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I love cities. Cities represent everything that is good about our species. Humans are
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social animals. We learn and grow and prosper by interacting with each other, by trading
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to mutual benefit. Cities are an engine of human prosperity. You know, people often invoke
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the joys of rural living, of village life. But the history of humanity is a history of
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migration out of rural areas into urban spaces. We want to be part of large economic networks
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which bring us opportunity. We want to be part of a bustling metropolis where there
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is a greater chance of our needs being fulfilled, where we can live the good life. And if you
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disagree with this, ask yourself where you're located right now. Chances are you've already
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voted with your feet. However, there is a big caveat to all of this. Cities are great
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most of the time, but not when there's a pandemic going on. It's our cities that are hardest
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hit by COVID-19 for obvious reasons. So many people, so close together. How much social
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distancing can we manage? And while I have no doubt that cities will continue to thrive
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after this pandemic is behind us, the question remains, how much will COVID-19 change our
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cities? How much will COVID-19 change us and the way we live our lives?
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is Vaidehi Tandel, a scholar who works
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at the IDFC Institute in Mumbai and has been studying cities and writing about urbanization
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for many years now. I've been thinking of inviting Vaidehi on the show for a long time
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and I finally got around to doing it now. The ostensible peg for our conversation was
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how COVID would change our cities and what our cities need to do to combat COVID-19.
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But we also took a step back and spoke about urbanization and the history of cities as
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also the field of economics itself. Before we get to our conversation though, let's take
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a quick commercial break. If you enjoy listening to The Scene and the
#
Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the show alive. The Scene and the Unseen has been
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a labor of love for me. I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding
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my brain and my universe, and hopefully yours as well. But while the work has been its own
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reward, I don't actually make much money off the show. Although The Scene and the Unseen
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has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken up to the insane engagement level of
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podcasts and I do many many hours of deep research for each episode besides all the
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logistics of producing the show myself. Scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians,
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the travel and so on. So well, I'm trying a new way of keeping this
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thing going and that involves you. My proposition for you is this. For every episode of The
#
Scene and the Unseen that you enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee or even a lavish lunch whatever
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you feel is worth. You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing
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an amount of your choice. This is not a subscription. The Scene and the Unseen will continue to
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be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in. This is just a gesture of appreciation. Help
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keep this thing going. sceneunseen.in slash support.
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Where are you? Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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Thank you so much for having me, Amit. Yeah, it's been a while coming because our mutual
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friend Shruti Rajgopalan keeps telling me that, you know, why don't you get weather
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here on your show? What is wrong with you? You are both in Mumbai, which is of course
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true though now both of us being in Mumbai is sort of a moot point in these days. So
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I'm now that you know, you're finally on the show and we've bumped into each other at events
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but never actually had a conversation. So I'm looking kind of looking forward to knowing
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more about where you come from and so on. So tell me a bit about, you know, your journey
#
so far, not just your journey in terms of academics and career and all of that, but
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also in terms of, you know, your intellectual journey, what are your influences? What are
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the things that have shaped you? Right. So I started off wanting to be a journalist
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actually in school. And so I always knew I wanted to get a BA. So I scored decent enough
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for me to get into Xavier. So that was like a big thing. And I wanted to major in literature
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back then, but you have to choose other subjects along with your, you know, main major. So
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I'd taken economics and we didn't have economics at school before that. It was only in the
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11th and 12th that was the first time I got exposed to economics, you know, as a discipline
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and it kind of blew my mind. And I sort of eventually veered away from literature and
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then ended up dumping it for economics and ended up majoring in economics. I went on
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to do my masters again. By then journalism was no longer a dream as such. I was thinking
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more about getting into academia and my masters really helped because I mean, it was at that
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time, you know, the department of economics, it started its first semester course and we
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were like the second batch went on this new course with a lot more rigor and, you know,
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a proper semester based system. And we had excellent professors. Many of them sadly have
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retired now. But at that time, you know, it was a great environment to study. You know,
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we really got down into the weeds and, you know, ports in mathematical, you know, formality
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of the treatment of the subject as well as going beyond neoclassical economics to discover
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other things like, you know, institutional economics, public choice theory, and the kind
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of electives I picked back then were extremely important and useful in how I've ended up
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looking at policies and looking and where my research has taken me. So that was sort
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of like a journey in terms of the academic journey. And I eventually ended up doing my
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PhD under one of my professors back then, Professor Bhai Pethi, who was at the department.
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And it ended up being in urban economics, but I approached it from a political economy
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lens looking at things like transactions, cost economics, and so on. And yeah, and
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then since then, I mean, I think I've been at IDFC Institute, which is the research policy
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think tank in Mumbai. And you've had guests on the show, you know, been my colleagues.
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So I've been here since 2014. I took one year off to get a postdoc at Columbia. But I've
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been here since and been basically working on public policy research and urban areas
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and also in business regulatory environment.
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I find a couple of strands intriguing here. One is that, you know, you said, you know,
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beginning to study economics blew your mind. And I was curious about why this is so because,
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you know, I remember, you know, back from my time, and I didn't study economics, actually
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studied literature. And but I remember from that time that the economics that was taught
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in Indian colleges was just boring and dull. And basically, it was meant to drive you away
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from the subject. And it wasn't interesting at all. So, you know, was this particular
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course different in that sense? And the other question regarding this I have is that one
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lemon that I have heard even from economists is that a lot of modern economics training
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is too focused on data and the math and the econometrics and all of that. And you are
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no longer sort of looking at broad concepts to make sense of the world. Like, you know,
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one of the ways in which I think literature and economics actually related is that they
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both give you insight into human behavior. And that's always why I've been like economics
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is, you know, at different times, I've never been formally trained, blown my mind as well.
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So I'd be interested in knowing, you know, what are the ways in which it blew your mind?
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Did you sort of contextualize learnings of economics to your through the life around
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you and realize that hey, these are not arcane things, these really matter?
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I very vividly remember my first class in economics, where they teach you the principle
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of diminishing marginal utility. And it's a very simple sort of class, very non technical.
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I mean, they'll draw a graph, which was a downward curve, and there'll be like, mangoes
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on the one side and like, your y axis will be a utility. And basically, the more mangoes
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you have, the additional one appears less and less to you. And I was just like, wait,
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there's a term for this, you know, and, and that was just like, what's going on. So I
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think from then on, it was, it's not like the course we had was very, you know, amazing
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or very up to date in terms of it's a Mumbai University undergraduate economics course.
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So very, very basic stuff catered to like a very, you know, non mathematical sort of
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batch of students. But still, it was things like this that I kept on discovering, which
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I was like, Oh, I mean, this sort of makes sense. It just ended up answering questions
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that I didn't know I had. And it allowed me to, to understand and name concepts like opportunity
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costs, for instance. That was another thing I was like, Oh, wait, yeah, this, this makes
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sense. And there's a word for it. So I can now actually use it and make sense of the
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more sense of the world around me. So these, these ideas were the ones that were what attracted
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me to it and what grow, I mean, it's so the love for literature continued. I dropped it
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only in my third year I was doing lit in, in first year and second year, but it allowed
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me structure, whereas literature was there for me to get into the motivations of people
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the inner motivations for people of people what economics was allowing me to do was looking
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at systems. And like, you know, looking from a systems approach, I could not find a better
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way of, of trying to explain the world around me. So yeah, so I think that's, that's how
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I feel the two sort of helped me look at the world in very different ways. But I mean,
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equally important ways about your question about, you know, the formal, the math obsession
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in economics, it exists. And it's been a product of a number of factors. So I mean, we don't,
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I don't want to get into that, because that's probably another episode. And I don't think
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I'm the best person to talk about it, because I only learned as much as was enough for me
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to, you know, get by. But I think there was a period of time where there was a lot of
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empiricism. So the econometrics and the empiricism and like the clever ways in which you define
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your identification strategies, which is basically the way in which you establish a causal relationship
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between x phenomenon and a y phenomenon, that led to a lot of emphasis on showing off these
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various types of identification strategies. So your whole, you know, emphasis was on looking
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for not the questions, but what is the interesting data that with which I can do some fancy stuff
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and have a nice relationship. But I think over time, there has been shift back to looking
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at some of the fundamental things. And I think we've gone to sort of balancing the two things.
