Interview

Leo F. Saldanha, Coordinator, Environment Support Group, Bangalore in conversation with Michael Goldman, Sociology and Global Studies, University of Minnesota; currently V.K.R.V. Rao Chair Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.

Environment Support Group (ESG) is a non-profit which began in the year 1998 and is based in Bangalore, Karnataka. ESG works with a variety of environmental and social justice initiatives across India and the world. Its work is anchored around actions involving research, education, campaign support, and advocacy for the reform of environmental decisionmaking processes, to make them pro-people and pro-environment.

 

What do you think of the just released ‘Database/Information for Preparation of the Revised Master Plan 2031 for Bengaluru’, and of the master planning process? What are activists and civil society organizations offering as an alternative to the document and the process?

Those who have been in favour of a strong state government are now working their way out of that position to join a wider network of people who are looking for a state that is accountable; in effect a weak state government, but a stronger local government as far as local area issues are concerned. When they say local government, it’s really communities engaging and controlling the local government, not a runaway local government that would anyway be like a strong and unaccountable state, which is what we’re suffering from in Bangalore now. I think the problems we have experienced in the past decade – the scale of urbanization, the messiness of it – is hurting a lot of people now. People are able to connect the dots now and say that this [the many problems of the city] is all because of poor planning over the past decades, because we couldn’t engage, or we did not engage, or we were not allowed to engage [with planning and governance processes]. We are reclaiming that power now, and that is really a huge political shift that I see here. Hundreds of citizens and other groups are now active. There are meetings where people have trouble getting a chair – I’ve not seen such active response for almost a decade.

In the 1990s when we were fighting against the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) project, an example of the state-led planning process that simply thrust the project on this region with no prior consultation, there was some public response, and resistance even, but eventually it petered out. Protests against the project were left to those directly impacted with displacement or those raising human rights concerns. But the wider planning dimensions, and the long-term implications, were not understood by most. The implications of having a girdle around a city almost suffocating its organic growth was never comprehended. And then you had a state run by then Chief Minister S.M. Krishna who believed very strongly in centralized power and in directing planning by a centralized state. He strongly believed in corporate power and the capacity of corporations to guide the visions of a city like Bangalore. He was all about listening to the elite, and guided by their advice appointed foreign firms as consultants to design Bangalore’s future.

People who spoke from experience, and with a keen knowledge of the city’s economy, culture, geography and ecology, were completely ignored. In 2005,¹ we protested when the French consultancy firm SCE (Strategic Conseil Etudes) was hired by the Bangalore Development Authority to undertake the task of preparing the Revised Master Plan of Bangalore (2015). This planning process catered mainly to the demands of the IT sector, the corporate sector, and the landed elite. The Master Plan (2015) created by SCE is the reason for the disaster the city is now. The city has been stretched at every level – roads, water, housing, sewage. Even though there is a supply of housing, it is not affordable, and this is deeply troubling. The displacement of poorer communities due to the over-pricing of land, and the everyday stress the poor suffer just to make ends meet, were precisely the conditions that led to the flash strike last year, when the garment workers came out on the roads and shut down the city for a day.

None of this is being forgotten; it is being remembered in a very active way. There were times when we should have spoken out but we did not do so in a concerted way. The most amazing thing is that some of those who were members of elite planning organizations (appointed by several chief ministers over the last two decades) such as BATF (Bangalore Agenda Task Force) and ABIDe (Agenda for Bangalore Infrastructure and Development), are now openly stepping up and saying that they were wrong in being part of it. These organizations took away planning from the local civic body and the constitutionally empowered MPC (Metropolitan Planning Committee).

In the 2014 documentary film, ‘Our Metropolis’ by Gautam Sonti and Usha Rao, the well known architect Naresh Narasimhan speaks enthusiastically about the great city that is coming about as a result of all this elite-driven planning. But the same Naresh is now talking a totally different language. He’s talking about ground-up, grassroots movements, building a vision from deliberate democracy; he is actively disassociating himself from ABIDe, the Vision Group, and BATF. Amazingly, the other person who came for the meeting we recently held was Ravichander, who earlier was a member of the elite Vision Group and is now writing against the vision of the Vision Group. I see this as part of a major transition. It is really positive that people are becoming alert and are examining issues in a deeper, more incisive way, clearly based on a very strong sense of restoring democracy in decisionmaking. In fact, just today I was reading that a group has made a demand to make the Metro’s Phase II Detailed Project Report public, saying that they will obstruct work otherwise.

