#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pulya Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
#
Kick ass podcast in Hindi, it's amazing.
#
Why do people move to cities?
#
Cities especially in India are crowded, congested, polluted with large numbers of people who
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come here living in unhealthy, unhygienic conditions and fill these slums.
#
And yet, people keep coming to cities.
#
The story of humanity, in fact, is a story of migration away from rural areas and into
#
If cities are so goddamn terrible, why do people move to cities?
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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India like the rest of the world is rapidly urbanizing, but our governance and our politics
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does not take this into account.
#
My guests in today's episode are Ruben Ebrahim and Pritika Hingurani from the IDFC Institute,
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a think tank that focuses not just on ideas, but also on ways and means to turn their ideas
#
into reality given the state of the political economy.
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One of the areas in which the IDFC Institute has great expertise is cities and urban planning.
#
And I invited Ruben and Pritika to come on the show when I read an article by them in
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Bloomberg linked on the episode page for the show about why India is more urban than we
#
think and why that distinction matters enormously.
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It's a fascinating subject, but before I take you over to our conversation, a quick commercial
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Ruben, Pritika, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Ruben, before we sort of get to the topic at hand, tell me a little bit about the IDFC
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So I'd say broadly speaking, it's an institute that was set up as a sort of think do tank.
#
And the reason we say think do tank is because most think tanks and academic institutions
#
tend to restrict itself to asking what questions and why questions without getting into the
#
And most public policy interventions actually get stuck on the how of it because the how
#
is where political economy gets involved.
#
So we're actually involved in what we sort of broadly sort of define as ideate, innovate,
#
implement, institutionalize.
#
Those are the four stages of public policy as we see it.
#
So we obviously have some deep sectoral knowledge as well.
#
But I think you can actually apply this principle no matter what realm of public policy you
#
So that's broadly speaking, the remit of what we do.
#
So essentially, you go in there saying not just that we're going to find out what policy
#
works and should be implemented, but also what policy can practically be carried out
#
and pushed through the that's right, because ultimately in public policy, if you aren't
#
capable of implementing it, what's the point?
#
And so unlike other think tanks, you actually want to make a difference.
#
I think most think tanks would like to make a difference.
#
I think the problem is that in general, people who are technically trained, therefore have
#
a bias towards thinking that a solution is also technical, right?
#
Keep in mind, I had exactly the same bias, right?
#
So when you look at a problem closely enough that you realize that the technical piece
#
You can't do anything without the idea in the first place.
#
But once you have that, and specifically in public policy, you've got to see it through.
#
You can't leave that to someone else.
#
And what are the sort of areas in which, you know, IDFC has expertise where you try to
#
Yeah, so I'd say broadly speaking, so beyond the what we described as sort of state capability,
#
governance, all of that, which are more sort of horizontal, generic knowledge, I think
#
the specialized knowledge is across three verticals, which is urbanization, the reform
#
of the welfare state, and the criminal justice system.
#
Those are broadly the three areas where we have deep expertise.
#
And Pritika, you've done a master's in city planning from MIT.
#
So can I ask how you got to that?
#
Like, you know, how did you begin to look at cities differently once you actually did
#
your courses and so on?
#
That's a great question.
#
So my undergrad was in development economics, and so I think I started with an interest
#
in development questions.
#
And then I worked in economic consulting for a while, so completely different.
#
And then when I was going back to graduate school, and had conversations with my advisors,
#
I think the way I thought about cities was the location for development, right.
#
And so, I mean, the reason I was interested in cities is a very multidisciplinary topic,
#
but I think also in the way in which we think about city planning, we have to be prepared
#
A, to think about economic development, and then, you know, physical planning, transport
#
planning, and a whole host of other things.
#
And just a sort of term city planning seems to denote a top-down way of thinking.
#
And obviously, you've done economics before this, so you understand how market works.
#
And you know, cities also are another form of spontaneous order.
#
Did that make a difference in how you looked at city planning, and who are the sort of
#
people who influence the way you look at city planning?
#
In fact, I was one of the few people that came from a fairly solid economics background,
#
and I wasn't afraid of urban economic classes.
#
And I think what ends up happening is you have generations of planners that think of
#
cities as sort of a top-down, so not only take a top-down approach to cities, but also
#
think of markets as something you can plan, and you can't.
#
And so I think that's definitely, you know, something that I took away from the program.
#
The two people I think that influenced me the most is Alan Berto, who's at NYU, and
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Bimal Patel, who's done an incredible job of marrying planning and economics in India.
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And who's joining you guys in India, so that must be nice.
#
And in general, Ruben, you wrote a piece recently with Robert Maga, where, you know, I'll quote
#
from that, where you guys say, cities, not nation-states, are the dominant force of human
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civilization in the 21st century.
#
Humanity transitioned from a rural to a primarily urban species, Homo urbanus, at breathtaking
#
In the early 1800s, less than 3% of the world's population lived in cities.
#
Today, more than half the global population is urban, and by 2050, the proportion will
#
rise to three-quarters, stop quote.
#
Why has this move towards urbanism happened, and what are the sort of challenges it then
#
holds for a developing nation?
#
So I think what cities really do is they provide you economies of scale and economies of agglomeration.
#
And those two sets of economies basically allow you to sort of build job markets, labor
#
And I think the reason why people generally move to cities, and I think this is perhaps
#
sort of Alan Berto's great contribution, is to define cities as labor markets.
#
And these are not the creatures of an architect's imagination, so to speak, right?
#
I mean, so yes, people like us perhaps have the luxury of saying, you know, we live in
#
Mumbai for X or Y reason, but the primary reason why most people who have moved to Bombay
#
have moved here is purely to find a job.
#
And that's true of most cities around the world.
#
So in effect, these cities are just labor markets.
#
So you effectively move to where the jobs are.
#
Equally, there's another transitional phase that has happened over the last 200 years,
#
which is the transition towards through industrialization through to service economies, right?
#
I mean, so we were primarily an agricultural society, no matter where in the world you
#
And then you have industrial society.
#
So surplus labor comes out of agriculture, they need to be employed somewhere.
#
That's the industrialization process.
#
And then as productivity goes up in the industrial sector, you start moving into the service
#
So that's the process by which it happens.
#
So the question is, what is the location of industrialization and what is the location
#
of the service economy?
#
And those generally tend to be cities because you actually start agglomerating people.
#
And obviously it's natural that, you know, people want to be in as large economic networks
#
So they come to cities and it gets denser and denser.
#
And does it at some level?
#
So again, from a job market perspective, it also allows you to shift jobs, right?
#
I mean, so the larger the market, the more opportunities there are.
#
Division of labor, divisionization, blah, blah, all of that.
#
And does that in some senses conflict with how a nation state sees itself?
#
So for example, here you have, say, the city of Mumbai, where people are coming because
#
of the economic networks.
#
There are all kinds of jobs, no matter what your skills are, you can specialize and so
#
But at the same time, you have a lot of regulations which put restraints on this kind of movement
#
and cohabiting together.
#
For example, we were talking about FSI before this episode, and I've done an episode on
#
that earlier with Alex Tabarrok while he was with you guys in Bombay.