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So I feel, for instance, I really like the work that so Karthik who was on your show,
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so his work, then the stuff that Raj Chetty do on social mobility. And these questions
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are extremely fundamental for us as a society. So they're not looking at trivial questions.
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And they're in it for like, they're really, really committed to this. It's not like they're
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moving from one interesting problem to the next, because, you know, they just want to
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show off their tricks. But it's a deep commitment. And, and they bring a lot of mathematical
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results to try and understand it. So I'm not complaining, to be honest, in terms of where
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it's moved now, perhaps 20 years, or even 10 years earlier, may have been the case that
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there was, or perhaps I'm just reading the ones, the people I like. So I think that this
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is how things have moved on, whereas the reality is completely different.
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And reading the ones you like also has a word for it, which is selection bias. A sort of
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a tangential question here, when you when you spoke about how, you know, Karthik and
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Raj Chetty are not sort of just showing off, you know, their tricks. And, you know, the
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thought that struck me earlier, when you were talking about how, you know, people would
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get carried away with their econometric models, and just try to show everything is, you know,
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I'm reminded, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm reminded of this essay that the philosopher
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Agnes Callard wrote recently, where, which I'll link from the show notes, of course,
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and where she sort of was speaking about why academic writing is so dense. And her point
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there was that once you get on a tenure track, you're expected to publish in certain journals
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and blah, blah, blah. And those journals have their own conventions and so on. And therefore,
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you have to follow those conventions. And what you are therefore writing for is to get
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accepted into those journals and not to really make your writing have an impact on the wider
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world at large. And would there be a similar thing with, you know, the use of math and
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economics, where at one point in time, you know, using complicated econometrics became
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almost a way of signaling to your peers, or the sort of people around you of how sophisticated
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your work is, and how rigorous you are, and blah, blah, blah, and not really having that
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sort of an impact on a wider readership. And also, you know, and you haven't really been
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an academic per se, thankfully, but is there therefore some kind of dichotomy within, you
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know, academics or within the field of economics, for example, where, you know, there is a trade
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off between how much you can change the world by actually having an impact on the real world
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and studying things that matter in the real world as, you know, Karthik and Raj do, and
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you do, in fact, or so is there a, you know, trade off between that and just doing impressive
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work which will sort of get you ahead or get you noticed?
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So I think that most of the people, again, I have, I've only looked at this tenure track
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system miles away sitting here in India. So I'm going to add that as a huge caveat in
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what I'm going to say. My sense is that in the field of economics, at least, the work
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that the established tenure professors do is very different from the ones who are just
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out of the job market. So for the ones who are just out of the job market, the incentives
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are very different, right? You need to produce in certain journals for about five years.
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But as I guess, if you study the kinds of papers that say an above average econ grad
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rights at the beginning of their career, and then how and as they sort of progress, you
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know, once they get tenure and the work that they do after, I think that it will change.
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My sense is that you will start off with, you know, just trying to get published and
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at least have those one, two papers, because it takes a long time, like a life cycle of
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papers, five years, you know, if you want to get into a top journal. So it takes a long
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time. So you will, you know, try and see what the work you're doing is sort of going to
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get you published. And so it's more geared towards that. Once those constraints are relaxed,
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that's when the sort of real, I guess, not real, I mean, I don't mean the effort, these
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are like very, very soul crushing, you know, type of work that people do and the kind of
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journeys that they undertake. But once you're established, I think that that's when you
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start doing the long term stuff, start looking at taking on larger projects, and sort of
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expanding and trying to impact policy. And so the, you know, the Catholics of the world,
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the Jonathan groupers of the world, they all sort of come into their own at the later part
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of their post tenure. So that's the, that's what my take is. So it's about like, just
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early stage career versus later stage careers, the incentives that exist there and that lead
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being to the kind of work that happens.
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I like the phrase the Karthik's of the world, I hope Karthik is listening and it becomes
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a popular phrase. And it also, you know, I was kind of struck by what you just said about
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the life cycle of a paper being five years, because that whole system of academic publishing,
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the long time lags, the whole peer review system seems so nonsensical and bizarre to
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me, I understand that there are trade offs involved. But, you know, just sitting on the
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outside, it seems like it's completely, you know, warped on one side and the kind of work
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you do, of course, is very different. I was struck by, you know, you were saying that,
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you know, when you did your masters and you studied further, your sort of specialization
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area was urbanism with a focus on the political economy, you know, both of these going together,
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which kind of made me sit up because I thought it's almost as if, you know, IDFC Institute
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went back in time and they gave the requirements to the university and then they produced you
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because that's sort of exactly both what you do now. And I think what in these times is
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necessary now. I mean, we need a scholarship and work in these areas. So tell me a bit
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about what drew you to that specific subject at that time.
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There was a bunch of things. So I've lived in a city all my life. And initially, as a
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kid, I remember like completely hating it because I used to long to, you know, get out
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of the city and go on trips with my parents and family holidays and things like that.
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I used to hate railway stations and all the crowds around. If you come to Mumbai, you
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know, there's enough reason for you to hate Mumbai. But as I think grew, I guess, I mean,
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in my college days, I was when I realized that, okay, there's some reason why people
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are coming here. And it does seem to be making, you know, life easier for people. And you
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could see this from, I mean, I could see this as I grew up, I realized my parents also had
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the same journey rather my grandfather did, he moved to a city. If he stayed back in the
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village, he would not have got the opportunity that he did when he moved here. Of course,
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it had that there was social networks in the city that allowed him to get a foothold and
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so on. And it has two generations on the line, you know, it's made a difference to how we
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live. So those kinds of things sort of struck me. And again, I think the art department
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was among the handful of departments in the country that offers a paper on urban economics.
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So I said, Okay, let's take it. And I along with this, so I took an elective on public
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choice theory, and I took another elective on just trade, basically, we had an international
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trade. And I feel like all of these sort of have, you know, they do combine. And so it's
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when I actually ended up sitting on for my first urban eco lecture, it was very similar
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to what happened when I sat in my first eco lecture, you know, when my professor who later
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went on to be my PhD supervisor was, was trying to explain to us what what's the secret sauce
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why why do cities prosper and what makes some cities grow and prosper and why do some cities
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fail and and so it just, again, it gave me a lot more insight and understanding. And,
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you know, after my master, I was trying with the I knew I would want to do a PhD anyway.
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So I was trying between like moving, you know, taking a gap year, getting some research work
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and then moving to the US or staying here. And I, I knew that I'd only stay if my then
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urban eco professor said he'd take me on as a student and he was happy to so I said, okay,
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I have no reason to go then. It's fine. I mean, life is nice. You know, you have you
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can be at home, you can do your thesis and and the university is lovely if you've visited
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it at any point in Kalina. It's a nice green place. You have nice chai. So I find this
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Yeah, no, it's very interesting. I used to pass the university almost every day because
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I used to be a professional poker player for five years. And one of the games I regularly
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played illegal underground games, of course, was in New Mumbai. So I would go there via
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the SCLR and therefore and I hated the thought of the university because that was the most
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crowded road that particular stretch but that's a bizarre and completely unrequired tangent
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in contrast with most of the tangents I take. So and also you mentioned sort of the political
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economy aspect of it and then you sort of joined IDFC Institute which calls itself a
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think and do tank. So where, you know, the whole idea is that we don't just think about
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things and diagnose that oh, this is a problem and this is what we should do but you actually
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try to work with the state and kind of getting things done. So tell me a little bit about
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that difference between a think tank and a think and do tank. And therefore, how does
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that affect the work that you do? Does all your work then have this extra layer of, you
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know, how practical is it to make things happen in this area? So are you not just whenever
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you're studying X, are you not just studying X but also X plus the government's role in
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That's an interesting question because I have not looked at the work that I do from, you
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know, how feasible it will be to get it implemented. It's always been about, we've been lucky
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that as you mentioned, right, it's a nice match where the questions that excited me
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were the questions that the Institute was waiting to and wanting to investigate. So
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the way we started out doing work was if we were a very small organization and Ruben,
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my boss, he sort of let us, gave us a free run. He said, you know, what interests you,
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what excites you? Why don't you take up a research idea that you think, you know, you
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will be able to deliver on? So first work that I did along with my colleague Komal Hiranandani
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and Mudit Kapoor who was then a visiting fellow. He's an associate professor at ISI Delhi.