 

Can you elaborate?

The Metro Rail Project has been expanding into the second stage but the authorities have not shared the detailed project report (DPR). A decade ago, Vinay Sreenivasa [an activist, now with Alternative Law Forum] and I had fought a Right to Information (RTI) case. As an outcome of that, the DPR was made public which I had put on our ESG website.² The managing director (MD) of the Namma Metro project at that time, Sivasailam, threatened me with criminal action because he said that it amounted to stealing proprietary information. I asked him to go ahead and said I’d like to see what the court had to say. Obviously, he did not file a case. But the fact that the state was trying to arm-twist us was very clear then. Now, when they decide to not share the information, there is a public response demanding that they do. People are not even going the RTI way but are saying, ‘It is your responsibility suo motu to disclose.’ So it’s a very positive shift where people are holding those in power accountable. With the sheer number of mega projects being thrust on us, there is a tendency to say, ‘It is too much to handle’. But with the kind of networking that’s taking place, we say, ‘No, as a network, we can probably handle it better’.³

 

How broad-based is this network?

[laughs] You would never imagine Isaac Arul Selva, who works on housing and land rights for the poor, sitting with Ravichander who is part of the Vision Group and ABIDe. You wouldn’t see Kshithij Urs [now with Action Aid], who has been working systematically against corporatization of water distribution and so on, engaging in discussions with Naresh. But we were in the same room discussing our concerns and disagreements. So it’s that broad-based. There are folks who work on solid waste management concerns, who once thought of it as a very specific task, now see it as part of a wider problem, of poor planning and as a governance issue.

 

Why? Because things have become so bad that people realize they have to join up with others and share their concerns?

Yes, one cannot be sectoral about it anymore; one has to be inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary in responding to the scale and complexity of the situation. Everyone is suffering, the poor particularly.

One of the responses to the unbridled widening of roads and mass felling of trees is that people are saying, ‘You cannot address traffic congestion by widening roads’ and ‘Let’s do regional planning’. People are saying, let’s look at improving the bus system, and limiting private transport as it involves so much destruction. In fact, this weekend (in March), there is a protest demanding ‘double the fleet, half the fares’ of the city bus fleet. I thought it was a nice line – double the fleet, half the fares. It’s basically about making public transport accessible, because Bangalore has the most expensive public transport. Thousands of people are circulating emails, hundreds of people are going into buses and sharing leaflets in support of the campaign and it’s nice to see all of that. So it makes officials a little more vulnerable. I feel that they should feel vulnerable all the time.

 

What is the main critique of this master plan process?

I think the main critique is that the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) should not do it because of the damage it has systematically done in planning the city: due to their lack of accountability and transparency. It is by design a non-transparent body, a parastatal that is accountable only to the chief minister. This finger pointing at the BDA is very much based on empirical evidence and experience. The second concern is legal: the Constitutional 74th Amendment (Nagarpalika) Act, 1992, mandated the Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) as a representative body [that should undertake the function of planning in consultation with local civic and panchayat elected bodies]. Clearly then, the BDA has no legal role in planning Bangalore.

So by challenging the BDA, people are actually engaging with deepening local democracy. There was an earlier trend in Bangalore when people thought that a strong state was the only way forward. In the 1950s we had the CITB (City Improvement Trust Board) with the power of planning, even though we also had a municipality. In those times corruption was not a big problem – there was no financialization of land, no real estate brokers run amok as we now see, and politics was not so corrupt. So a state driven exercise of planning was by and large benign to the concerns and complexities of local communities while accommodating newer resident communities. Planning was not as ruthless as it has become in the last two decades. Now people are speaking very differently, saying: ‘If the Nagarpalika Act has acknowledged that the lack of public involvement in local democracy is why our cities have become dysfunctional, then why are we allowing an undemocratic anti-constitutional BDA to plan our city? Why are we allowing the problems the agency has created to perpetuate?’

