[Urbanstudy] On the TAG in JNNURM UIG sub-mission

[anant m]

Hi all,
When I started writing these notes, I was very tempted
to title it - "how to offer  constructive criticism to
a group of Russian Roulette players" May be I will
still do that at some point. For the moment, I do not
know if Ramesh Ramanathan wants to participate in a
debate on this list or not.  But the DTE article and
his response to it raise a number of interesting
questions that should be of interest to this list.
Urban change cannot be understood in isolation from
state restructuring and urban finances! So I am just
posting a bunch of loosely organized notes on the
possible areas of exploration for this list so that
others who may be interested can join in. I have
inserted some citations here and there and refer to a
number of writers just in case anyone wants to look at
what others are saying about these same issues. But I
think what will be really very useful is for us to
have informal conversations around these issues in
different fora. The touchstone is lived life - not
scholarly texts. 


1) Question of responsible criticism 
RR asks:
"Dont you think that criticism if it is to be taken
seriously must be
accompanied by some suggestions on what could work
better ?"

Most emphatically yes. But, then criticism works in
different modes and at different levels.Often in the
kind of debates that we are engaged in, criticism is
not about the specific provisions of the project 
being undertaken (e.g. height of a dam wall, location
of a flyover etc.) but about the terms of the debate.
So
obviously the suggestions would be for a different way
of framing the discussion. And often people in
positions of power or with entrenched interests dont
want to confront that kind of criticism because it
means battling it out on a larger turf. It involves
responsibility and courage. So, from the Sardar
Sarovar through microwatersheds to JNURM, the refrain
is: "these criticisms cannot be taken seriously.
They are too shrill. They are petty. They are not
offering viable alternatives and so on",  when all the
time the alternatives are staring you in the face.
There are versions of this everywhere. The Harvard
Institute for International Development-Soros
foundation - USAID networks which pushed for the
disastrous shock therapy in Russia have always
insisted in retrospect that nobody could foresee what
was going to happen when all the time there were
people crying hoarse that this was a dangerous thing
to do. If anyone is interested in how claims of
scientific knowledge are made in these kinds of
discussions, I strongly recommend Timothy Mitchell's
article "The work of economics: How a discipline makes
its world.
http://www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/papers/07workofeconomics.pdf

Apart from the fact that it is an excellent study
using a science studies approach, it is also useful
because it traces the way in which 'over the counter'
pills  for poverty (e.g. Hernando de soto) are peddled
to our policymakers. (It is also worth checking out
Gillian Hart's work on South Africa and Michael Watt's
work Nigeria and Jamie Peck's work on fast policy
transfers in the US and Europe. There is a very
refreshing line of work from geographers with
feminist, postcolonial sensibilities on geographies of
ethics, care, responsibility etc. Writers like Doreen
Massey, Victoria Lawson etc., and some recent work by
Eric Sheppard, Richa Nagar on economic globalization
is worth checking out. Ultimately, I think we should
think very carefully about what personal, emotional,
intellectual integrity in this kind of work entails. 
 

2) Agency and subjectivity: As it stands, RR's
willingness to debate is offered on a very narrow
turf: if you dont like JNURM then give me an
alternative recipe that will produce the same results.
 It is premised on  on our agreeing on what the
problem is and what we require in terms of outcomes.
It
insists that there is only one way of formulating the
problem and only one way of making ethical choices.
This is why RR misreads criticisms as 'moral
one-upmanship' when in fact, the critics abhor
precisely that kind of competitiveness. What is being
proposed here is a qualitatively different kind of
morality. And that is also where RR overestimates his
own ability to choose one of the two sides. This is a
classical western liberal stance.  But that is
precisely where the politics is - The 'homo
economicus' that Ramesh Ramanathan believes in and
promotes as the only possible world and the rest of us
for whom the world of voluntary choice is so very
limited.  But we do have a choice here where Ramesh
sees none: between dismissing criticism as petty or
engaging it with the respect that it deserves by
exploring how other ways of being become possible.
There are some issues here worth thinking through the
question of agency and subjectivity. Dona Haraway,
Judith Butler etc., are worth reading, but
Gibson-Graham's work - "the end of capitalism as we
know it" and more recent work like Regional Subjection
is worth reading. It is definitely worth checking out
literatures on actor network theory. Timothy
Mitchell's work - rule of experts/colonizing egypt;
stage of modernity (in questions of modernity), can
the mosquito speak are all worth a read. 

3) Growth fetishization, State restructuring and new
spatiotemporalities:


The problem according to the authors of JNURM (who
have borrowed the terms of reference very very
uncritically from the ADB and a host of consultants
and  transnational bureaucrats who are in a sense
clones of
the Pinochet's Chicago boys) is that our cities
require billions of dollars of investments in
infrastructures to be able to sustain steady levels of
high growth rates.  Such investments cannot come from
the
state. They have to come from the capital markets.
Municipal bonds just dont work in India. Why would any
one else want to invest in Indian cities ? How can we
bring them to invest in infrastructure, so that when
we have the infrastructure, we will have the other
investors coming in bringing in jobs. [This is a very
slippery road. Once we start on it we can only move
from one hazard to another].David Harvey's a short
history of neoliberalism is a decent resource. there
is a lot of work from latin america - tracing the
histories of the chicago boys. i havent yet seen much
written on the struggle between keynes and hayek which
literally was fought from the trenches of cambridge
and London school of economics. But there has to be
something out there. 


4) Scale politics of the economy - 
Very often we think that we can appeal to a higher
level of authority if things dont work at the lower
level. But the trouble is that in the last 10 years a
whole lot of new systems of authority have emerged.
Between the citizen in Bangalore and the government of
India now lies a whole range of formal and informal
networks that stretch across the globe where important
decisions are taken. Cities alliance is only one
example of these. In the face of these global
networks, we are talking about the participation of a
spatially arrested 'local' citizen. 