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So three of us were working, we started working on this idea of trying to measure urbanization
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in the country using a different metric than what the government uses to try and see whether
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India is different. I mean, whether India looks different, whether it's more urban than
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the official definition seem to suggest. And official definitions, I mean, suggest that
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we are 31% urban. And that's the census definition. If you, if you look at the just, if you just
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count the number of municipal areas in the country, then that would account for 26% of
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the country's population. So it's even lower. And it's surprising given India's per capita
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income, you know, about, we're fairly rich, but our urbanization rates are not reflecting
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that. So is that a quirk of the definition that we're using? That's the path we took.
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It led to some interesting insights, some interesting results, we can discuss that later
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at a later stage. But what we realized is, is where sort of the do piece comes is the
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fact that we tend to speak, we don't just keep think about research as a product that
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will be printed in our journal or as a report and be kept on the shelves. But actively speaking
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to government policy experts about it. And of course, sort of, it helps to have built
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so in this, this is the strength that say Ruben brought where he is, you know, well
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network and he knows that, you know, he'd be able to interest not just Indian experts,
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but even international experts in the kind of research findings that that we were producing.
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So we could do a lot of presentations, we've presented at various forums, you know, to
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the government to other urban experts, to even bureaucrats in various so it's a lot
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about actually going and talking about it and trying to sort of, it's the marketing
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piece. And it's equally important because we believed in the rigor of our research and
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we believed in the findings. And we knew we had enough analytical rigor to stand on to
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be able to go and present. So that's the sort of approach that the Institute takes. It's
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about a like creating the research and using enough rigor. I mean, we don't want to necessarily
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publish you know, in the top five journals. So it's certainly not going to be that level
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of rigor where you're looking at the number of asterisks on your coefficient and so on.
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But it's enough that it will pass like, you know, any scrutiny, any sensible sort of person
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can see the logic. And, you know, that was the way in which we thought about the research
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that we do. And of course, like, ensuring that you write op-eds, ensuring that you speak
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to people ends up sort of, you know, having some impact, I will again not say in a policy
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space, again, this is stuff that some of that Ruben and others also say that in the policy
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space, you can really make no causal claims in the work that you do in the and the policies
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that get framed. In fact, you know, you should one time make any any causal claims because
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that's disingenuous in a certain sense. But, but talking to people is something that is
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what every sort of serious research slash policy expert has to do. You have to keep
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talking, you have to keep writing for the lay public.
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Ruben's been a good friend for like almost 15 years. And the way I have often described
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him is a way that you just described him that one, of course, he's one of the most brilliant
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people I know, but also he is by far the best networker I know, and not networker in a sense
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of for the schmoozy kind of networker. But the networker in terms of actually getting
#
things done, I mean, to use Gladwell's terms, he's not just a connector, but also a maven,
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which is a sort of a unique combination. I had Ruben and Pritika on the show last year
#
and in an episode, a link from the show notes where we spoke about precisely that study
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how India is more urban than most people think up to 45% urban. And you know, as you pointed
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out in a piece you wrote this January with two co-authors, where, you know, you pointed
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out that if you take the metric of 5000 people as an urban area, Kerala is actually 100%
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urban, you know, so that whole statistic that came earlier in the year that three of the
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10 fastest growing cities in the world are in Kerala, and that makes sense. And although
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I covered this area with Ruben and Pritika, but nevertheless, give me a sense of why this
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matters. Is this this whole sense of what is defined as an urban area and what is not?
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I mean, obviously, definitions matter, because whatever is defined as an urban area is ruled
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by an urban body with its own rules. So your roads have to be this wide, and these are
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the services that have to be provided. And a rural governing body doesn't have those
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same restrictions, so you get a different quality of service. So tell me briefly, you
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know, why it matters, and what is sort of holding us back from recognizing that, you
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know, we are as urban as we actually are. So why it matters is something that, as you
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mentioned, every place, if you go to the fundamentals of it, what distinguishes a rural area from
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an urban area is that the urban urban areas tend to be denser, they tend to be larger
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in size, and their base of economic activity is not agriculture. Right. And so they're
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fundamentally different from a rural place. So they don't require irrigation facilities,
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they require, say, building bylaws, right, where, which allow you to have some mixed
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use zoning and so on and allow you to build a non agricultural sort of construction and
#
so on. So their needs are different there. And it's again, it's coming from the fact
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that urban areas have something that that rural areas don't, which is economies of scale
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and agglomeration economies, right. So what the large populations, what the densities
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allow you to do is a bunch of things, they allow you to share ideas faster, because you
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tend to meet a lot more people, innovators, famously, you know, a lot of the innovations
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come from the from the most urban parts of the world, and people will pay a premium to
#
locate that you have, you know, very high talent, you will want to locate in a place
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where there are other talented people and smart people like you. So that's, that's one
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of the reasons why the urban sort of the densities and the sizes of the city is sort of self
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reinforcing. So once you have higher productivity advantages from being in the city, it will
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attract more people, which will again lead to higher productivity. But there's a downside
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to this, which is, you know, I think, I forget who it was, but there's that three famous
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dis agglomeration effects. One is congestion, one is crime, and contagion, the three C's.
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And that's why you need a different type of because these externalities exist, you need
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different types of governance mechanisms for cities as compared to villages and rural areas.
#
Now what happens is when you apply a definition for urban versus rural area, the underlying
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assumption is that your definition is accurately identifying the settlement as urban. When
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you apply a definition that does not do that. So suppose you apply a definition that is
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extremely strict, like India's definition is, you may end up, you know, misclassifying
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urban areas of village. And then that means that even though there are these potential
#
agglomeration effects that there are no governance systems that can mitigate the dis agglomeration
#
party. Right. So that's the issue. If you misclassify, and that's why it's important
#
to correctly classify. The other reason it's important to correctly classify is because
#
at least in India, you have several schemes that are targeted only to rural areas. And
#
this has come out again in the current debate where now there's some debate on having an
#
urban employment guarantee scheme, because what you think is traditionally because rural
#
areas have worse off in terms of socioeconomic characteristics, you need to give them special
#
benefits, you need to have special schemes, special programs to rural areas. But if you
#
are misidentifying the rural areas, that means that some of the money is going to urban like
#
rural areas, right. And that's a misclassification of resources. You can obviously debate the
#
need for this rural urban classification based on current definitions, because to me, if
#
you are going to implement a scheme that will help the vulnerable people, it should be targeted
#
to the people irrespective of where they live. I mean, this one first filter of where they
#
live and then identifying the households within those areas is to me, you know, a very inefficient
#
way of going about doing things. But it's convenient, it's easier, I guess it's easy
#
to implement because we have traditional rural departments and urban departments looking
#
at rural development and urban development separately. I guess that's the reason why
#
this happens. So that's, that's the second reason why you need to get definitions right.
#
Because you need to be able to if you if your targeting is based on where a person lives,
#
then you need to identify that place correctly. Now, why is the government not proactive in
#
correcting the definitions? You know, if it is aware that there's a problem, then why
#
is nothing being done about it? To that the answer sort of depends, it depends on the
#
state governments. So in our constitution, local governments are under the state list.
