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The problems with India’s recent infrastructure push: an obsession with form and display over substance, rather than building for the long term.
The recent decision of the Tamil Nadu government headed by Chief Minister Joseph C. Vijay to scrap a greenfield airport at Parandur near Chennai predictably drew a barrage of criticism from the “pro-development” lobby, which likened the move to economic self-immolation. It is not so much the economic rationale of the project—the number of passengers it will serve, the volume of exports and imports it will facilitate, or the transportation network it will spawn—as its sheer scale that seems to have caught the fancy of even the fence-sitters: an airport that could cost Rs.27,400 crore and possibly more and spread over 5,846 acres.
This fetishisation of mega infrastructure projects—be it the Great Nicobar Island Development Project or the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway or the countless other jaw-dropping endeavours—is not merely an individual failing. It is a national epidemic, seemingly hardwired into our collective DNA. Bent Flyvbjerg, the Danish academic and one of the world’s leading scholars of megaprojects, explains this penchant for big infrastructure projects through his four “sublimes”: the political sublime, underpinned by prestige, visibility, and political legacy; the technological sublime, driven by a fascination with the biggest, newest, fastest, and most technically impressive; the economic sublime, fuelled by the huge flows of money and business that megaprojects generate; and the aesthetic sublime, which stems from the attraction of spectacular, monumental projects.
But knowing what drives the frenzy for big infrastructure projects is only one part of the equation. The more important question is whether this glossy, big-ticket infrastructure expands people’s substantive freedoms. And one cannot answer this question without drawing on Professor Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities: the idea that the value of resources and facilities lies not merely in their existence but in what they enable people to do and to be.
That is exactly what we have attempted to examine in this special edition. Who is infrastructure built for? Is it for the elite or the ordinary user? Who gets to decide what infrastructure is built? Who pays the price? Will the facilities we build enable a woman to travel safely at night? Will they allow a street vendor to earn a living or enable a migrant worker to reach a job affordably? Do they equip our cities and towns to withstand extreme heat and catastrophic floods? Can waste be dealt with without simply moving the problem somewhere else?
As Professor Jayati Ghosh points out in her lead article in this issue, the answers to some of these questions are not always heartening: “The problems with India’s recent infrastructure push are similar to the problems with broader economic and social policy over the past decade and more: an obsession with form and display over substance; a focus on short-term gains rather than building for the long term; a predilection for grandiose and highly visible interventions rather than the systematic, solid, and careful policies that would ensure sustainable and inclusive infrastructure for the country and its people.”
And it is this obsession with the spectacular that has made us lose sight of a seemingly mundane but fundamental tenet of development: putting basic human needs at the centre. What is the point of chasing the bullet-train dream if the simple act of walking on city roads remains an arduous, and often dangerous, task? That it took the Supreme Court to declare the right to walk on safe, designated footpaths a fundamental right is a telling commentary on how far our infrastructure priorities have drifted from the everyday needs of people.
With this special edition that covers topics as varied as subaltern migration and the lessons it holds for policymakers, the botched blueprints of the cities of the future that have reduced smartness to a footnote, and the need to guard against creating a patriarchal urban spatial order, we hope to curate a conversation and be part of a movement that will privilege people over physical assets. Happy reading.