#
So is that a conflict which somehow needs to be sorted out between governance and the
#
natural spontaneous order which brings people to cities?
#
So as the city's economic base evolves, the built form needs to evolve as well.
#
So I think the example we were discussing is the meatpacking district in New York.
#
So when it's a manufacturing hub, you need a very different built form than when it's
#
So allowing for higher FSI as your economic base changes, putting in more mass public
#
transit as you have more people coming to work versus people being able to drive in
#
And so I think when we don't allow planning to evolve, we end up stifling the economic
#
And just for my listeners who might not be familiar with the term, FSI basically means
#
how high you're allowed to build.
#
Nuts and bolts, that's what it comes down to.
#
I had an episode on this with Alex Tabarrok which will be linked from this episode page
#
which had the title of Reclaim the Sky where Alex eloquently said that why should we reclaim
#
the sea and Mumbai can't expand much in terms of its geography, we should reclaim the sky
#
and kind of expand upwards.
#
And that's just sort of one example of the kind of regulations which hamper the natural
#
But to this, critics would say that you can't just have anarchy and people going wherever
#
and you need to somehow control all of that.
#
How do you respond to that?
#
You cannot have, so FSI floor space index is basically a ratio that defines how much
#
floor space you can build as a ratio of your plot area.
#
So it's a technical term and it takes into account things like the location of the plot.
#
It could take into account the soil quality, accessibility.
#
So at a given point in time, a certain plot may have certain features and so can only
#
support so many people.
#
What we forget is that the carrying capacity of a plot can be enhanced.
#
So if an area is serviced by a road, for instance, instead of the road, you can put in place
#
BRT or you can put in a metro.
#
And so that same plot becomes accessible to so many more people.
#
Now there is a cap on how much a given plot can take, but then it's for planners to tweak
#
So I completely understand why people balk at, you know, higher FSI and low operand because
#
all you think is constantly stuck in a traffic jam, it's hard to walk or to get anywhere.
#
You know, how are we going to have taller buildings with the given transit?
#
And I think what's key that city governments do is enhance carrying capacity at the same
#
time that they allow the area to densify.
#
The other thing that often gets conflated is density of people and density of space.
#
So if you look at the older parts of Bombay, they were built, you know, to a certain height.
#
As the areas became more desirable, the amount of built space didn't change.
#
But because more people wanted to live there, they just subdivided and you had more people
#
living in the same amount of space.
#
If you instead recognize that there is demand for an area, allow the buildings to redevelop,
#
you know, taller more space, you will actually get the same number of people in slightly
#
You know, has implications for affordability as well.
#
If you think of land prices as a constraint, the best way to sort of lessen that constraint
#
is to divide the land plot by larger number of units.
#
And so I think the sort of reflexive response to FSI doesn't take into account a large
#
number of these factors.
#
I think there's also an interesting sort of underlying question here, which sits as a
#
sort of heart of public policy, which is how much regulation is enough regulation, right?
#
I mean, and the fact is, none of us really know how much regulation is enough regulation.
#
Or even how much regulation is too much regulation.
#
It's too much regulation, right?
#
So I think in the urban context, I think the sort of gold standard is the commissioners'
#
plan for New York City.
#
That was really a thought experiment that was carried out in 1811, where the state government
#
of New York basically commissioned Governor Morris, basically commissioned these three
#
people to do a thought exercise.
#
And the scenario they were planning was, so New York at that point is mostly concentrated
#
in the tip of New York, around Wall Street.
#
And it has approximately 25,000 people.
#
So they basically said, let's do a 200-year planning exercise where the population of
#
the city will actually go from 25,000 to a million.
#
This plan is the street grid of New York, right?
#
So keep in mind that nothing's built.
#
It's just a statutory map that's basically been put into place, which says, if New York
#
grows, if the economic activity in New York goes up and therefore people move here, etc.,
#
this is the way the city will actually grow.
#
So if you look at the underlying base map, for instance, you won't see Central Park,
#
but Central Park is like a Lego block.
#
It's literally been sort of placed on top of the street grid.
#
So the width of the roads, the size of the, all of this was determined in 1811.
#
But they didn't then go on to basically say, you will have X kind of industry here and
#
Y kind of industry there.
#
They said nothing of the sort.
#
They simply said, if the city grows, here's how the city will grow.
#
And there's an underlying street grid that basically allows for this growth of the city.
#
And funnily enough, like, you know, some of the old Indian cities are actually built
#
But were they planned or did they just happen to come up with street grids?
#
Yeah, they were planned.
#
Because, I mean, they're literally perpendicular.
#
I mean, so if you go to old city of Jaipur, you will see it.
#
There's a grid exactly like the New York grid.
#
So how much should you plan?
#
Like, okay, at the level of the street grid you just pointed out, it makes sense.
#
Where do you draw that line?
#
I think too much is the point at which you become too static and don't allow for dynamism.
#
So it's a little bit like what Pritika was pointing earlier, which is things keep changing,
#
The economic profile of a city moves.
#
So New York used to be in garments and then garments just disappeared.
#
You need to allow the city to actually move from one industry to the other.
#
So anything that prevents the dynamism involved in the ability of a city to adapt to changing
#
conditions to me is too much regulation.
#
So let's take the FSI of Bombay, right?
#
Just keeping a strict 1.3 all over the city of Bombay to me is just, it's a static.
#
Well, other big cities are 15 to 30 and so on.
#
But again, it's very granular.
#
I mean, so when you say 25 in Singapore, it's not all of Singapore.
#
It's the CBD of Singapore, the central business district of Singapore that has 25.
#
So you just need granular planning, right, which then allows for the city to evolve based
#
on how the market dynamics work.
#
So it's not like I am suggesting that this is the only way that the city will evolve.
#
I'm saying I don't know.
#
So let's actually have a system that takes into account ignorance.
#
And you're just as ignorant as I am as to where the city goes.
#
So what you just pointed out about New York was, in a sense, it feels very unusual to
#
me because it sees guys planning way ahead of time before there's even really a city
#
But typically how city planning happens would be fairly reactive, right?
#
Because otherwise, what's the impetus for planning?
#
So I'm not entirely sure that is the case because you've got any number of examples
#
of cities that are built on a grid.
#
So if you actually look at the United States as a whole, I mean, there is the Jeffersonian
#
grid, which is, you know, west of the Mississippi, the entire United States is on a grid.
#
And so you just need to go on Google Maps and like zoom into a place like Omaha in Nebraska,
#
and you'll see it's on a grid.
#
And this is all stuff that was done ages ago.
#
So Barcelona is on a grid.
#
I mean, there's any number of cities globally that are on a grid.
#
I think a lot of this really comes from if your starting point is that cities matter
#
and we need to plan for it, as opposed to this is a terrible thing, you know, let's
#
try to prevent people from coming in.
#
I think your starting point matters.
#
And so if your starting point is this is a good thing, we need to encourage it and we
#
need to find ways to accommodate for it.