We are going through the worst drought in 40 years. In about two weeks time, if there is no rain, Bangalore will run out of water. All of this citizen action is coming together in a very assuring way even as we are to deal with problems of unprecedented scales and complexities. Sometimes fear helps bring people together in a positive way.

 

What were some of the outcomes from your recent ‘people’s master plan’ meeting?

We decided that each sector would critique the 35-page document that the BDA has put up on its website.⁴ It is a silly document; we don’t know what to even call it. It’s not a data base, it’s not a vision document; it’s just a set of rambling thoughts – there is no coherence to it. Everyone recognizes it as part of a ritualistic sharing of something that a few people have cobbled together and quickly put out for public consumption. This time, however, people aren’t buying such tactics. They now want to know more about how the Dutch consultancy, Royal Haskoning DHV, was hired to write up the 2031 master plan. There are questions raised about the huge amount they have been paid; I believe it is 15 crore rupees. People are asking what the Dutch have been doing over the past two years while under contract, when all that has resulted is a 35-page document. Apparently, nothing. Because much of the data are plain and simple wrong; they haven’t even succeeded in the pure, simple task of organizing the data. There are deeper questions being asked of whether this is another exercise in corruption of planning.

So each of the groups at the meeting representing different sectors of society have taken back homework, to critique this BDA planning document and come up with their own narrative. Based on these narratives, we are going to organize a ‘festival of planning’. Why this name? We didn’t want to make it depressing; to live in a city is to live with enthusiasm and life; it is a place for enterprise, cosmopolitanism, creativity; it is a place to think deep, clear, and sharp. These are the kinds of aspirations people have, not necessarily to worry about lack of water or transport, which is mundane and that we anyway endure. In this festival, everyone is going to come and speak of a vision for our city, and by so doing we will expose the huge gap between people’s aspirations, people’s capacities to design their own city, and what is being done by this Dutch consultancy and BDA.

This is all being done without money, and people are happy that everything is transparent – the thinking process, the organizing process, even the expenditure part. We spent 2000 rupees for the meeting and everyone shared the expenses. There are no power relationships here. We took a conscious decision not to take money from the big foundations that readily say, ‘we will host the meeting’. We decided there should be a sense of equity among us. A new form of politics is being lived through this experience.

 

What types of people or sectors were represented, and how have their perspectives changed?

Yes. When we spoke of street vendors five years ago, we were outsiders in local forums. We were raising concerns that were not supposed to be the real concerns for a city like Bangalore. Bangalore’s concern was the information technology sector and keeping investment flowing. But in this conversation we are talking about how to make the streets secure, safe, and full of life. And how do you make sure that the promise of the Street Vendors Act is realized? One of the strongest critiques is that the Dutch consultants did not talk about the street vendors, nor about the urban poor or housing. And these concerns are being voiced not from activists who have been working on these issues, but this is everyone speaking. We have professors from architecture schools saying, ‘This is crazy! They didn’t even conceptualize a plan for a very diverse city where everyone has to have an equitable chance.’

The critique of the public transport system has changed from the point of view that was dominant ten years ago, which was to ‘bring more Volvo buses’, which really meant that only ‘techies’ could afford to ride. I see a major change in the language! There was a very serious effort to try and look at art and culture as not merely gallery exhibitions, but art and culture as lived experiences of people from across the city. For instance, Kirtana [a playwright, singer and film maker] said that the language of our engagement and of the alternative master plan has to be inclusive and humanistic, not technical and technocratic. It is because planning has become a technocratic exercise that tends to mystify everything, and our effort is to demystify it for everybody. That is why we will have a festival instead of a seminar. The language of engagement itself is changing.

 

What do you imagine to be the next steps after the festival?

I think it’s going to produce a kind of unwritten manifesto, where everyone shares an imagination of the city as an outcome of an organic engagement, unlike the one that has been thrust down upon us over the past two or three decades. People want to own the message now, as much as the city, and want to organize the planning process in a more dynamic and collaborative manner. So there is going to be a lot of deliberate and detailed engagement with the idea of planning, with the kind of concepts that are being promoted, and at every step people are going to hold the state accountable. That, I think, is a huge shift.

There was a sense of cynicism in the past and a huge distance between what people wanted and what people did. Now, that gap is being closed. I feel that when that festival happens, in a month or two from now, it will be a platform to influence the state bureaucracy in a positive way and will make elected representatives more sensitive to what’s being said here. It’ll be a rallying point for change.