#
So the state that has to set out the rules to identify urban local bodies, the center
#
can give broad guidelines, but the states have their own municipal acts for identifying
#
urban local bodies. And there's political reasons sometimes for the states not to notify
#
a town even if it is, you know, has all open like features. There's also pressure from
#
the ground up at times, it's not just that the state is at fault, there are at times
#
demands from the citizens to not be classified from a rural to urban area, just as there
#
are demands from the citizens, there have been historic demands from the citizens to
#
actually be called a city, you know, because they think that they have the necessary numbers
#
and the economic base to be done. So there's again, there's three reasons why. So the citizens
#
will resist any conversion if it means that they will lose out on the rural schemes, right?
#
If you become urban, and if you no longer get NREGA or PMGSY, these other things, then
#
your incentives are not to become urban. Businesses sometimes also resist, so local businesses,
#
because if they switch, then they may be subjected to higher taxation, they may be subjected
#
to higher rents, you know, just the cost of doing business may go up, as opposed to being
#
in a village where the regulations are a bit lax. The tax thing also applies to villages
#
because cities are typically levy property taxes. So if you're a village, then the households
#
from need to pay a property tax. So these are the factors that can cause some resistance.
#
And there's one more factor, which is the panchayat leaders themselves. So historically,
#
some states have done very well in terms of the democratic decentralization of within
#
the panchayat iraj system, right? You have very strong elections and you know, very well
#
entrenched political parties and so on, and leaders within the village. If there's a fear
#
that the village gets either amalgamated into a larger town nearby, or if it gets converted
#
into an urban area, it's a very different electoral system. So in cities, you have mayors.
#
Mayors have no real powers as compared to a sarpanch, right? A mayor is typically indirectly
#
elected, typically not even for the same duration as his or her government would be. So that's
#
the reason why say political leaders would resist. But at the same time, there are countervailing
#
factors. Also, as I mentioned, there have been people who fought to be within the city
#
because they've realized that there are costs to having haphazard construction in their
#
villages, which lead to building collapse and so on. And, and, you know, they would
#
like to get certain facilities, like, say, a big municipal hospital or some, some other
#
amenities that say a municipal body will be able to provide them. So it's not that it
#
just goes one way. And you don't know ultimately, like, which force ends up winning. But these
#
are the different contestations that take place in in sort of determining an urban or
#
a rural status. Yeah, and it differs, I mean, greatly from states. So we've seen that, for
#
instance, West Bengal and Kerala tend to have very few urban local bodies. And, I mean,
#
this is just a hypothesis. I was just thinking about it, it could be because they have a
#
very, very strong tradition of decentralization and decentralized government. And so the so
#
I guess there's a lot of power at the local levels to sort of resist conversion or sort
#
of get the states to agree to not convert them. So these are also areas where a lot
#
of the new urbanization that's coming up does not come under an urban local body. It's
#
either classified as urban by the census, but or it is sort of they're just large settlements
#
that continue to be called villages.
#
It's so fascinating and almost surreal that, you know, little things like definitions can
#
make such a huge difference in outcomes and in the lives of actual people, you know, before
#
I kind of proceed, I think, you know, just for our listeners, I should, you know, quickly
#
explain what I think is a common premise to both of us, which is that cities are a damn
#
good thing. Urbanization is fantastic. We should continue to urbanize very briefly.
#
The reasons for this include, of course, that, you know, we have denser, higher population
#
density means, you know, bigger economic networks, which we can access vastly more opportunities
#
and so on and so forth, which is why, you know, however much people bemoan cities, it
#
is generally people living in cities who bemoan them as they live in cities. You know, the
#
bottom line is that so many people voluntarily come to a city and they reveal preference
#
tells you something about why that is. Also, from the point of view of the environment,
#
cities are a great thing because cities allow you, allow the state to say provide things
#
like water and electricity and so on to people at a far lower per capita cost than would
#
otherwise be the case. Now, obviously, there are a lot of ways in which Indian city could
#
be optimized better, like if they were higher, if they, you know, reclaim the sky in the
#
phrase of Alex Stabrock, our mutual friend, and all of that. And, you know, I'm going
#
to turn now to what I would call the pandemic paradox, which is that the, you know, the
#
pandemic, you know, inverts some of these processes in the sense that while otherwise
#
population density is such a fantastic and desirable thing, desirable because it forms
#
in the first place, because it's desirable, because people are voluntarily moving to cities,
#
but in a pandemic is the other way around. In a pandemic, it's literally fatal. Tell
#
me a little bit about how sort of pandemics of the past have, you know, affected cities,
#
like you've written about this yourself, about, you know, how, you know, the plague
#
changed Athens forever in 430 BC, Pericles died among others, a century later, Constantinople,
#
and cities have always sort of had a tough time with pandemics. Like you said, the third
#
risk of that you pointed out, which is contagion, you know, so how has that gone in the past?
#
And the thing is cities have always rebounded because people have always assumed that, okay,
#
there are trade-offs, that there is a risk to going to cities like, you know, like you've
#
pointed out, you know, in the 19th century, the mortality rate in the life expectancy
#
in cities was actually less in rural areas, sometimes as much as six, seven years, because
#
there were hubs of disease, there was no concept of public health. You know, people had wrong
#
notions, there was a point in time where people didn't even realize that, you know, open water
#
and open drainage can, you know, lead to diseases like cholera and whatever, which is why the
#
life expectancy was lower, but people still, you know, realizing the trade-off, they still
#
chose to go to cities because the opportunities were just way, way greater. So give me a sense
#
of how through history, what's been the relationship between, you know, cities and pandemics and
#
how people think about both?
#
Yeah, I think there was an interesting example that Ed Glaeser gave when he said an Irishman,
#
you know, back in the day, would rather, you know, choose the likelihood of giving, getting
#
cholera moving to a city over like being subjected to the, say, the potato famines, right? So
#
it's never been a very easy trade-off. You were essentially choosing the lesser of the
#
two years and anything that increased your chances of survival. It was quite bleak back
#
in the 19th century. And several examples of large epidemics breaking out and claiming
#
millions of lives exist, starting, I mean, of course, with the cholera epidemics in London,
#
New York City also had yellow fever epidemics, cholera epidemics. In Mumbai, we also had
#
bubonic plagues in the late 1800s. So our Epidemic Diseases Act actually comes from there. It
#
comes from the bubonic plague in Bombay. And what was done, I mean, the Act was then created
#
in order to help the rulers tackle the pandemic. So it's been a feature, I mean, a bug rather
#
of our cities that we had because of the invention of germ theory, because of very, very massive
#
investments in public health infrastructure, managed to keep it. So that's how we saw these
#
kind of large scale epidemics getting fewer and farther in between. And whenever they
#
cropped up, there was easier ways to tackle them. You know, people knew enough, there
#
was enough for vaccines and all these scientific advancements that helped you live in the city.
#
So that's sort of that bleak choice that existed earlier, no longer was the case. So it sort
#
of attracted more people. We also see this as a time like the early 20th century is the
#
time when the city started growing in size, because the cities in those days were much
#
larger than the cities in the previous centuries, because you'd solve for these, you know, very
#
grim problems. So the ways in which you can solve them exist, and they continue to exist.