#
I think you will come down a path that looks very similar to New York and Barcelona and
#
all of these places as opposed to the mentality mostly here, which is urbanization is a terrible
#
And by the way, every single person who thinks urbanization is a terrible thing lives in
#
And this is like I just read a couple of episodes with Ram Guha on Gandhi and this was one of
#
Gandhi's tropes that a villages are, you know, India should be a country of villages and
#
So tell me in India, that therefore per se, how have cities tended to evolve and how has
#
the planning mindset tended to sort of.
#
So I'll let the planning question be answered by Pritika, but under just the Gandhi question,
#
I mean keep in mind the fact that he was taken to task by none other than Dr. Ambedkar who
#
actually pointed out to Gandhi the hypocrisy of someone who grew up in a city and lived
#
in London and Johannesburg and Pretoria and Mumbai, making the case for how great villages
#
That's typically the way the case is made and Ambedkar's point was I actually grew up
#
In fact, Guha made the point in his biography right at one point where he was in London,
#
he'd gone for his education Gandhi, not Guha and Gandhi wrote an essay idealizing the pastoralist,
#
the Indian pastoralist and all that and there was a very funny throwaway line about Brahmin
#
bids every day, Vaishya bids once in two days and a pastoralist bids once a week, but otherwise
#
You know, they're healthy, they've got good bodies and they eat healthy food and breathe
#
clean air and Guha points out that until this point in his life, he had probably never spoken
#
to a villager in his life, you know, grew up in Porbandar, Rajkot, urban centers, goes
#
to London and so on and so forth.
#
But that's a digression too.
#
But just to continue that digression for a second, I mean, keep in mind Gandhi is heavily
#
influenced by Henry David Thoreau, who's also talking about the same thing in the United
#
States, the pastoralist movement and so on and so forth.
#
But yes, I mean, I think every country goes through this phase of the romance of, you
#
know, this is a classic, you know, the grass is greener on the other side, except in this
#
case, I don't even know what the other side is.
#
It's idealized and sitting in my head.
#
No, and people demonize cities so much and yet everybody wants to come here.
#
In fact, the very fact of urban migration tells you that a lot of the tropes that exist
#
in our discourse are mistaken.
#
For example, people say population is a bad thing, India's problem is population.
#
But all human movement is a movement to places with greater population density because Julian
#
Simon said people are the ultimate resource.
#
And a similar point I make about inequality, when I talk about inequality and poverty being
#
very different things, and all of human movement is towards, especially by the poor, is towards
#
places with great inequality, which is cities.
#
And one of the things that, so I always think of cities as poverty digesters, right?
#
Because it actually allows you to escape poverty, to which one of these sort of non-intuitive
#
things that is always mentioned is, but then why are cities poor?
#
Cities are poor precisely because there's more poor people coming in to get out of poverty.
#
So you're, that's what's actually going on, but if you actually might, I mean, no one's
#
actually from, as far as I can tell, no one's actually done serious longitudinal research
#
tracking people across time to see if they got wealthier.
#
But I think anecdotally, you'll see it everywhere you look, which is people have escaped poverty
#
by just moving to cities.
#
I mean, I just say revealed preferences say everything, you don't need data beyond that.
#
People just keep coming to cities and however much you decry slums, the people that are
#
living there voluntarily, there is a reason for that.
#
And slums again, you know, people make the mistake of equating slums with poverty.
#
Slums are the consequence of bad real estate policy.
#
And that may be a good segue for Prithika to answer your previous question.
#
Let's get back to that.
#
Have you forgotten my question?
#
No, even I've forgotten it.
#
So my question basically was that, you know, while abroad, there might have been this tendency
#
for cities to be drawn along grids and planning and so on and so forth.
#
In India, I would imagine, especially looking at the state of cities today, there's possibly
#
been a little more anarchic than that, not in a bad way.
#
And how have Indian cities like, you know, Bombay, Delhi, whichever traditionally evolved
#
and how have planners and intersected with that in terms of the mindset that they bring
#
I think a broad way to answer that question is, you know, even if we had better planned
#
cities at the core, I think an inability to allow cities to scale has been the problem.
#
So we just talked about slums.
#
I mean, slums are really failing to appreciate the fact that people are moving to the city
#
and what you need then is more formal sector housing.
#
So what a lot of Indian cities have done, or industrial policy did to some extent, was
#
to say, look, you know, cities are growing, you know, we can't control population, we
#
aren't able to provide amenities.
#
And so there was incentives for manufacturing to, or mandates rather, for manufacturing
#
and universities to locate outside of cities.
#
So I think there's constantly, and this comes from the master planning approach, right,
#
that we will spread development more evenly across the region, or we will not allow for
#
densification and so, you know, mandate that things spread out more evenly.
#
I think one other way to sort of think about it is, I mean, and this may be controversial,
#
but urban planners tend to think of cities the way they would think of buildings, right,
#
because a lot of them sort of come from this sort of architectural background.
#
A building is a static concept, right, you can plan a building, to then apply that mindset
#
to something that is fundamentally a dynamic, ever evolving organism, right, and then to
#
apply these principles, I think this is just a very bad idea.
#
And I think that's typically what has happened.
#
And so if you look across the universe of planners who understand the underlying market
#
economics of why people move and live in cities, I'd say that's a very, very small number.
#
In the world, that's a very small number.
#
In India, it would be miniscule.
#
And would it be fair to say, to carry that analogy forward, that a building is made of
#
bricks, but cities are made of people.
#
And, you know, it's very dynamic, you can't plan, I mean, the same way you can't plan
#
I mean, in general, you know, I mean, and you and I probably agree on this.
#
I mean, I don't know is a very useful starting point on all of these exercises.
#
And so exercising some level of humility to say, I don't really know where this goes.
#
And then, you know, so let that humility be your sort of binding constraint.
#
And then with that, now do what you need to do.
#
You're a guy who interacts with politicians and bureaucrats, and you're talking to me
#
We'll take a quick commercial break and we'll come back.
#
Welcome to another awesome week on IBM Podcast.
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If you're not following us on social media, please make sure you do.
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We are IBM Podcasts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
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So we have a listener survey going on right now.
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Please do participate on that listener survey.
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That helps us when we go out and talk to advertisers.
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It is also very helpful for us to kind of know who you are and what kind of things you
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We ask a lot of questions around what kind of content you'd like to see us put out in
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the next couple of months.
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And yeah, we'd really appreciate any feedback that you could give us.
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We launched a new podcast on Valentine's Day called Dating is Garbage.
#
Surbhi, Abbas and Janam talk modern dating and the woes and wows that come with it.
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Each week they sit down with some very cool guests and have an unfiltered conversation
#
about their dating habits, awkward experiences and heartbreaks.
#
Tune in to hear them attempting therapy on each other.
#
On the first episode, we have comedian Urooj Ashfaq discussing rejection.
#
On Cyrus Says, Cyrus is joined by lawyer couple YP and Abba Singh.
#
They discuss what it takes to stand up to authority in court, corruption in India and
#
how the Me Too movement has affected court cases.
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Also check out the hilarious Valentine's Day special of Cyrus Says where he was joined
#
by Ayesha, his wife, Kunal Vijaykar and me.
#
The four of us try to discuss and dissect romance, really, really badly.
