If there's an ideology that abounds in the civic works of Bengaluru city, it is something I would call developmentalism. Concretisation might be a better word, but developmentalism has a better ring to it.
Many thoughts have been triggered in my head ever since I learnt to drive in Bengaluru. I recall moving slowly and very cautiously behind a child on a tricycle with an autorickshaw blaring its horn from behind me on a narrow residential street. I remember thinking how one small misstep or lapse in concentration from me could be fatal to an innocent, blameless child just wanting to ride his tricycle. I don't know if he was supervised by an adult.
It took me back to something written on twitter by an urban planner. He asked how come we are okay with a 1000kg mass of metal moving on roads and forcing parents to stop children from going out on the streets out of a legitimate fear of a road accident. Is the transport of an individual more important? Or is giving children a safe space to run around and play near their homes more important? Cast in this way, as heavy masses of metal that move at speed right through living areas, we can see that cars and automobiles in general are fuel guzzling, carbon emitting monsters endangering the lives of pedestrians, especially children.
I don't want to be a Luddite. I am fond of technology and I genuinely believe that overall, the world has become a better place to live because of it. That's not to say it is all good - our water bodies are choked with contaminants, the high mountains are awash with micro-plastics while the oceans are filled with not-so-micro plastics. The soil and the air have turned toxic and we're steadily moving towards a world where climate extremes are much more frequent and a mass extinction is ongoing. In the middle of all this though, somehow the lives of billions of humans have been improved [citation needed].
Let's refocus on Bengaluru rather than looking at the entire world. When I visited in November 2020, soon after the first wave of the pandemic, the city was quieter than it's usual self. One morning I went for a run near Sankey Tank but I was frustrated by the fact that they were doing some construction work in and around the walking trail there. I skipped and jumped over construction debris and slush and ran, but didn't return after that.
When I came again in November 2021, the place was still under construction! The worst part - they were concreting the entire walking trail. Hard trails are known to be particularly terrible on the knees for runners. Tripping and falling on rough concrete surfaces cause much deeper cuts and scratches than a simple mud trail. Concrete doesn't allow plants to grow, it stores heat and radiates it out at night, making the immediate surroundings a little hotter. Children can't play on it because children fall often. Basically, a concrete trail is not good for any demographic of people who want to come to Sankey Tank.
What's wrong with a simple mud trail? (see here for a nice example) If there's enough grass and greenery around and the right type of mud is used, it will not get very slushy in the rain. Doing this is obviously much cheaper than preparing tons of concrete. It's better for runners, it doesn't absorb heat, it allows rainwater to seep through and recharges ground water.
The problem is that the folks at BBMP, and in general the policy-makers, are smitten by this ideology of developmentalism. It calls for maximum human intervention everywhere and to make everything look like it has been worked on a lot. Things have to look "modern". And it should not be cheap.
We often see the news about some controversial remarks made my politicians at an election rally or public speech. We might watch these snippets of such a speech. The next time though, take about an hour or two out of your day and watch an entire election speech given in a rural part of the country. In the run-up to the 2018 elections in Karnataka, I watched a couple of speeches and there were two aspects that caught my attention. First, is just how bloody boring they get. (Now I don't blame Mr. Siddaramiah for infamously falling asleep at public meetings). And secondly, how much of the speech is about how much money was "released" for various schemes and programmes. So many crores allocated for this, so many crores for that.
Imagine if Sankey Tank could be made into a nice, shady, walkable park with just ₹ 5-10 lakhs. That would be an outrage to the developmentalists! It needs to look upgraded, not just improved. It needs to be visible that something big was done. That somebody intervened here.
It's not only innocent walking trails around nice lakes that bear the brunt of this. Every road in Malleswaram is currently witness to the ravages of this ideology. Every road being "white-topped" is testament to this ideology. (white-topping is the word used to mean replacing tar roads with concrete roads) The idea is that we need BIG roads for BIG cars and these roads should be widened and made of concrete so people can reach very fast and very smooth until the next jog-jammed signal. Look, I'm a huge fan of roads which aren't filled with potholes. I understand that roads need to be widened. But at some point shouldn't we stop to understand that if we add one extra lane while 1,000 new vehicles are registered in the city on a daily basis, the extra lane doesn't matter anymore. A rant on the slow pace of the metro, the travesty of the lack of public transport options to places like the airport, the criminally underutilised railway lines in the city and the shrinking fleet of BMTC buses is for a separate blog post perhaps.
Delays in infrastructure construction are a fact of life in every single part of the world. I'm not upset that the construction of the metro is taking decades when it should have taken years. I'm upset that the thinking (assuming there is some thinking) is to simply keep building bigger and bigger and bigger roads when the immediate need is to DE-congest the roads. No amount of fly-overs and underpasses and signal-free corridors will save you from congestion if you have so many cars on the street. And people will keep buying and using cars as long as there is no alternative.
Cast your eyes behind Mantri mall and you will see a bluish-gray monstrosity coming up, a rectangular glass building. Unimaginatively coloured, ugly glass in a tropical city that sees single digit temperatures maybe 2-3 times a decade. Look at the footpath in front of your house - before they were made from sturdy slabs of stone called "chapdi kallu" in Kannada. Now it's the same stone but with a nice polished finish. Why? They're slippery in the rain, especially when they're slightly sloped. But it needs to LOOK modern and man-made.
Now the footpaths along large roads are being stripped of these big stones and being replaced with tile-like arrangement of concrete blocks. Because you can't have ancient stones next to a nice, swanky concrete road, can you? Doesn't matter that they're just there, supporting the weight of people and trucks which park on the pavement, with a nice rough surface that you don't slip on. Sure, some of them are shaky and could use a bit of cement at the joints, but that's very easily fixable. Incremental and simplistic changes are out of the question. There has to be a bombastic announcement that so many zillion crores are going to be spent to build this huge thing. Making it "smart".
Developmentalism cannot believe that something that has just worked for a long time can continue to serve its purpose without a fuss. Maybe bureaucractism is the better word - where activity is treated as achievement. "Dynamism" as a virtue. We have to go to a place, rip everything out and put something new while spending a lot of money. Understanding the purpose of what is being done, actually improving the place, is secondary.
I want to emphasise here that I'm neither against human intervention nor building things anew. I am strongly for modern air-conditioned metro rail systems, wide highways and expressways connecting major cities, faster trains, higher buildings and all that is generally termed development. Urbanisation is a net good for people and for the environment. Technology has so many solutions which will be adopted at breakneck speed - like electric cars and solar power and so many more. But I break at the point where we "develop" for development's sake, because we want to feel like we're developing.
PS - It's August 2022 and the concreting of the Sankey Tank walking trail is still underway.