#
But I think what also started happening was in the 1960s onward, the more the urbanization,
#
sort of the stage for the next phase of urbanization shifted from these very developed countries
#
to the developing world, which is not yet I mean, we know what's to be done, we know
#
that you need to make investments in clean water, sanitation, and so on. But for various
#
state capacity reasons, maybe even, you know, the type of government that you have, these
#
are not either policy priorities, or they're just not being well implemented. So these
#
reasons when this next stage of urbanization kicked off in the developing countries, this
#
sort of problem has sort of emerged as, again, one of the ugly facets of urbanization. And
#
the pandemic was honestly something that was, it's affected all countries, of course, it's
#
affected the cities much harder, even the cities in developed countries, simply because
#
of the nature of the densities that we've, we've talked about. But what's different
#
this time around is, of course, we have a lot more scientific advancement, we know what
#
has to be done, it's just a matter of time, as they say, before vaccines are coming up,
#
it's not that everyone's just, you know, put out put up their hands and waiting for
#
death, or some situation like that. We are all waiting for death. Well, hopefully for
#
death at some point later, not death due to pandemic. But what's happened is, we, because
#
in the developing world, the cities have just become too large, and too badly managed. We
#
are just going to end up having major disasters. I don't know how I don't know what has happened
#
with we've come far along enough in the pandemic. And it's not yet, like had a very, very bad
#
impact on say, the large cities in Africa, large cities in, in other parts of Asia. And
#
I mean, I don't know, like what that causes, maybe we'll know a few years later, whether
#
it was a different strain or what, but certainly if the same level of impact that that hit
#
cities in the developing world, a developed world hit the cities in the developing world,
#
we would have been seeing large scale sort of devastation and completely crumbling and
#
broken down infrastructure of all kinds. And we do end up, I mean, in Mumbai, in the cities
#
in India, where things have, I mean, where the pandemic has hit very hard, you have seen
#
the city infrastructure struggle. So in this instance, I think the reason why we've not
#
been able to, even though the lockdown was supposed to allow us to build up our infrastructure,
#
we were not very able to do that, perhaps because we don't have systems in place that,
#
you know, or sort of institutions in place that actually plan for these. Well, we don't
#
have great surveillance systems. And wherever they do exist, say, like Kerala will come
#
out as one of them. And that's also because it had to deal with, say, a NEPA a few years
#
ago. So it's our entire sort of urban public health infrastructure, which is just healthcare
#
infrastructure, has been geared towards sort of very limited types of things to do. We
#
don't have in our cities, even though it should be possible to have, we don't have, you know,
#
disaster planning for like, infectious diseases, we don't have any sort of infrastructure that
#
does that. And that sort of thinking at an institutional level is what is a has sort
#
of let things get made things get worse. The third thing is we don't look at public health
#
infrastructure as a, you know, as a public health problem. So we don't look at I mean,
#
we look at water and sanitation and public solid waste management as very, very like
#
in silos. And so okay, we know that if you of course, we know the benefits of providing
#
clean water, we know the benefits of providing sanitation, and the you know, the impact it
#
has on cholera related type or related deaths, diarrhea related deaths, and all of that is
#
known. But we don't look at all of this together as something that is important for the city
#
in terms of from a health perspective, we look at it from a service provision perspective.
#
I think that's what ended up happening where we have different departments doing different
#
things without any common sort of objective of public health and public health includes
#
like in these three things gets subsumed under public health, right? We have a separate we
#
have the silo based way of functioning, which is, in my opinion, led to some problems that
#
we face in this inability to have a coordinated way of dealing with with diseases.
#
Yeah, I mean, that that's been a perpetual problem in urban governance that we function
#
in these silos. I'll come back to that later. And also to the question of, you know, how
#
cities both here and across the world have sort of been affected by COVID. But before
#
that, just to take a step back, I have like a two part question, which is, you know, you
#
referred to how that trade off between, you know, cities being so dangerous, and should
#
we go to cities and yet the economic benefits and the social benefits even of being in cities,
#
how that changed completely when cities just became much better places to live. And one
#
reason for that, as you pointed out was just the growth of knowledge and technology, like
#
you understood germ theory, and, you know, your technology advanced to the point where
#
you could cure what would otherwise be severe diseases very quickly and blah, blah, blah.
#
So that's a technology part of it. But in terms of governance, you know, what were the
#
things that were done, which mitigated the impact of cities, you know, that part of the
#
impact of cities where they became more livable. And the second part of the question is that
#
did governments did the state over a period of time get complacent about the possible
#
ill effects of contagion? Because, you know, they had, you know, your technology had advanced
#
enough that, you know, pandemics weren't breaking out all the time and things seemed okay, did
#
they get complacent? And is that something that, you know, they will begin to, they are
#
beginning to rethink now, you think?
#
So the first thing about what changed in terms of governance, my sense is that the governance
#
did not change. It was the priorities of existing governments that within cities have changed,
#
because they realized that, you know, we need to keep the rich in the city, we need the
#
tax money, let's, you know, ensure a clean environment and clean, you know, water and
#
so on for them, we need businesses to stay. So that was that realization that led to sort
#
of setting up of these, you know, specialized public health departments or public health
#
boards that did a lot of surveillance work that planned for where the public health infrastructure
#
will be how to bring clean water in from outside the city, you know, through the aqueducts
#
and so on. So all of that was sort of done through this special, I think, Bombay also
#
had that in the Bombay Improvement Trust. So the context was different, of course, you
#
had the British elite living in, you know, certain part of the city, and they, the VIT,
#
of course, first made sure that those areas are, you know, were prioritized in terms of
#
ensuring that you have clean sanitation and clean water being provided. And then there
#
was later on, it was expanded to outside of the, of the colonies, where the working classes
#
live, only because they realized that, you know, if, if there is any outbreak in these,
#
you know, very, very dense quarters of whether whether subjects lived, then it's going to
#
quickly come into their colonies and affect them. So there was some effort that was done
#
to widen the roads and in the in the areas where the working classes and the, you know,
#
the Indian parts of the city. So it came from this incentive, it was about like ensuring
#
the because that these these cities were so economically important to the either the government
#
or the colonial powers in the case of India, that in terms of the trade and the commerce
#
that they brought in in terms of the tax dollars, that they brought in that it was a natural
#
priority to try and make sure that they continue to dominate in the trade and commerce in the
#
in the world. Those sort of incentives don't exist as much. I mean, in today's day and
#
age, there's a lot of, if you look at it different, if you look at the developing countries, this
#
sort of incentive does not exist as much because the people who should be concerned about Mumbai's
#
privacy as a global city don't live in Mumbai, you know, the tax dollars that come to Mumbai
#
are not invested in Mumbai, they go to all other parts. So there's a lot of different
#
political economy reasons. And I think I mean, I can talk a little bit about this, if you
#
want, but there's this thing about that we don't have a decentralized system, like you
#
don't have a powerful city leader who has a vested interest in keeping the city prosperous,
#
because that would lead to that, you know, shame and his government or getting more revenues
#
and then you know that they can invest in and get elected, you know, and claim that
#
this is what they've done for the city and therefore get elected. So these sort of electoral
#
incentives are completely broken. And so you don't see, you know, this natural priority
#
of any city leadership to make sure that the cities are healthy is not there because of
#
these broken electoral incentives, in my opinion.
#
Yeah, I'd done an episode with Shruti, I think in 2017 or two and a half years ago, where
#
we spoke about this aspect of urban governance, you know, especially in the context of Maharashtra
#
where, you know, power and accountability are delinked here. So the people who are accountable
#
to voters in Mumbai or local councillors and whatever have no power to make these big decisions
#
and the people who do have the power in the state government, the votes that they're chasing
#
are elsewhere and they don't really care about the city. And therefore you want, you know,
#
sort of governance to be as local as possible. So, you know, we don't so there's a more direct
#
link between, you know, performance and all of that. So, you know, we'll take a quick
#
commercial break now. And then when we come back, we'll get right down to the subject
#
at hand, which is COVID and our cities.
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Vaidehi Tandel about how COVID
#
has affected our cities and will continue to do so. And you know, this is fascinating
#
piece that Ruben and you wrote a few weeks ago. And I just want to quote from there because
#
I kind of find this fascinating where you're talking about how where some cities were less
#
affected than other cities and quote, sold with a population density of 16,000 persons
#
per square kilometer at far fewer cases in New York. Taipei whose density is comparable
#
to New York did not suffer from a serious outbreak. Other Asian mega cities such as
#
Hanoi, Hong Kong and Bangkok have done well too. A World Bank study of the outbreak in
#
China shows that population densities in cities are not correlated to the spread of the virus.
#
Very dense cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin have remained relatively unscathed.
#
Stop quote and apologies if I've mispronounced the name of one or more of the Chinese cities.