#
On Simplified, the trio is joined by Meghnaad and Shreyas Manohar.
#
They discuss why learning school civics can help us understand today's political scenario
#
and about their new podcast, How to Citizen.
#
On the habit coach, Ashton talks about the importance of substituting your regular table
#
salt with Himalayan pink salt.
#
On Croc's Tales, we have a month long Valentine's special.
#
Aadhan takes over classic fairy tales and gives them a modern Croc's Tales spin.
#
And with that, let's continue with your show.
#
Welcome back to the Scene on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting here with Ruben Ebrahim and Pritika Hingorani and we're talking about cities.
#
The reason I invited you guys on the show was this excellent op-ed you wrote for Bloomberg,
#
which is linked to the episode page where Pritika, to quote from that, you guys said,
#
India is more urban than politicians know or acknowledge, stop quote.
#
Is there a dispute over what is urban and how much of India is urban and why does it
#
There's a dispute because the dispute arises from the definition that we use.
#
So there's two ways in which we define urban in India.
#
One is the statutory definition.
#
So that just means that every state government sets its own threshold and defines what's
#
urban and what's rural.
#
And there's, you know, states use widely differing criteria.
#
And once a state government recognizes an area as urban, it gets an urban municipal administration.
#
The second definition is a census definition.
#
Now the definition changes over time, but the difference is that it's a uniform three-part
#
definition that's applied to the whole country.
#
So it has a population cutoff, it has a density cutoff.
#
Then what's interesting is it has an occupation criteria, which is that 75% of the male workforce
#
needs to be non-agricultural activities.
#
Now this is not a criteria that's used widely across the world.
#
And so our colleagues at IDFC Institute ran an exercise to say, by the statutory definition,
#
With the census definition, India is 31% urban.
#
Now it looks like you're quibbling over 5%, but 5% in the Indian context is 55 million
#
people, which is the population of South Korea.
#
And so essentially what you have is 55 million people who live in dense urban environments,
#
as acknowledged by the census, but don't have a local authority that's required to provide
#
them with the basic services that you need with dense urban living.
#
So things like sewage lines, fire safety, building regulations.
#
So that's just between those two, there's a problem.
#
But then the larger question is, okay, this is a definition we've chosen, but what does
#
everybody else in the world do?
#
And what if we use some of their criteria?
#
So our colleagues ran an exercise to apply two simple population thresholds that, you
#
know, Mexico, Ghana, and a bunch of other countries use.
#
And you find that when you apply different criteria, India could be anywhere from 47
#
And so then the broader question is not what's the precise definition you should use, but
#
is just the definition we've picked, is that obscuring the reality in front of us?
#
And so the other piece of work we've done is using satellite data.
#
And so satellite data is interesting because when you use administrative data, you're constantly
#
measuring within a fixed administrative unit.
#
So you could have two administrative units that are side by side, individually they fall
#
below your thresholds, but the fact that they're side by side means taken together they're
#
actually an urban unit.
#
And so, you know, when we use satellite data, we find these, you know, dense corridors growing
#
out of cities that really should be considered part of the larger agglomeration, but aren't.
#
The reason that we're concerned is goes to what Ruben was talking about before, which
#
is a failure to anticipate this means that these areas then develop and densify in the
#
absence of any regulation, and then retrofitting these areas become extremely difficult.
#
So what I realized while reading your piece, which I hadn't known earlier, is that the
#
definition matters because the kind of governance you get is based on the definition that area
#
defined as an urban area will get a different kind of governance.
#
Just unpack that for me.
#
So it's sort of pretty much picking up from what she just mentioned, which is if you're
#
a urban municipal body, you're supposed to basically provide these services that if you're
#
a panchayat, the rural administration, you don't have to provide.
#
So what happens is if you have a bunch of places that are urban-like, right, I mean,
#
if you just simply use other criteria, but because they are governed by a village administrative
#
unit, actually doesn't have access to these services.
#
So once you actually get into these numbers, you'll actually see absurdities all over the
#
I mean, so I'll give you a small example of this.
#
We discovered that there's an area in Kerala in Munnar called Kannan Devan Hills, which
#
is a panchayat, and the population of Kannan Devan Hills is 55,000, and it's a panchayat.
#
In which world is 55,000 people actually a village?
#
It's an absurd starting point.
#
Now, in that particular instance, it's Munnar, it's the Tata tea estates, I'm guessing.
#
So therefore, there is private provision of services, right?
#
Tata is probably providing all of those services.
#
But imagine the same thing is happening in UP and Maharashtra, et cetera, without the
#
backup being provided by a private provider.
#
I think that's when you begin to run into serious problems.
#
So I think this policy is really messing with people who are actually both moving to and
#
living in urban-like areas, but the governance mechanisms refuse to acknowledge them as such.
#
And so part of this, I mean, I think there's another sort of thing to ask here, which is
#
a lot of these definitions, this is globally, right?
#
I mean, they're political for sure, but a lot of these things were put into place at
#
a very different time, right?
#
When the country was a lot more rural, et cetera, et cetera, and things have moved on.
#
And why are we still caught with definitions that were put into place in the 1950s and
#
By the way, this is equally true in the United States, right?
#
I mean, where rural areas actually have inordinate power over places where people actually live.
#
So it's this inability to actually adapt, which again is creating this problem.
#
And would it be the case as this also reflects a deeper design flaw?
#
Because it feels to me that what services you get as citizens, it's a question of demand
#
and supply, that there's a political marketplace, a marketplace for governance.
#
You have certain demands.
#
It doesn't matter whether you're categorized as urban or rural.
#
If there's enough demand, you get those services.
#
But what seems to be happening here is that that link is broken between power and accountability.
#
And what instead happens is that the services that citizens get has to be mandated from
#
above, which is why these definitions start to matter.
#
So part of that is also because the governance unit is messed up, right?
#
Because there's no real power at the level of the municipality, right?
#
The municipality, the most powerful person in the system, isn't a bureaucrat, is the
#
The politician, the mayor actually has no real power.
#
So it's like in Mumbai, if you ask the question of who's the mayor of Mumbai, I mean, most
#
of us would struggle to answer that question.
#
Who's the mayor of Mumbai?
#
Does anyone know the...
#
I don't know the name of the...
#
But it's actually, and behind it is the political reality, which is that if you actually had
#
an empowered elected mayor of Mumbai, that person would almost overnight become the most
#
important person in the state of Maharashtra, right?
#
So therefore, the existing power structure, which has the chief minister at the helm of
#
affairs, why would they actually give up any power to this particular person, right?
#
So now the problem is, if you don't solve for this problem, I don't see how you can
#
So you technically have, and so part of this is the reason why the 74th amendment of the
#
constitution, it's not actually working, which actually explicitly asked for devolution of
#
power to urban local bodies.
#
So that's one part of it.
#
The other part of it is, after this government, the current government took over, there was
#
this, so what Pritika defined as a census definition, also you created this entity called,
#
known as census towns, there's over 3000 of them.
#
And the whole idea was that census towns should now have statutory urban administrations,
#
I mean, that was actually mandated in, when was it, 2015 or something like that.
#
Nothing's happened, right?
