﻿This is the most populous city, and the capital, of a country that will soon have more people
than anywhere else on Earth. Home to more than 31 million residents, it’s a chaotic place
with a complicated history. It has major problems in housing, inequality, and transportation.
But if it can solve them, its residents will experience an enormous increase in prosperity. As
India’s seat of power, what happens here impacts a billion people and reverberates around the world.
This is Delhi: a fulcrum of the 21st century. Nestled along a protective ridge that sends
Himalayan snowmelt either west to the tributaries of the Indus river, or east to the Ganges,
Delhi is the gateway to one of the most expansive, fertile agricultural plains on the planet,
and a collection point for goods on their way to an extensive coastline for export.
This land has been the capital of empire after empire for thousands of years, but the defining
moment in its modern history occurred 75 years ago when India declared its independence from
the British Empire at Delhi’s Red Fort. [Nehru] “At the stroke of the midnight hour,
when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
This resulted in the partition of the Indian territory along religious lines into
India, and West and East Pakistan, which eventually became independent Bangladesh.
This had massive consequences. [Documentary narrator] “The very morning after
independence celebrations, Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India began to flee their homes.
Muslims headed for Pakistan, while Hindus set off for India. Enormous convoys of people moving in
opposite directions. The greatest mass migration in history. 10 million people were displaced, many
were attacked by robbers and armed militants along the way. A million people lost their lives.”
This flood of new arrivals overwhelmed the city as illegal housing settlements sprouted and grew
all over. This building wasn’t done to code and lacked basic plumbing and sewers. It’s a
crisis that Delhi is still struggling to solve. Today, the percentage of its residents living
in so-called unauthorized areas is as high as 40%. That’s a staggering 12 million people.
But to get a more complete picture of what Delhi is today, we must go back to events after Indian
independence. In 1947 Indian per-capita income had not increased since 1757–that’s
190 years of British imperialists taking ownership of - and exporting away - vast
quantities of India’s bountiful natural resources.
Revolutionary Mahatma Gandhi and his hand-picked political heir, Jawaharlal Nehru,
knew the Indian people needed a far different system than what the British Empire had imposed.
What Nehru wanted was an idyllic ‘Total Society’ in which injustice and inequality
would be defeated by the perfect nation-system. This dream was cemented during a short four-day
visit to Moscow, where Nehru and his father were wined and dined by the Communist Party’s elite
celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.
With tightly managed visits to factories and theatres, this was an obvious attempt
to impart a rosy picture of Soviet-style socialism onto visiting dignitaries,
and it worked. Nehru was awed by the USSR’s achievements in industry,
art, and bureaucracy. Unfortunately for India, Nehru overlooked the dangers of the Soviet system,
where a small group of men controlled all of its institutions and resources
and used them to dominate the miserable masses. When Nehru became India’s first Prime Minister,
he created his own version of a centrally-planned economy, convinced that only an all-powerful state
could bring about development rapid enough to achieve his vision.
[Manmohan Singh] “Nehru was a rational thinker and he wanted to apply science
and technologies to solve the great mass poverty that prevailed at the time of independence.”
While Nehru’s leadership brought about democracy and some industrialization, as the author Rana
Dasgupta put it, “the complexity of actual economic processes proved too great, and by
the end of his time in power in the mid-1960s, many sectors of the economy had been choked by
regulatory restrictions and lack of capital.” [Yashwant Sinha] “The government of India went
into business in a big way and they decided to control whatever was there in the private sector
also as firmly and fiercely as they could.” [Documentary narrator] “The British Raj was gone.
Now people were subjected to the permit Raj because everything needed a government permit.
India became a byword for red tape and bureaucracy.”
Real estate and land development in the city of Delhi was one of the most tightly
controlled sectors. The Delhi Development Authority - or DDA - was created in 1957 and
granted the exclusive responsibility of land development within the borders of the city.
The DDA prevented individuals from owning more than a handful of acres and forced people to sell
the agency their property at below-market prices. This backfired, disincentivizing private-sector
construction just when Delhi needed it most to keep pace with its explosive population growth.