#
So my question is, you know, one reason of course why South East Asia dealt with this
#
pandemic better is because they had experience of previous pandemics. So they could reflexively
#
move into social distancing mode and it is common there to wear a mask anyway. And, you
#
know, all of those little normative things help. But from the point of view of what you
#
studied the way cities are governed and so on, like, why do you think there is such a
#
vast difference between because the assumption is that where the density is greater the spread
#
of COVID will be higher. But that's not really borne out by the data. Clearly there are other
#
things at play as well. So tell me a little bit about your insights into this.
#
Yeah, so this was actually largely a piece that came out of, you know, this panic almost
#
among people that, you know, densities are bad and cities are obviously the villains
#
and we need to focus on rural development. So it came from the fact that there is not,
#
there needs to be a more nuanced understanding of what densities are. And if this was the
#
case, why do we not see the most dense parts of the cities, even within cities, the most
#
dense areas not experiencing high outbreaks. And we realize that it is, of course, the
#
fact that, I mean, one pattern is that if any city has in the recent past had to deal
#
with an epidemic, or a flu-like or a SARS-like epidemic, they've had the infrastructure in
#
place to allow immediate surveillance and shutting down and so on, without even actually
#
going to the drastic step of shutting down and blocking down all economic activity, even
#
without doing that, they've been able to manage this. But we find that in the case of, say,
#
if you look at Mumbai, and you look at densities across different parts, you're not going to
#
find the most dense areas seeing the outbreaks, you're going to find perhaps the areas that
#
are most deficient in amenities like clean water in terms of, you know, piped water,
#
and then also sanitation in terms of having proper indoor toilets. Those areas you're
#
going to see are going to be worse hit. And this was also shown in a recent study of CERO
#
survey that was done by Anoop Malani and a bunch of others along with, I think, TIFR,
#
they were scientists there, and that those results made a big, you know, like they made
#
it to the front pages of a lot of papers, which showed that slum areas tended to have
#
a lot higher CERO prevalence compared to non-slum areas. We can't conflate slum and non-slum
#
with more dense and less dense, because you may be living in a dense area, but what matters
#
is what is the consumption of lower space that you have? What is, you know, it's about
#
indoor crowding. If I'm living, you know, there are a hundred people living in a building,
#
but I mean, living in an area as opposed to a thousand people living in another area,
#
but the per capita space available to those living in the hundred population neighborhood
#
is less than the per capita space available to the ones that are living in a thousand
#
population neighborhood, then we cannot say that it's densities that are at fault. It's
#
the fact that you have not allowed, say, enough construction, or you've not allowed enough
#
floor space, you've not had enough housing to be built, which is leading to people cramming
#
indoors as opposed to, you know, just looking at densities. What is an important metric
#
to look at is indoor crowding. And if you ask why indoor crowding is happening, you
#
will come back to the same question of, you know, why is there not more construction for
#
the poor? And that leads you to the question of, again, your whole set of land use constraints
#
that stop people from building more. And that the motivation for these laws and these regulations
#
of stopping construction, not allowing construction is ironically a fear of densities. So it's
#
this strange sort of situation where you're blaming densities, but what's the real culprit
#
is not densities, it's not having enough housing per capita or not having enough housing space
#
per capita. That's the issue.
#
No, and it's so ironic and it fits exactly into the framework of the scene in the unseen
#
that your intended effect for all these regulations is that let's do away with density and your
#
unintended consequences that it's leading to density because you have 15 people cramped
#
in a crowd, you know, in a small room because, you know, there's this artificial scarcity
#
created by bad laws and regulation. In a sense, does, you know, like people often say that
#
a crisis is a good time for reform. And one of the things that this crisis does seem to
#
have done is pointed out the importance, even the urgency of reforms that otherwise people
#
like, you know, you and me have been writing about for donkey's years, such as, for example,
#
just FSI reform, where you have, you know, in Alex's words, again, if Mumbai reclaimed
#
the sky instead of the sea, and it just grew upwards, you'd have less of these 15 people
#
trapped in a room, you'd have land which was much more affordable, infrastructure would
#
keep up with all of this, there would even be more revenues for city governments, though
#
the Mumbai city government has so much unused revenue that's hardly an issue. So is that
#
something that, so first of all, you know, when you talk to people within government
#
and when you talk to policymakers and you talk about say things like FSI or rent control
#
and talk about how these are actually harming the poor, I mean, that's what they eventually
#
come down to because you create scarcities of available land and places to live, prices
#
go up, it's poor who suffer and then therefore have to live in these overcrowded slums, where
#
they are far more vulnerable to contagion. So first of all, even before COVID, was there
#
a recognition that these are problems or would they just indulge you as you spoke about this
#
stuff and, you know, they weren't incentivized to do anything about it? And whatever the
#
answer to that is that would that have changed in any direction now because fixes like these
#
are powerful structural fixes that are, however, long term fixes, you know, not short term
#
fixes. And my worry here as a citizen who's watched the Indian state closely at work for
#
decades is that a crisis will come and when the crisis is over, they'll forget all about
#
it and it's business as usual. So what's your sense of sort of dealing with policymakers
#
on all of this? And do you think that change is likely to happen?
#
So I am reluctant to bunch all government people in the same, you know, same bucket
#
or all politicians in the same bucket. I think there are enough smart and motivated people
#
in government who get things done, which is what makes some of the work we do exciting
#
and relevant. Otherwise, you know, we would be better off just writing op-eds and, you
#
know, instead of talking to people, instead of talking to government officials and so
#
on. So there are two ways in which this could go. There could be a set of people, powerful
#
voices that say that, well, we've always pointed out that these were bad. Now look, so why
#
you, you know, focusing on cities, focus on the villages, let's keep the returning workers
#
in the villages and provide them enough opportunities there and, you know, like, let them not face
#
hardships and go into cities and, you know, see what, look what happened to all of them.
#
These cities just closed their doors and so on. So there's one sort of political voices
#
that would talk about this. I have like not seen, at least in the public sphere, a counter
#
voice to this politically. And that is what is a little disappointing. And that's what
#
makes me pessimistic. I mean, I think I would know enough people, individual people who
#
would, who are not like that, who are very, who are still, you know, very bullish on cities.
#
And we, again, we're seeing the return, the workers coming back, right? Like those who
#
had gone away once the economy slowly, you know, came back, restarted and so people come
#
back, resume their old jobs or look for new jobs and so on. So politically, I'm not seeing
#
that sort of voice. And again, the incentives are different, completely political reasons
#
why certain types are being taken versus others. And that's, I think that's a failure to recognize
#
people's aspirations. I think if you are, it's to me a very misguided thing for you
#
to believe that the people who returned will actually stay without trying to understand
#
what their aspirations are. Like if their aspirations were to make something of themselves
#
or, you know, make sure that the children don't have to face the same hardships that
#
they did, then the messaging would be very different, I feel. I mean, or, I mean, I'm
#
not saying that, in fact, I guess most, I know nothing about politics. So I shouldn't,
#
I should not talk about what the, how to win votes or what the winning strategy in this
#
case would be. But in my mind, it's just that it's a puzzle to me, like, are these, do these
#
people like, are their aspirations not being understood? Like, if they were, then you would
#
sort of be talking about some other things, you would be talking about, you know, making
#
sure that your cities are looking after, you know, the most vulnerable people and so on.
#
We're seeing some of that conversation happen in the, you know, among the people and the
#
organizations working in the development sector. So the, you know, the World Bank and all your
#
other multilateral organizations and some other sort of, I guess, think tanks are also
#
trying to think through, okay, let's look at what the issues are in terms of, say, migrant
#
housing, in terms of access to social protection for the urban poor, and let's try and fix
#
those systems. But ultimately, I mean, it's a political thing. And I don't, I don't know
#
how it will end up happening, whether or not it will end up happening, despite so many
#
people saying, or so many non-political voices talking about these issues. And if I would,
#
just to sort of go a step further, it's also about who does the fiscal burden fall on,
#
right? So if states where the cities are have to now be responsible for the people that
#
are coming to work in their cities, that's an added fiscal burden without on the states,
#
right? And that's something that I don't see states taking on very willingly, because these
#
are not voters for them. Their vote banks are different. So these complicated political,
#
you know, calculations make me a lot more pessimistic. It's not the intentions of people.