#
Not a single one of them has actually changed.
#
So what does an urban administration do differently?
#
Like it'll provide sewage, it'll provide infrastructure, which a city needs.
#
So I'd done an episode on urban governance with our French Ruthi Rajgopalan, and she'd
#
kind of spoken in great detail about the mismatch between power and accountability, which basically
#
means is that the people that you vote for at the local level, like the mayor and your
#
cooperator, don't have any power, and the people who have power are your state government,
#
because that is where devolution of power ends.
#
State government and the bureaucrats appointed by the state government.
#
Appointed by, and their incentives are very different because they want the rural votes.
#
They don't want the urban votes.
#
And this mismatch is a problem.
#
And according to you, just getting the definitions right to begin with would solve part of the
#
At least it starts a conversation, right?
#
I mean, so again, and I'm not sure we'll ever get a definition right, because it's a political
#
I mean, anything that I say, you want to tell me, but what about X?
#
Who are the interest groups against, for example, classifying what is now classified as a village
#
I mean, just think of the way, so if you just look at the money flows, which is always a
#
useful place to look, I mean, most of it goes to rural areas.
#
80% of the budget, I think.
#
Something along those lines does.
#
Now, on top of that, they also don't have to provide urban services.
#
It's actually a fantastic win if you're a rent seeker in those areas.
#
You have literally zero incentive to change the way things are.
#
In fact, we've recorded, and not just us, many people have recorded several instances
#
of urban areas reclassifying as rural areas.
#
So you get the money, but you don't have to provide the services.
#
How can you reclassify?
#
Do they claim that people have moved out of those areas?
#
So they were asked to, I think the census identified them as urban.
#
And so they, I think a number of them changed over to Nagar Panchayats, which is sort of
#
the base level urban municipal administration, and then decided to switch back.
#
So I don't know exactly what the mechanism is, but I think that that trade-off became
#
So how is this like, right at the start of the episode, you said IDFC also works within
#
You don't just want to propose good policies, you also want to see them through.
#
How do you push through reform in an area like this where the incentives of the politicians
#
in charge is clearly to maintain their own power and not devour power further?
#
So first of all, as I said, I mean, I think just starting up a conversation of how important
#
cities are is a very useful starting point, right?
#
I mean, so let's look at it this way.
#
So if I'm a politician, it doesn't matter.
#
So maybe these IDFC guys have got it all wrong, right?
#
And maybe 5,000 is the right unit to use.
#
But the fact of the matter is that people are moving from point A to point B. Yes.
#
Now if you've moved from point A to point B, chances are you're driven by the politics
#
You're trying to better your life.
#
More than likely, that's what's going on.
#
Now as a political response, I can either respond to it through the politics of aspiration
#
or through the politics of status quo, which is the politics of point A, which is where
#
you have left in the first place.
#
So I think that itself opens up a political opportunity, which I think Prime Minister
#
Modi very seriously understood the politics of aspiration, right?
#
Which is why the 2014 campaign was entirely about vikas and jobs and all of those things.
#
In a rhetorical sense, you understood it.
#
So, but that's the starting point.
#
The rhetoric is the starting point.
#
And I think in general, this aspirational urban voter who really has urban concerns
#
at the heart of her mind is actually a voter that no one actually claims.
#
I mean, look across the political firmament, is there anyone who speaks for this voter?
#
Now, the reason you don't speak for them is because you don't think it's a significant
#
But what if it is a significant number, right?
#
I think that's the political opportunity.
#
At the rate India is urbanizing, it is already or is going to be very soon a significant
#
But do they feel the same way about it?
#
You mean the politicians?
#
I mean, the people who are moving to the cities, are they a constituency, are they going to
#
demand the sort of change that we'd like to see happen?
#
More local government, more whatever, or are they just-
#
So again, I'm not sure that their first demand will be more local government, right?
#
But it may be more urban services.
#
It'll start with urban services.
#
I mean, and then you quickly do the calculus on that.
#
That sort of pushes eventually towards local governments.
#
So at some point it will get demand-led if there's enough.
#
And I suspect that's going to happen very, very soon.
#
It's already happening, right?
#
I mean, when you have Akhilesh Yadav and Narendra Modi both talking about Shari Bharat, which
#
is, and that's, by the way, the other thing that we need to clear up on this podcast,
#
which is the idea that urbanization equals Mumbai, or urbanization equals Delhi-
#
I mean, most of this is actually happening into towns and cities that you and I have
#
And here's another thing I'm kind of ignorant about, that when Mr. Modi spoke about a hundred
#
smart cities and blah, blah, blah, it sounded like a very top-down thing to me, that we
#
What was the vision there?
#
Did you see any merit in it?
#
Where have things gone?
#
So I think it was an opportunity to do things very differently.
#
I think it was squandered not necessarily because the opportunity was the wrong one,
#
but I think there's two problems.
#
One is this notion that smart is tied to technology, right?
#
I mean, that's just a terrible mistake.
#
So the question that I often ask is, how did Singapore get to be a great place to do business
#
before the internet, right?
#
The internet is just a sideshow.
#
I mean, it's something that sort of, it's a force multiplier, but you've got to have
#
your systems up and running and like, you know, in good shape before any of that.
#
If you live in an environment where all the systems are broken, right, and the plumbing
#
is entirely broken, going and saying, I'm going to put sensors here is not going to
#
And by the way, some of this is also tech companies and the like who have actually promoted
#
this notion that, you know, just set up a whole bunch of sensors and broadband and all
#
your problems will go away.
#
And the basic technology at the heart of it, just thinking aloud, would really be markets,
#
would really be prices because that's how society interacts with itself.
#
So the basic technology has always been broken in India.
#
And it's not just market, it's the markets, the regulatory structures around it, the governance
#
that is required, the state capability that is required, all of that is broken.
#
So you can't proxy for all of that using sensors, right?
#
So that's sort of, I think fundamentally the problem.
#
And then on top of that is this marriage and it has consistently been the problem in India
#
is this sort of imperial overreach when it comes to ambition and no sort of thinking
#
about the capability that is required at the level of the state to execute on the ambition
#
that you've just described so grandly, right?
#
And this is not a Modi government phenomenon.
#
It's been a problem across the board for 71 years.
#
Yes, it's been a problem.
#
So look at the comparison with China.
#
When China set up special zones, they set up four.
#
Why do we think we can go to 100 and 500 and so on?
#
I mean, just get too up and running, you know, because these things are really about demonstration.
#
And because it's about demonstrating that a certain set of interventions reforms work.
#
And then if it works and actually gives you real results, then there'll be demand from
#
elsewhere to actually have exactly the same set of reforms.
#
And one of the things that you guys were telling me now that you brought, you know, China into
#
the conversation is that what China did right was a thought at the level of cities as a
#
unit of reform, you know, starting with Shenzhen.
#
How did that come about and what difference did that make?
#
I mean, at the risk of being a little bit long winded about it.
#
But look, so post Mao, there's a power struggle, right?
#
I mean, Deng Xiaoping emerges as the leader.
#
But he has a set of conservative rivals in the party, led most prominently by Chen Yun.