The basis for all this has been laid gradually over
the last 15 years. Did it strike anyone as odd that
India should have needed two amendments to its
incredibly large constitution 50 years after it was
created  - to ensure local democracy ? Come on, this
document was
written by people who instituted universal adult
franchise at its inception!

But the oddity melts away if we notice that the
amendments were immediately followed by the FIRE(D)
project funded by USAID. Just think of the sick sense
of humor in that name FIRE(D)- inspired by it 
governments which are still draging their feet on
implementing every other aspect of the amendments,
have changed the accounting systems of the
municipalities so that they can make sense to
investors. And as
this has been going on, municipalities have been going
after CRISIL ratings.

Clearly we do have a mess here. Municipal corporations
have a very shallow tax base. So how are municipal
corporations supposed to survive if they do not get
funds devolved from the state and central governments
? But then our state and central governments
themselves
are not doing too well and in any case many of our big
cities are also state capitals which makes it
impossible for municipal corporations to
operate with any sense of independence. Repeatedly we
have seen state governments using executive authority
to kill all initiative in corporations. Planning,
development and revenue functions are
distributed across so many institutions headed by IAS
officers and politicians (the relative power between
them depending on the whims of the chief minister).
And they are constantly poaching on each other's
areas. And this tendency is increasing now as each of
these institutions is turned into a competitive mode.

The seeds for the JNURM were laid in the India
Infrastructure Report 1996 by ICAER. While this
particular document has been followed up by
the India Infrastructure Reports from a joint team of
IIMs and IITs, there were a number of other reports
which were sponsored by the ADB since 1996 on the
Indian state and the state of reforms. All of them
have a common theme. The world is changing, and if we
want to compete and sustain high levels of growth, we
need to change fast.  The India Infra 1996 report
projects an investment requirement that runs into
billions of dollars which simply cannot come from the
state- it has to be raised from the capital markets.
What is striking in all of them is this concern with
implementing reforms, overcoming political resistance
and so on. It is as if the reforms that are required
is already known from the beginning. (Read Montek
Singh Ahluwalia's article has gradualism worked for
India?). 

The trouble with all this lies in fetishizing the
growth rate even if it is not always stated upfront.
First of all, high growth rates do not necessarily
mean equity. So people who are concerned with
questions of equity are not necessarily obliged to
make suggestions
about how to maintain high growth rates. Second, all
these infrastructural investments do not necessarily
mean that we will have high growth rates. So people
could be questioning the wisdom of such investments in
the first place. Thirdly, economic growth rates are
anyways a very dubious means of computing the health
of a society. To beginw with these growth rates do not
take into account a whole bunch of production and
exchange activities that sustain people. Second, in
an era of such highly volatile transnational cash
flows, national growth rates are very very problematic
unless we use the very methods of computing them a way
of challenging the terms of trade. I could go on but
let me end with a fourth one, all these investments
especially in infrastructures come with a number of
other problems: speculative activities in localities
especially around land. But there are other
consequences too. One of the most important among them
is the fiscal disciplining of the poor through
microcredit and finance. In short
what happens here is that local markets are constantly
assessed and surveyed by large private banks who work
through NGOs to provide credit and credit plus
services (which includes housing, education,
consumption, income generating activities whatever and
whatever). This
effectively breaks the local social relationships and
replaces and reorinets individuals towards a credit
card economy. But of course, I am not romanticizing
these relationships, nor am I saying that credit
cards are bad by their very nature. But if we do not
pause for a moment between the two and reflect on how
we are conceiving the problems and their solutions,
then what we are effectively being agents of a
tremendous amount of violence. Just think of the sad
irony here that we are witnessing in many cities in
India where the MD of a large private bank and a
supermarket chain and an IT company's CSR wing 
through an NGO displace a local  money lender cum
kirana store owner cum two bit sidekick of a
corporator. (I am not making it up).

There are a number of very useful empirical studies on
many of the themes indicated above. Definitely the two
books I suggested in the previous email. But those
books are already outdated. The list is too large to
include in here. But if anyone is interested, we can
pick up the threads as we go along. One writer
definitely worth keeping track of is Melissa Wright -
particularly her work on the maquiladoras. Her article
in annals of association of american geographers -
from protests to politics (2004 i think) is a very
good study built on years of work with women workforce
in ciudad juarez a mexican city.  Neil Brenner, Bob
Jessop, Erik Swyngedouw etc., have done very rich work
on these kinds of scalar reconfigurations and the
politics around it. 

5) Reconfiguration of public-private
Perhaps what will be of immediate interest to this
list is the question of reconfiguration of the public
and private. What I am describing here is a
transformation that is sweeping across cities not only
in countries like India, but the US and Europe too in
an incredibly short span of time. It is driven by
finance capital and
by an extraordinary belief  that history  and
geography matter only as cultural commodities. How
else can we make sense of claims such as 'Sivarama
krishnan and Sheela Patel and Vasimalai have decades
of
experience in 'urban governance' when urban governance
is a holdall term  which has come into vogue in the
last decade ? Or the claim that Indian cities are 70
per cent private. But of course they are. But it is
also possible to argue that there is nothing private
about the so called private. It is all public money
that comes through public issues and public
placements. What is involved here is a reconfiguration
of the historically established conventions of what is
public and what is private in the specific
sociopolitical context of post independence India. By
turning it into a 'technical' issue, effectively what
is being attempted here is a blocking of a discussion
of the politics of that reconfiguration. 
There is a fair amount of theoretical work on these
issues, But I think the best insights actually come
from groups involved in struggles on housing, labor
etc. and from the tremendous amount of creative
writing that is taking place in regional langauges in
India. 
anant





		
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