Since 1950, Delhi’s metro population has increased 21-fold, yet the DDA remains in control of
its real estate sector. Every project has to meander through its inefficient bureaucracy.
When it does approve new private development, it usually uses a lottery system, with residents
waiting years - sometimes decades - to see if they’ve won the right to build. This leads to
all sorts of efforts to game the DDA system, making it even more inefficient and corrupt.
[Documentary narrator] “Since it was impossible to work with the system,
people learned to work around it. “Every license, every permit was procured
by corrupt means.” A bribe?
“Well, bribe is the simpler word I suppose.” “The Indian people were being given shoddy goods
and services at very high prices. Enterprise was stifled and growth was crippled.”
“The economic environment was simply not conducive to efficiency or profitability.”
For a study in contrast we need only look just beyond Delhi’s official city limits,
to the gleaming skyline and well-maintained infrastructure of India’s tech hub, Gurgaon,
or Gurugram as it’s now officially known. Two strategic moves made Gurgaon what it is today.
First, after it became clear that the DDA made private development impossible in the city of
Delhi, the real estate company DLF bought up farmland on the outskirts in the 1970s and
80s. Then, it decisively developed it as western corporations began to embrace the practice of
business operations outsourcing. Today, hundreds of fortune 500 companies have
offices in Gurgaon to take advantage of Delhi’s large English-speaking workforce,
who gladly perform services at salaries fractions of what workers in the US or Europe earn.
As a master-planned, sterile city dominated by corporations, the amount of privatization
sometimes goes too far. The Gurgaon police force is outnumbered by private security officers
10 to 1. Still, it’s hard to argue with the results from an infrastructure perspective,
as noted by a local economist. [Parth Shah] “Most people did not
even know Gurgaon existed 30 years ago. It was completely farmland on the outskirts of
Delhi. Inside a compound of a colony, you will find great services, world-class standards.
Right outside that gate, public services don’t exist. So water connections are very poor,
sewage lines are not done very well. It’s in a sense the story of India, frankly, where the
private industry has been very successful, has created world-class standards and aspirations
among the people, while the public sector has not been able to keep up with that.”
For every new arrival finding tech work in Gurgaon, several others are unemployed
or struggling to make ends meet in low-wage jobs, like rickshaw drivers and housekeepers.
Unfortunately, many of them end up living in makeshift houses in the middle of the metropolis.
[Colony resident] “Some of my neighbors have been living here for 20 years. There’s no electricity,
no running water, and no toilets. My husband can’t find work anywhere. We have no future.”
India is often portrayed in the west as the world’s largest democracy,
but things are more complicated in the capital. Decision-making in Delhi operates within a complex
political system. There is an elected assembly; their leader, the city’s Chief Minister;
a Lieutenant-Governor, appointed by the President of India, who oversees agencies like the powerful
DDA; and three municipal corporations who each elect a mayor. Last year things got even more
muddled when the national Government of India passed a law requiring the local Delhi government
to secure the Lieutenant-Governor’s sign-off before any executive action goes into effect.
There seems to be a strong aversion to directly electing public leaders in India. Perhaps this is
due to the relative newness of democracy itself in the country. In fact, for most of the time since
independence, India has resembled a hereditary dynasty, with either Nehru, his daughter,
or his grandson holding the Premiership for 38 of the 44 years between 1947 and 1991–the
year when decades of bad policy pushed India’s economy to the brink of total collapse.
[Documentary narrator] “The collapse of the Soviet Union reverberated round the world.
For India, it was the end of a role model. [Minister Singh] “This was a telling proof
that a command-type economy was not as secure as we had thought.”
The government was left holding too many worthless Soviet rubles and severe
agricultural shortages were setting in. [Minister Chidambaram] “We were borrowing
heavily. We had to mortgage our gold deposits. Our growth rate had come to virtually zero.”
The government of India was broke. In 1991, the new Prime Minister appointed
economist Mohanman Singh as Finance Minister. [Minister Singh] “The argument was quite simple.
We were in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. It was time to think big.”
Despite resistance within his own party, the Prime Minister approved Singh’s plans.