#
I don't think, you know, politicians are necessarily anti-state or whatever, but they
#
have their own reasons for posturing as being anti-city and so on. So yeah.
#
And how much of governance happens below the surface of politics? For example, you know,
#
I would imagine a politician would be interested and deeply involved in all of the things that
#
can affect the optics of governance. But there are a lot of things in terms of daily governance,
#
which happen below the surface, which nobody really notices, which they have no incentive
#
to really care about one way or the other. So I guess there, the bureaucracy in the deep state,
#
as it were, sort of becomes much more relevant in terms of what is done and what is not done.
#
What's your experience of dealing with the bureaucracy in those kind of circumstances?
#
Again, there are well-intentioned, but somewhat hamstrung by the kind of structures that they
#
have put in place. So I've come across bureaucrats who want to do things. And some of them have been
#
able to push through things. I mean, I don't want to name names, but there have been cities like
#
Pune, cities like Mumbai, cities like Chennai, I have seen bureaucrats who have been able to do
#
things for the betterment of the city, whether it is pushing through reforms, like say property tax
#
systems and so on. So I think there is some hope at that stage. But again,
#
if you look at the other compulsion or the other constraint that is that you need the person to
#
be there at least for one entire political cycle, at least for five years, for them to actually
#
get the hang of the department and then figure out what the problems are and then listen to people
#
who have the solutions for it. And then make sure that things get, at least the ball gets rolling.
#
And that's sort of like, that's a luxury in the administrative services, actually.
#
So if you have bureaucrats who've spent enough time, say, as urban managers or city managers,
#
they tend to be a lot more sensible about like what's needed. And they've been able to push
#
through some interesting reforms as well. So yeah, I think it can happen at the bureaucratic level.
#
But these are, I mean, this is again, I'm speaking from business as usual times. And this is like a
#
completely different world that we're living in. So I don't know how their incentives and priorities
#
have changed now. And what are the priorities of the government at the local level? Unfortunately,
#
I mean, we have not, or at least I have not had a very deep look at it. Or I mean, I've not been
#
I mean, I've not been privy to do that sort of those sort of conversations, because the goalposts
#
change, the priorities change, you know, from one week to the next. So it will take, I think,
#
some time for us to start talking about rebuilding, reforms, and all those kinds of things
#
at the city level. So in both your recent pieces on this and the piece you wrote at the end of
#
April in first post, I think, and then the piece you wrote in July with the Rubin and the Hindu
#
Sun Times, you'd laid out a bunch of things that the government could do to mitigate it. So I'm
#
going to go out to go to the four policy suggestions which you and Rubin mentioned in the July piece.
#
And the first of these we've already discussed where the first of the policy responses you'd
#
like is, quote, addressing crowding by increasing per capita consumption of floor area by drastically
#
reducing regulatory barriers to construction, stop code, which, you know, we've already discussed
#
that, you know, FSI and other regulation which prevents a far greater supply of housing can be
#
relooked at. By the way, I wish you guys use a little less jargon and simpler language for
#
somebody like the Hindu Sun Times, but never mind that these points are insightful and great.
#
Let's turn to the second of those where you say that, quote, administratively, the crisis has
#
taught us that a pandemic response cannot be federally mandated and requires a decentralized,
#
proximal and accountable response. To enable this, city leaders need to be empowered,
#
stop code. And we've already spoken a bit about how they are not empowered. There's a gap between
#
power and accountability and so on. But would you say that more than anything else, this pandemic
#
really underscores the importance of local self-governance because the conditions on the
#
ground are so different from neighborhood to neighborhood that any central response which
#
looks at a one-size-fits-all sort of approach will necessarily fail. So, one, do you think
#
that this underscores the need for greater local self-governance? And two, do you think that there
#
is state capacity for such local self-governance to actually work? So, it is, of course, a story
#
about empowering local self-governance, but it's also a story of getting a polycentric governance
#
system to work. So, when I'm talking about a polycentric system, I'm talking about multiple
#
types of government and whose functions and responsibilities are demarcated,
#
or basically the jurisdiction is demarcated in such a way that they can absorb any externalities.
#
So, and they're able to function at the right level of scale. So, for instance, when
#
we're talking about an outbreak, there's multiple things going on. You need, at the local level,
#
you need empowerment, but you also need some higher level, some thinking about the scale.
#
I mean, the scale of thinking has to be slightly higher where you are thinking about things like
#
what should be the testing strategies and what should be the way in which you are deploying your
#
resources, so state resources, because not all resources may be with the local body. And the
#
reason why, I mean, it makes sense to have them at the state if the state is at the appropriate
#
scale to be able to absorb the externalities that come up. So, it's the fact that you need
#
the polycentric system to work. So, you need your local tier to work. You need your, say, metropolitan
#
tier level of government or metropolitan system to work, and you need your state system to work.
#
And they're all doing different things. This polycentric governance actually was a
#
term that was coined by Vincent and Eleanor Ostrom. And when they were looking at police,
#
you know, the way police function in the United States, and basically, why do you have sort of
#
different tiers and why should you either not, you know, it's a disaster if you either consolidate
#
everything or you completely decentralize everything, because there are functions that you
#
need different to be assigned to different scales. So, I know this was a bit of a digression,
#
but I just wanted to highlight that we end up talking a lot about decentralization, because
#
we know that that piece, I mean, at that level, things are completely broken. At least at the
#
state level, some things work. But at the urban sort of city level, we are not giving cities
#
enough revenues. The property tax collections are like very, very minuscule. And cities like
#
cities like Mumbai earlier used to rely on octroi. And octroi went away because of the GST.
