and ruptured water pipes….and so on. At first glance, there is hardly a rational explanation for such extremes coexisting hand-in-hand and one benefitting of the other. Why is the infrastructure and law/order situation not improving? Intuitive answer – most working middle-class are outsiders who don’t vote…..a large portion of the local population are land-selling peasants who have become overnight millionaires with scant education, resulting in societal tension and crimes. They care little for infrastructure, which translates into insufficient demand from politicians of more govt involvement. As a result, builders make merry developing infrastructure however they can, for their outsider residents, charging them hefty “maintenance” sums for basic needs like water and electricity – all in all, a sorry state of affairs for a region that boasts of being the capital of the largest democracy in the world! So, how can Gurgaon or Noida or Ghaziabad be fixed? Or for that matter, how can such overnight “Gurgaon”s in other parts of the country be truly modernized, uplifted from such gross superfluity, and transformed from a dysfunctional “builder raj” into a functional urban centre with basic infrastructure and law/order? Only time will tell, but I fell the key, as with many other things in India, is to link the money with the votes! - A way to incentivize the politician/ruling class to actually DEVELOP the region to get votes……in turn incentivizing the local population towards more infrastructure/education in order to get higher financial returns! Who? How? When? Keep thinking….and so will I….. Fellow IITians out there, SOCIAL ENGINEERING is the battle-cry….that’s what urban India desperately needs now!