#
Now, the problem is that you want to try a set of reforms because whatever has happened
#
in the past has destroyed China, right?
#
Completely destroyed China.
#
Now, you also sort of think of this as an operating system problem, right?
#
I mean, it's and so Deng Xiaoping was also very familiar with both Hong Kong and Singapore
#
specifically had these conversations with Li Kuan Yu.
#
So the way to use that analogy is the operating system that China was running on is DOS.
#
And the operating system that Hong Kong and Singapore are running on is Linux, right?
#
Now the easy glib answer here is I need to basically change from DOS to Unix, Solaris,
#
Linux, whatever the best in class is.
#
Now ask yourself the question, if you just ran a department in an office and you told
#
them to move from one operating system to another, how hard would it be, right?
#
Now imagine that at nation scale and you realize just what the political economy of this process
#
actually looks like and Deng Xiaoping fully understood that.
#
And so one of the things that was brought to his attention was that the out migration
#
into Hong Kong, basically illegal migration out of China into Hong Kong was all concentrated
#
in this particular area.
#
And Deng Xiaoping had a sort of very non-conventional response to it, which is, you know, rather
#
than say, let's stop it, his response was A, why are they going, right?
#
And can we create those same conditions on this side of the border?
#
Was really the question he was asking.
#
And then when you try these reforms, I do not want to go try it in a Beijing or a Shanghai
#
where there's a vast number of installed DOS machines, right, or end seekers.
#
I'm going to try it in a place where basically there's nothing, right?
#
Or people are using typewriters.
#
And what's the difference between DOS and Linux in this context to take this forward?
#
So to take it forward, it's basically think of it as Linux is best in class in terms of
#
like, you know, it's a market economy.
#
Prices are the controlling mechanism, coordinating mechanism, rather.
#
You have foreign investment, a whole bunch of things like that, which just doesn't exist
#
So what he really does is he then realizes that Shenzhen, which at that point of time
#
is just a fishing town, and no one's ever heard of Shenzhen, but it was a jumping off
#
And he realizes that this is a place where I'm going to run a controlled experiment.
#
And it's a special zone is what he calls it.
#
He runs this controlled experiment in Shenzhen where they start putting in reforms, market
#
reforms, really start in Shenzhen.
#
Now there's one other thing to clarify here, which is that they were not special economic
#
There were special zones.
#
And this is actually the intra-party conflict between Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping that played
#
out here, where the conservative opposition, their point was if you let them tinker with
#
the market and economics, it will soon lead to experimentation in the political side and
#
the party will lose its dominance.
#
So Deng Xiaoping, to sort of accede to that particular criticism, inserted the word economic
#
to indicate to the powers that be at the local area that you can experiment, but do not let
#
it come into the political system because the communist party wants to retain control.
#
And then Shenzhen happens, we know the story of Shenzhen.
#
In 1981, the place has a per capita GDP of $700, today the per capita GDP is $27,000.
#
I mean, it's probably the greatest increase in human development, if you will, in recorded
#
I think it's just astounding what happened in Shenzhen.
#
But more importantly, the reforms begin to spread out from Shenzhen, right?
#
I mean, more zones are opened up, et cetera, et cetera.
#
Then Deng Xiaoping does that famous southern tour, where the Shanghai area and a bunch
#
of other existing cities complain about the fact that Shenzhen has actually been allowed
#
to power ahead of Shanghai, so they want the same set of reforms.
#
And that's how Pudong is set up as a sort of special zone, right?
#
And then Pudong drives a very large part of what happens in the Shanghai area and so on
#
So what I'm trying to say here is, these are just reform experiments, right?
#
And you want to really try these experiments in ways that don't upset the political equilibrium
#
elsewhere, but allows you to tinker.
#
And if these are successful, they will drive reform, because there will be demand for it
#
And having empowered local city governments, which are then competing with each other and
#
you have different cities competing, you know, enables that process, that's all of that.
#
The other thing that I think people generally do not understand is that China is way more
#
decentralized than India is.
#
And it's a, you know, when you hear the popular narrative of the Chinese Communist Party being
#
this very centralized, it's just not true.
#
I mean, China is very, very decentralized compared to India is way more centralized
#
And that allowed for a lot of these local experiments to happen.
#
And governors, mayors, all of these people are just allowed to tinker.
#
But given that a lot of Indian politicians, perhaps Modi himself, look at China in this
#
aspirational kind of way as in, you know, we want Bombay to be the next Shanghai and
#
blah, blah, what are the lessons they took from that?
#
See, part of the problem is that don't look at just the end state, right?
#
I mean, you're looking at Shanghai as it is now, you're not looking at the process by
#
which Shanghai got from X to Y.
#
The process is what matters.
#
And so the question we should be really asking ourselves is, what in the process can we replicate?
#
So I'll give you an example.
#
A couple of years ago, there was a thing about making Kala Ghor at Times Square, right?
#
So again, we conflate the optics of two things, right?
#
And so you ask yourself the question of why is Times Square what it is?
#
And so the solution was put up big billboards, but you ask yourself the question, why do
#
people pay so much for advertising in Times Square?
#
It's because there's people there and there's economic activity there.
#
So I think we get it backwards.
#
We conflate optics and we don't, like Ruben said, we don't look at the process of how
#
those optics came to be.
#
And also somehow we demonize densification.
#
Like I did an episode with Steven Pinker where he spoke of the whole movement of eco-modernism
#
and he made the point that densification is actually a fantastic thing and it's good for
#
Because if you have denser concentrations of people living and working together, that
#
means you have more of the countryside, so to say, the idyllic, beautiful countryside
#
everyone wants to escape.
#
So even in environmental terms, cities growing upwards and becoming denser is good for the
#
So I think the, and this goes back in some sense to Tharo and Gandhi, the preoccupation
#
with green space, it's really a question of the scale at which you're looking at the question.
#
So saying every neighborhood needs a park is fine, but every house needs a certain amount
#
So maybe not in a city like Bombay, but a tier two city.
#
City then means that instead of going up, you spread further and further out.
#
So A, not only are you consuming more land, but to then traverse that piece of land in
#
an efficient manner, you need more kilometers of roads, you know, metros at some point,
#
And so essentially by spreading out, you're much less green.
#
So Ed Glaser and Matthew Kahn have done fantastic work looking at American cities and suburbs.
#
It's called green cities, brown suburbs is a great piece.
#
Seeing the dense urban areas actually much more green than sprawling suburbs.
#
And I think that's the other narrative that we need to change.
#
I mean, the reason why New York has Central Park is because every building around Central
#
Which is a great way to look at it.
#
And you know, another line that struck me as something that I'd like all my left liberal
#
friends to consider is again, quoting from you, more fundamentally cities, especially
#
large global cities have always been the vanguard of openness, pushing for open borders, markets,
#
Most modern progressive social movements originated in cities precisely because they instinctively
#
accommodate difference, disagreement and diversity.
#
They reshape democratic governance from below.
#
And it is a fact that, you know, cities are simply more liberal than everything around
#
You're likely to find more Trump waters or more Brexit waters in the more rural areas.
