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Vision 2020 -- Why India has no Silicon Valleys

P. V. Indiresan

THE pioneers of the Silicon Valley took a conscious decision not to build closer than 400 feet from the highway. In the last century, the pioneers who settled in the Wild West made their main streets a hundred feet wide. Such deliberate avoidance of cong estion was due to civic consciousness and civic pride.

In stark contrast, Chennai is said to be the second most crowded city in the world. (The worst crowded, Kolkata, too is Indian. Apparently, in the matter of civic development, there is a kink in the Indian psyche.) The most powerful and the most influent ial officials and leaders of Tamil Nadu have their offices and business headquarters in the vicinity of the river Cooum which they have turned into a channel for city sewage. None of them seems to be concerned, let alone ashamed, to have their prestigiou s headquarters in the vicinity of that stinking cesspool.

There was a time, within the memory of the old people of the city, when the Cooum was a pleasant place to stroll by, a river where people could bathe and whose water they could drink. Unfortunately, the expansion of the harbour north of the river mouth a nd the northward littoral drift of the Bay of Bengal combined to deposit more and more sand south of the harbour wall. That sand deposit has now spread to the extent of completely blocking the mouth of river Cooum and preventing it from being flushed dai ly by the tides in the sea. That is one reason why the river is as bad as it is.

Twenty years ago, I mooted a proposal to flush the river by building a sea wall in such a way that the river mouth would remain open all the time. Instead of welcoming the experiment, the officials concerned raised many objections and rejected the move. One reason was the sand deposit creates real-estate. Hundred acres have been created that way. That is big money. Given the choice between making money with such new land being created every year and suffering the stink of the river, those officials opte d for the former. As the Tamil saying goes, panam enraal pinamum vai therakkum, that is, when it comes to money even a dead body will open its mouth!

Some time ago, when I was a Member of the State Planning Commission, I persuaded the Tamil Nadu government to permit the National Institute of Ocean Technology to clear the mouth of the river Cooum at its own expense and at no cost to the government. Tha t has now been done. As part of that scheme, the sand that accumulates near the river mouth should be removed periodically. A government official has refused to permit such a removal and thereby made the entire exercise infructuous. Here is a case where there is not only no civic consciousness (let alone pride); there is an active rejection of such sentiment.

The government system in India is such that every official has veto power. Even junior officials can block any move, particularly in the case of novel experiments. The system is also such that it is quite impractical for anybody else, however senior, to remedy the harm done. That negativist culture frustrates all attempts to improve the administration, in general, and civic amenities, in particular. That is how our governments are driven not by an exalted vision but by its total absence.

In a democracy, we get the government we deserve. The citizens of Chennai (barring a few) have zero civic pride. In other countries, business leaders take on themselves the responsibility of making their city beautiful and attractive. They reckon that a beautiful city is good for business. For instance, the business people of the City of London get the streets swept six times a day and gladly bear the entire expense. By the look of them, the streets of the Central Business District in Chennai are probab ly never swept. Keeping the streets clean would cost a business that makes crores of rupees no more than a few thousand rupees. Yet, it would rather wallow in filth than incur that small expense to get its street cleaned. Even if any particular business tries to remove the filth, it is probable that (the way it happened in Delhi) someone in the municipal establishment will declare it illegal.

If you place a frog in an open pan of water and heat the water slowly, the frog would let itself be cooked to death rather than jump out and escape. The people of Chennai are like that frog. Every day, the city environment is getting worse and worse. Yet , the citizens of the city are blissfully unaware and unconcerned of what is happening to them. They have become fatalist and have accepted slow death as their irremediable fate. To be fair, that is not peculiar to the citizens of Chennai; all Indians su ffer from such a limited civic vision.

Even expensive prestigious projects suffer from blinkered vision. For instance, TIDEL Park in Chennai is a magnificent edifice built at a cost of several hundred crores to house the IT industry. The TIDEL Park is so situated and so constructed as to maxi mise overcrowding. In contrast, the Silicon Valley, the fastest growing real-estate in the US, is well spread out and aesthetically beautiful. Chennai too could have expanded its businesses the way Americans did. In that case, it would have located outsi de the city where alone enough space is available. Chennai is doing the opposite: it is deliberately expanding inside the crowded city congesting it even further, and making it even more filthy. The pioneers of the Silicon Valley had a civic vision. Our planners are innocent of such aspirations.

All this congestion is being promoted as a favour to business. What do businesses need? (That is not the same as what they want.) In modern business wealth is created by people, not by machines. Then, the best location for a visionary business is where t alented people are available and where they can stay contented. Then, one requirement is proximity to high-tech educational institutions like IITs. From that point of view, the TIDEL Park is well located. However, it is not wisely located when it comes t o the provision of basic amenities for the precious people who are to work there. That is the result of a conceptual error: Conventional people measure distance in kilometres; visionaries measure it in time taken to cover the distance. The TIDEL Park cou ld have been located 30-50 km away and yet be within a half-hour ride from the IIT.

Let us consider an alternative vision. As in the Silicon Valley, let industrial and commercial development be shifted some distance away from the city, but within an hours ride from both a major airport and a technical university. In such a rural setting , it will be a simple matter to provide clean water round the clock. There will be plenty of open space for playgrounds, high quality schools and medical facilities. The dwellings could be spacious; with even the poorest guaranteed as much as 100 square metres of space. Waste disposal could be simple and localised the muck need not be carted tens of kilometres to be dumped in insanitary landfills. The habitat could even be so designed that all employees would reside within walking distance from their w orkplace. They would, therefore, be able to save several hours every day they now waste in commuting, in being confined in smoking buses, or waiting in interminable queues.

Would all that not become unaffordably expensive? Actually, such an idyllic development will be cheaper than confining oneself to congested and hence expensive cities. Calculations show that in these greenfield sites land can be leased for no more than Rs 5-10 per square metre per year. Round-the-clock water supply and effective waste disposal could be provided in every dwelling for as little as Rs 20,000-30,000. Commuting costs could be virtually eliminated. Once these cost savings are factored in, d evelopment some distance from the city would become much cheaper than expanding inside the city. That is what Americans have been doing for years, and they are as cost conscious as any one can be.

High quality vision need not be expensive. The best things in life are free, almost. The worst things are always expensive. The pity is few realise that truth.

The Technology Information, Forecasting, and Assessment Council (TIFAC), the organisation that prepared the Vision 2020 document for Indias development, has embarked on a scheme with this new vision and hopes to try it out in the vicinity of Chennai. The local people have been sounded and they are enthusiastic. The State Government appears to be favourably inclined but, according to local officials, some government rules and regulations can be a hindrance. Will the entrepreneurs of Chennai cooperate? Th at remains to be seen.

Visionaries get out of hot water; frogs stay put. It remains to be seen whether business leaders of Chennai are visionaries or are frogs.

(The author is former director, IIT, Madras. Response may be sent to indiresan@bol.net.in)

This is 59th in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on November 19.