To secure a massive loan from its former British colonizers, India transferred 40
tons of gold bars to the Bank of England and opened its economy through capitalist reforms.
[Minister Singh] “We introduced more competition. To release
the innovative spirits which were always there in India. The economy turned around much sooner
and much more deeply than I had anticipated.” Indeed, the results speak for themselves.
Per-capita GDP has climbed steadily, and today stands 627% higher than it was in 1991.
But it’s still less than its neighbor Bangladesh and African nations Nigeria and Congo.
30 years is just not a very long time to develop considering its poor starting position,
which means its economy can still be quite dysfunctional, as the Delhi-based
author Rana Dasgupta described in a 2018 talk. [Rana Dasgupta] “A lot of the massive new projects
of India - the new highways, the new airports - are actually completely authoritarian in the
way that they are done. Farmers are kicked off land using state apparatus - police, bureaucracy,
etc. - and business people come in who are friends of politicians, and partners, and build these
things very fast. Though India models itself on the US to a very great extent, the city I
describe is much more close to Moscow than to New York or Washington. A city in which
a small number of extremely well-networked people have huge control over access to opportunities,
capital, etc.” All of the factors I’ve discussed so far
came together in the construction of a megaproject of enormous importance: the Delhi Metro.
First conceptualized in 1969, the project languished for decades as indecisive state
agencies and officials studied and debated and planned. Meanwhile, Delhi’s population boomed,
and with no other way to get around more and more gasoline-powered vehicles took to the streets.
Just like with housing, the government was constantly playing catchup,
resulting in a haphazard road network and inconsistently built infrastructure.
Today, there are more vehicles on the streets of Delhi than anywhere else on earth, contributing
to its horrific air quality. Its residents spend 14 million combined hours every day
stuck in traffic and lose a staggering 9.7 years of average life expectancy breathing toxic air.
After enough public outrage, metro construction finally broke ground. With the 1991 economic
reforms and more competent leadership pushing the project into existence,
the first line opened in 2002. It has grown rapidly in the two decades since.
Now 10 lines and 254 stations make up a system that covers more than 200 miles and carries
over 4 million passengers a day, making it the sixth-most-ridden metro network in the world.
It is a vital megaproject in the course of human history, not just because it is
the first rail-based system to get carbon credits for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by 630,000
tons every year. It's significant because it is a huge confidence boost for the people of
Delhi–confirmation that Indians can take on their biggest problems, and solve them.
Improvements in the capital - and across the country - are happening more quickly now.
The Delhi government has brought water to those that lack it and according to its calculations
every unauthorized colony should have at least one communal tap by the end of this year.
In 2014 the Modi government launched the Clean India Mission to solve the unsavory health crisis
of nationwide open defecation. It has subsidized the installation of 90 million toilets and today,
more than 70% of Indians have access to one. The second phase of the program now turns to the big
job of proper management and treatment of all the waste these newly-built bathrooms collect.
On housing, some fresh approaches are finally empowering residents of Delhi’s
unauthorized colonies to develop neighborhoods themselves. But there is a long way to go
and it is obvious from the outside that the DDA approach needs a complete overhaul.
For Delhi to really thrive, it also needs a better-trained and funded police force.
To clean up Delhi’s air, bans on agricultural crop burning in neighboring states must be enforced.
Many farmers just ignore this law, sending smoke that blankets the capital for weeks every fall.
And to cut emissions, Delhi’s many vehicles, especially its auto-rickshaws and motorcycles,
must go electric. 70% of India’s electricity is still generated by coal, but it now costs less
to build a solar farm in India than anywhere else in the world. Panels should soon cover sun-soaked
Rajasthan to the southwest, with wind turbines rising all along the blustery Gujarat coast.
Few societies in history have faced as many simultaneous challenges and
opportunities as India. It is projected that 70% of India’s infrastructure for the year 2030
hasn’t been built yet, which makes the next 5-10 years critical.
If leaders in Delhi can pass and enforce laws that develop the country efficiently,
the increase in quality of life will be one of the most remarkable stories of the first half
of the 21st century and will position India to become a global power with few rivals.
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other stuff that isn’t on the level. Until next time, I’m Bryce Plank.