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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.