 

So much of this urban development and expansion occurs on the backs of farmers and rural communities. Do you see any signs that these urban groups are working to interact with rural communities on thorny issues of justice and equity for ecological resources such as land, water, the commons, fertile farm land, all of which is being taken in the name of the ‘world city’?

Although we had invited farmers groups, they couldn’t come. Obviously there’s still a long way to go before we can make them feel comfortable and they see a need to engage with this process. But everyone understands that this kind of urban sprawl leads to usurping land and the commons from the farming community. One participant said that the planning exercise at the BDA can be seen as simply taking colour pencils and colouring the map, turning what is productive farming land that is sustaining families into industrial zones. This planning process has turned into a process of massive displacement. He joked that the BDA is in the business of selling colour pencils! Isn’t this a good metaphor to understand what happens in the planning exercise? I saw it in 2005. All they did was colour spaces on the map, turning productive farmland and grazing pastures into zones for conquest and control. Whom did they ask? What did they consider? There was no impact assessment of any sort. There was no consultation with panchayats.

In both the build-up to the festival of planning, as also after our festival, we will take the exercise of ‘participation in planning’ across the city, including into the periphery. This way any group can organize a similar process in their local constituency, to get everyone engaged. We want to take it the next step forward and translate anger and critique into collective planning for action.

 

Do you think at some point the political parties would get involved?

Our hope is that they should be so deeply troubled that they would want to get involved; not accommodating such citizen engagement could cause a gap between them and their own vote banks. So I think they will get involved.

In a strange way, it is all coming together. It took a long time for Bangalore to wake up. But the city is waking up and it’s waking up in a very inclusive way. Just four years ago there was a campaign called Whitefield Rising (a very exclusive campaign for the wealthy IT suburb to become the new hub for commercial development). But now these groups are integrating with the rest of the city, and the city’s issues: they are no longer talking about more roads, and instead about making train travel and bus travel inclusive. There is also a growing shift away from the allure of the snazzy Metro, to a language demanding public transport be affordable and inclusive.

So I guess people are recalling where they came from. Not everyone was born rich. There’s a sense of humility in all these engagements that I didn’t see several years ago. A willingness to step up and stand up for someone else’s cause. This is nice.

 

Why are things changing quickly in Bangalore?

Bangalore has an advantage of having a critical mass of people who are highly informed and analytical. They were neutral or inert for a long period, but now if they become active in the right sense, things can move quite fast in Bangalore. It’s a largely youthful population here, and we need to get them to think about the city and democracy and their futures. What we’re now seeing is a major shift in the quality of life aspirations, especially in young families. They are seeing what’s happening in Delhi – the pollution and devastation of public health due to reckless urbanization – and there is a conscious effort to avoid that in Bangalore. Many of them who are stepping out to protest are saying that the quality of air is bad to breathe and it indeed is true. While it is not as bad as Delhi, it can get that bad here very fast.

The right connections are being made and it needs to be kept alive. You need engagements that capture the imagination of people. There are a lot of creative people who have stepped up. The campaign line, ‘double the fleet and halve the fares’, was coined by people in the advertising industry, who got involved in the movement and have been working from a very deep sense of social justice. One person from ‘Citizens for Bangalore’ spoke about how caste and class have combined to oppress; this is not language you would normally hear in these meetings, but she brought in these important social dynamics. Someone else raised the question of humanism! We’re waiting for a wide variety of critiques to come out. I’m hoping these will bring out a rich text that will be translated and circulated. It’s like putting a book together from multiple perspectives without any plan to publish it. What a contradiction right? Don’t plan to write a book on planning, and there you have it!

 

* The interview was conducted on 27 February 2017 in Bangalore.

Footnotes:

1. See: http://static.esgindia.org/campaigns/rcdp.2015/RCDP.html

2. See: http://static.esgindia.org/campaigns/Tree%20felling/Hasire%20Usiru/research/Metro_DPR.html

3. See for instance: http://esgindia.org/education/community-outreach/press/bangalore-road-widening-and-other-urban-html

4. See: http://www.bdabangalore.org/EnglishPressNote.pdf