#
I mean, again, it's one of those, I mean, it's exactly what is mentioned in that piece,
#
which is like, you know, I mean, in a city, you have to deal with diversity.
#
I mean, you don't have the choice.
#
I mean, when you're on the public trains of Mumbai, you don't really have a choice in
#
terms of who's sitting next to you, who's not sitting.
#
You can't do caste discrimination in the Virar past.
#
You can't do all of that stuff in a city.
#
So have you ever been on a Virar first?
#
So, so, you know, I mean, again, I've made this point in the past, which is whether
#
you care about sort of gender issues, caste issues, all of these.
#
I mean, one of the places which digests and destroys a lot of those things is actually
#
Because out of your pure self-interest, you have to learn to get along with everyone.
#
It's kind of a no-brainer.
#
But recently we find sort of, we live in times where there is a pushback against the cosmopolitan
#
of cities, where once you thought that the world is opening up and now it seems that
#
the world is closing down again, does that worry you as a trend?
#
So I think, okay, this is now a digression, but I think part of the problem is because
#
elites, yes, mostly living in cities, have failed to account for one phenomenon, which
#
is that economic globalization, which all of us are great fans of, causes social dislocation.
#
And what I mean by social dislocation is its ways and means of living and so on and so
#
forth that have been just basically uprooted from the ground up.
#
And it's happening in much shorter timeframes because of the advent of technology and so
#
So where earlier societies had a hundred years to deal with a certain kind of change, it's
#
being compressed into 10, 15 year timeframes.
#
So what is going on in my opinion is just basically the lack of coping mechanisms in
#
So rather than denigrate them as racists and whatever else, and I don't know, maybe they're
#
racist, but to assume that they're racist because they lack the coping skills is actually,
#
It's a fatal conceit even of the elites to basically just assume that lack of coping
#
mechanisms equals something really bad.
#
I guarantee you, if the same elites are put into the same pressure cooker, they would
#
not have the coping skills either, right?
#
I mean, it's just that they don't subject themselves to that.
#
The same elites are probably playing the same kind of identity politics with different groups.
#
With different groups, exactly.
#
So this is a point that I've made to, for instance, journalists from, say, the Financial
#
I've always told them, when was the last time you did a story of social change in India,
#
which is a consequence of the economic change?
#
When was the last time you saw a piece like that in the FT?
#
Everybody's so enamored with GDP numbers and so on and so forth, nobody's actually talking
#
One of the best stories about this was when Ellen Barry did this great feature story about
#
young women from Orissa migrating to Bangalore to work in the textile factories.
#
That's one of the few occasions on which you actually see these really, really good feature
#
stories because it's not easy, right?
#
I mean, it's not, there's nothing natural about it.
#
You know, you're being uprooted from everything that you know as comfort and home, everything
#
completely forced to adopt.
#
The norms have changed so dramatically.
#
These are not easy things to deal with.
#
And even there, I'm sure you'd find a lot of rhetoric in the sense that these ladies
#
who are leaving their homes and going to work in these factories are doing so because it's
#
such a big deal for them.
#
They're moving to a better life.
#
And yet it's so easy to paint it as, oh, they're going to be like sweatshop laborers or, oh,
#
look at their work conditions or, oh, look at their working hours.
#
And not realizing that they've chosen that because it is by far the best option open
#
We should celebrate that choice.
#
So we should celebrate the choice, but at the same time be aware of the fact that, yes,
#
they've made the choice, but that doesn't mean necessarily that life is easy for them.
#
It is not an easy life.
#
I mean, as the Ellen Barry story will actually point out, because the normative shifts that
#
are required and so on, I mean, you need to have serious coping skills to deal with this
#
So I think in general, what is happening around the world actually is this, is basically that
#
the social change brought about by economic change is beginning to speak up.
#
And now there are a whole bunch of politicians who are perfectly willing to take advantage
#
How do the people who are benefiting actually attribute how their lives have improved to
#
You know, because the people who, the left liberals who rail against liberalization the
#
most are the elites who actually benefited from it the most.
#
You will find the greatest defenders of Nehru are people who are among the elites, not the
#
people who were kept in poverty for decades.
#
So that connection is also even important for a policymaker like yourself to make, because
#
that kind of pressure from below is what actually drives a politician to make change.
#
But again, it needs to be well articulated.
#
I mean, it's not clear to me that so in, since you mentioned Steven Pinker, I mean, you know,
#
that's one of those arguments, right, which is the, the good stuff, if you will, is not
#
And it's sometimes counterintuitive.
#
And a lot of it is counterintuitive completely.
#
I mean, so, so the fact that things are getting better, et cetera, et cetera, is not a point
#
of view that you hear often enough.
#
I mean, and part of that is also because think about the average or the median story in a
#
So when you write a piece like the op-ed you just wrote for Bloomberg, outside your office
#
and outside your professional circles, how is it generally received by people?
#
Do people feel you're stating the obvious and it needs to be said?
#
Do people say, Oh, you know, what is this focus on cities?
#
How does part of your constituency politicians and bureaucrats, how do, how do they react
#
I mean, certainly it's not obvious.
#
I mean, so that's the one thing that has become, so the, obviously the response to the op-ed
#
has actually been quite phenomenal.
#
And a lot of the respondents have been just this, which is, Oh, wait a second.
#
And to me, I mean, and those of us who are sitting in the midst of it, all we are really
#
saying is how urban you are depends on how you define urban, right?
#
It's as simple as that.
#
That's all we are saying.
#
Now this goes back to the old, you know, point about common sense is not so common, but as
#
far as I'm concerned, it's a commonsensical statement to make.
#
So it is counterintuitive for sure.
#
And I think the response broadly speaking has been extremely positive.
#
Also I think it's helped.
#
And I think Prithika is really responsible for this is to, we are not therefore suggesting
#
We are suggesting that here's the reality of what's going on.
#
Let's now figure out how to deal with this, right?
#
Instead of basically laying a stake in the ground and saying, no, India is X.
#
All we are saying is if you use this metric, here's what we end up at.
#
So I think the sensible thing to do is to actually go back to, and this is a point Prithika
#
makes repeatedly is this, let's plan for densities, right?
#
So this to me is really a, in some ways it's an administrative question for a given population
#
and a given density, what are the services you need to require, you're required to provide.
#
So I think this whole rural urban divide is completely counterproductive and useless because
#
you see it in the satellite data, for instance, it's all continuums.
#
And it's not just an administrative question is also a political question because the density
#
of people is a density of votes, right?
#
So I think from the perspective of the person, it is for a given density, what services do
#
I need is really the question you're trying to answer.
#
So I think, so, you know, I mean, I have said fairly controversially and obviously it will
#
never happen for the obvious reasons.
#
Let's take a simple example of this, which is why do you need a ministry for rural development
#
and a ministry for urban development?
#
I would say bring those two ministries together and have a ministry for economic development.
#
If it happens in areas that do not meet the urban threshold, you use different strategies.
#
If it happens in Mumbai, you use a different strategy.
#
So what really needs to shift is your urban, I mean, your development strategy, not your,
#
if you define yourself as X, then you will get manna from heaven.
#
And if you define yourself as Y, you get nothing.
#
See, this is a problem Ruben that we already have a jobs problem in India and you're trying
#
to cut down on ministries and put one minister out of a job.
#
You know, this, you policy people, you don't understand these basic things.
#
I'm going to sort of end with two questions and I'll ask both of you to answer those.
#
And the question being that, supposing in a thought experiment, you're suddenly dictator
#
of India, you can do whatever the hell you want, or let's say you can be a worm in Mr.
#
Modi's brain and you can make him pass whatever dictate he wants.
#
What are, I won't, I won't say three things or five things or whatever.
#
I won't put a number to it, but what would strike you as in the context of cities and
#
urban development, the most important things that you would do?
#
To start up the conversation about why urban is important.
#
And look, the fact is, we're not going back.
#
And I think this is actually, maybe I should have said this earlier.
#
Even if we dislike cities, you're not going to stop people from coming into cities.
#
There are any number of governments anywhere in the world, the Chinese government tried
#
the hookah system, we tried FSI limitations, we tried all.
#
Everything stops people from coming, right?
#
So you're literally King Canute telling the waves to go back.
#
It's not going to work.
#
So one way of approaching it is it doesn't really matter because people will move into
#
cities anyways and it'll create its own demand eventually, blah, blah, blah.
#
The other way to say it is basically say, look, this is inevitable.
#
It's happened everywhere in the world.
#
The stopping of this tough business will only lead to bad outcomes.
#
So for instance, take FSI, right?
#
I mean, if you restrict the floor space, you'll get slums.
#
You'll just get very bad outcomes if you do things like that.
#
So being able to, as I said, aware of it, celebrate it, prepare for it, right?
#
And the preparation also has to include building the capacities that are required to prepare
#
I mean, to deal with it.
#
So what you really need is you need urban management, you need a cadre of urban managers
#
to now start emerging who know how to run a city, right?
#
We don't have any of that stuff, right?
#
There's no urban management schools anywhere.
#
So that cadre needs to evolve for sure.
#
Yeah, I think between the three things that are outlined and creating the capacities that
#
are required to manage the process is probably what I would absolutely concentrate resources
#
So I'd say something similar, I'd say building on what he started doing, which is speaking
#
to the politics of aspirations, right?
#
So people are trying to improve their lives.
#
A job is usually the mechanism to do that, recognizing that cities are where most of
#
our jobs are going to be created if we aspire to move up the value chain and create a certain
#
And then I think the thing that we forget, we were talking about social dislocation earlier.
#
Why do so many people want to stay on the land in some sense?
#
Now this is purely intuition.
#
Do they have the capabilities to move off the land, right?
#
So in some sense, this resistance to move is also a fear of, do I have what it takes
#
to make it in a city beyond my ability to participate as low skilled labor?
#
And so if we're not equipping people to leave the land, even if we were to create jobs in
#
cities, but I'm not sure that they could all make that transition.
#
That's a point that needs explanation because it's a little bit like, so land is more than
#
likely your most important asset, right?
#
And so your inability to collateralize it, if you leave the land and the fact that there's
#
not enough protection for your land in the first place is actually a huge disincentive.
#
I mean, I've had multiple episodes on agriculture and this is precisely the problem.
#
People are trapped in agriculture.
#
So even a lot of people who would otherwise come into cities cannot, they're trapped.
#
And again, the same logic applies, which is, you know, you're celebrating a sector that
#
is so low productivity, right?
#
And it's always celebrated by people who are not in agriculture, right?
#
I mean, there's no marginal farmer who's standing up and say, I want to remain in marginal farming,
#
And by the way, this is actually, it shows up in opinion polls.
#
It shows up in like, and the simple question to ask is, what would you like your child
#
That's a great question.
#
I mean, there's nobody who says, I want my child to be a marginal farmer.
#
So why do we celebrate marginal farming?
#
Why do we celebrate poverty?
#
It's because mostly because none of us have to deal with it.
#
It's an abstract concept.
#
It strikes me as very sad that the term economic development has got such a bad rap.
#
I mean, economic development should be a moral imperative.
#
In fact, I spoke to Tyler Cowen recently as well about his book, Stubborn Attachments,
#
where he makes exactly that same point.
#
It's a book of moral philosophy.
#
And he says that as a species, we should aim towards economic development because that
#
is what makes people better off at an individual level.
#
And it's the development of people.
#
And the last question I'm going to ask both of you is for all of my listeners who have
#
heard this episode and who are saying, it's very interesting, but these guys just kind
#
of touch the surface and I want to know more and all that.
#
I mean, obviously, I'll have links to your pieces and stuff below this episode page.
#
But what sort of resources can you recommend?
#
What are the books which change the way you think about cities and economics and so on
#
I mean, so amongst the books that I've read recently, I mean, absolutely the best book
#
that I read last year was, funnily enough, Order Without Design by Alan Berstow.
#
So think about that for a second.
#
It's an urban planner using a line from Frederick Hayek.
#
So you have an urban planner and one of the greatest urban planners in the world who's
#
basically using Hayek as the title of his book.
#
That alone should be a recommendation for everybody to pick up that book.
#
I've just started reading it.
#
Shruti recommended it to me in my 100th episode last month.
#
So I actually have the book in my bag.
#
I was showing her the physical copy and Pritika is also halfway through it.
#
I think we've both been obsessing about it.
#
It's a summary of everything you need to know about urban planning and economics.
#
If people are interested in the practical application of this, because I completely
#
understand you said, what's the reaction to our piece?
#
The piece that I'm actually worried about is the piece that we're going to write on
#
FSI, where I fully anticipate people calling saying, what are you recommending?
#
So the practical application of this is if you look at what Bimal Patel has done in Ahmedabad
#
and he's worked with the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and the Urban Development Authority
#
to do the new development plan for Ahmedabad.
#
It perfectly marries a lot of the concepts we're talking about.
#
Leaving room for dynamism, reshaping both city peripheries and redeveloping incrementally
#
the inner core of cities.
#
I think the work that they've done there is fantastic.
#
If listeners want a more sort of general introduction to the ideas that were discussed, definitely
#
Triumph of the City at Glaser is an excellent place to start and it has enough references
#
that you can then follow and so on and so forth.
#
But yes, I mean, I just go back to Berthold's book.
#
I mean, remember this is a man who started his career with La Corbusier in Chandigarh.
#
My God, that's like a full circle.
#
Did you know Mino Masani started as a socialist?
#
The good news is that, you know, as Alon himself will say, he's a reform planner.
#
Thanks so much for coming on this episode.
#
Great fun talking to you.
#
I only wish it had been much longer and pleased to come back again sometime.
#
Pritika and Ruben, thanks.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow Ruben on Twitter at N-E-B-U-E-R-Forty-Two.
#
That's his first name backwards, Ruben backwards, N-E-B-U-E-R-Forty-Two.
#
And you can follow Pritika on Twitter at the much easier Pritika13.
#
That's at P-R-I-T-I-K-A-13.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
And you can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen on sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
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#
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You need to track down the most interesting minds, get them into their zone and settle
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It's all content and we're in the middle of this weirdly exciting phase where all the
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