#
So, there's a massive shortfall, which has not been offset by any other revenue source. So,
#
there's a major hollowing out of the revenues that cities have. If you don't have revenues,
#
then you don't have the power to undertake any sort of expenditures that can allow you to run
#
that excess capacity. Because then everything is an exercise in saving budgets and saving
#
expenditures. So, that's the sort of problem that you have when you don't have revenues
#
at the city level. The second issue is, and I think this has been discussed earlier also,
#
is you don't have leadership. You don't have accountable leadership because the mayors don't
#
have any real powers. And the municipal commissioners are appointed by state governments
#
and they're political masters at the state level. This is not to say that municipal commissioners
#
have no incentive in ensuring the corporations perform well, but it becomes too idiosyncratic,
#
depending on the person that you have. If you're lucky enough to have a great bureaucrat,
#
then it's good. But if he or she is bad, you can't vote them out of power the next time or
#
take any action against them. If you had a system where the commissioner was accountable to the
#
mayor, at least through the mayor, you could exercise some control over the actions of the
#
commissioner. The mayors are powerless. So, that's basically your revenues are a mess. You don't have
#
enough decentralized power. And the third thing that's missing is, in terms of your functions
#
and responsibilities that you have to undertake. There is a list, which is called a schedule, which
#
lists out the functions that an urban local body has to undertake. But the actual functions that
#
the local body undertakes end up being far more. So, whenever there is a centrally sponsored scheme,
#
which the local bodies then have to undertake, those are additional unfunded mandates on the
#
local body, which are a drain on the resources which are not coming on time, even things like
#
your grants that the state finance commission has to give the local bodies, the untied grants
#
don't always come through. So, there's a whole bunch of these issues, which are, I mean,
#
lot more far experienced people have talked about it for far longer than even I've been
#
a student or a researcher. So, these things have been happening, I think, since the 90s,
#
even when we officially sort of recognized the third tier as a level of government in 92 and in
#
93, the problems have just sort of refused to go away. And there's a difference across states,
#
some states do better, some states do worse. But if I have to look at what can be done, or what
#
should be done in order to actually solve the problem, it seems like there needs to be something
#
that overrides the states. And again, I hesitate to say this because I know even the central
#
government is not the best way to sort of get around to doing things. But if the central
#
government mandates certain things to, you know, in terms of the fixing the revenues and fixing the
#
system of transferring grants, I think that would be a useful way to at least address the revenue
#
situation within cities. Otherwise, you're finding many of them not receiving what they are due to,
#
and that's like millions of grants from the State Finance Commission, and from the center
#
not being paid to them. So, it's all a question of where the money is, and a question of, and while
#
the Democratic representation and the, you know, the local empowerment and so on are key, I think
#
the revenue side of it is, we don't hear about it a lot in the public sphere, just maybe because it's
#
sort of a dry topic to talk about, you know, like, it seems like what is a grant in aid versus what
#
is a tax and non-tax revenue of a government is not the most exciting thing, I guess, a lady
#
wants to look at and think that. But I think, I think that's a very, very critical issue in solving
#
this problem. I think some dry topics are enough to make the eyes wet. And it's a little sort of
#
bizarre that, you know, our Prime Minister was actually a Chief Minister for almost a decade and
#
a half before he came to power. So, you'd imagine that he'd be cognizant and more concerned about,
#
you know, this aspect of it. And this is also incredibly tragic that I think we have no option
#
but to take a tangent for a moment or two to turn our mind away to something else. So, I'm not sure
#
that that is less tragic. So, while you were speaking of, you know, Bombay situation with
#
Octroi, because of GST, Octroi revenues have completely gone because the taxation system
#
changed and there's nothing in its place. You know, a thought that I've sometimes had came to
#
mind. Now, the conventional view of the GST is that, look, it's great in concept, because
#
it takes away all the friction of all these multiple taxes. And it was incredibly badly sort
#
of implemented, which is why it turned out to be such a disaster. In fact, I've received
#
some valid criticism that I agree with that in my episode with Arvind Subramaniam, I didn't push
#
back hard enough on this, because there's really nothing redeeming about the GST at all. But the
#
other thought that I've had is that even at a conceptual level, what kind of baffles me
#
is that we keep saying local self-governance, local autonomy and so on. But the GST is a
#
centralizing, the GST comes from a centralizing impulse, that what you should do is you should
#
let different taxes stack, different states and different local authorities tax as they will,
#
and then you let the people decide and you let them kind of compete with each other. So it seems
#
like even at the level of concept, it's not that it's everything is good about it, it's that there
#
is this inherent trade-off that you're moving to something centralizing and you're reducing the
#
autonomy of the states, which is something we actually see playing out, you know, as we speak
#
in terms of real-term consequences. Do you have any thoughts on this? My sense is that so even if
#
GST existed and Octroi did not, a well-functioning GST regime would have, I mean, I'm not very anti
#
the idea of GST. And I'm not saying that Octroi going away was like a complete like unmitigated
#
disaster. I'm just saying that this points to the lack of revenue sources that corporations have.
#
And the one revenue source, and this is justified in all types of theoretical frameworks as well,
#
the one revenue source that all local bodies should have is property tax. And that's the
#
revenue that they're supposed to really leverage and use. And that's something that, you know,
#
that's something that we see governments not being able to do because there is not enough capacity to,
#
like, local body capacity to implement a robust property tax regime. We don't see our property
#
tax systems being, you know, linked properly in terms of the underlying valuation of the property.
#
We don't see them being buoyant. The rates, sometimes the rates are too low, even if the
#
rates are not low enough, like people are simply not paying and you don't have any
#
way of tracking those who do and making them pay. So my sense is that there's still, there's so much
#
work to do in terms of improving our property tax system alone. Getting that right would be,
#
you know, a major win for urban local bodies. And the other set of sources that cities have,
#
and this is, I mean, not, perhaps it's not correct to say that cities have it because land is a state
#
subject, but cities also have, you know, very, very high valued land being used very inefficiently.
#
And there is government property that is being, or government land that is land vacant. And these
#
sort of properties and inefficiently used land can be leveraged to raise a lot of money for cities,
#
especially if you walk around in Mumbai and see an empty plot of land, you know how expensive that
#
could be. And just because you're government, you're saying you don't have any incentive
#
to use it or to lease it out to, you know, the highest bidder and so on. My hope was that with
#
Octroi being taken away, there would be a lot more dynamism being shown in using these land-based
#
revenue sources more intelligently. But that again has not happened at as much of an extent
#
as I would have hoped. So the property tax and the land-based revenue systems together would have,
#
at least, you know, get help cities have a very decent base of revenues. And that would have then,
#
you know, allowed them to do other like more sophisticated things like municipal bonds and,
#
you know, raise money from the market to finance infrastructure and so on. But yeah, that's not
#
happened. Again, I mean, I won't be able to articulate why it's not happened, but it certainly
#
hasn't happened. Yeah. In fact, I had an episode with Rajesh Jain, which we'll also link from the
#
show notes. And you must be familiar with sort of his grand campaign of, you know, he estimated how
#
much land the state holds across the country, including in Mumbai. And these are not trivial
#
amounts of land. These are such huge amounts of land that if you actually figure out ways to
#
monetize them properly, according to Rajesh, you could actually afford to give a UBI to the whole
#
country just from that alone. So we link that episode from the show notes and leave it to
#
listeners to judge for themselves. You know, having spoken about the state, it's time now to
#
get back to the more cheerful subject of the pandemic, which actually takes us back to the
#
state because a third of the things that you and Ruben suggested were, quote, social protection
#
systems need to be redesigned to protect the poor and vulnerable in urban areas, comma,
#
in addition to the current focus on rural settlements, stop quote. Now, whatever I'm
#
familiar with happening in sort of urban areas has actually happened because of private initiative,
#
like people give a bad rap to markets and so on. But everything that has been done for the
#
suffering here is through voluntary action. I think my friend Ruben Mascarenes and, you know,
#
his friends fed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people during that difficult
#
period of COVID and one could see the government doing absolutely nothing, at least relatively so.
#
So tell me a bit about what you mean by social protection systems for urban areas. What would
#
it entail? You know, what are the incentives against just implementing those and so on?
#
So social protection systems would fall into a bunch of different categories. So there will be
#
things like livelihood protection. There's things like livelihood support where you provide
#
income support. There's access to your public distribution system, which is your
#
ration shops and so on. They form a part of the social protection systems. You also have
#
schemes targeted to certain types of population, like the elderly, the ones
#
or women, and so on. So all of these areas, you know, all the schemes under which a poor person
#
or a poor household can avail some benefits of the other for different reasons. So there's food
#
needs, food security needs are taken care of through PDF. And then, you know, livelihood needs
#
maybe, or not livelihood needs, but some kind of income support may be provided through these
#
pensions, social pensions that the government provides. And if you have a potential livelihood
#
shock in terms of unemployment, you have your employment guarantee schemes that work.
#
Now, all of them are designed for a rural population and a rural country. As I mentioned
#
earlier, your NREGA is a rural scheme. So if you're an urban household facing
#
temporary employment shock, there's no employment guarantee scheme for you.
#
PDS, because it's linked to and again, to be fair, there's a lot of now a lot of John and a lot of
#
rethinking of these systems. PDS again is linked to the ration card, which is the place you stay.
#
So if you're a migrant, you cannot avail PDS, because if your address is somewhere outside of
#
the state, you cannot go to a ration shop and ask for ration. So there's just all these barriers to,
#
you know, and again, there the barriers may have come out of just the way the architecture of the
#
system is where you have, because the states are responsible for providing most of and implementing
#
most of the social protection schemes, they just end up sort of being very, very different across
#
and you end up then asking for a proof all the time of, you know, you belonging to the state to
#
be able to avail these benefits. So these kinds of issues have, in the pandemic time, really,
#
really hurt the poor. And there is an opportunity here to think more creatively, again, given you
#
now have some technology, you have your, you know, John's own accounts, and you have some sort of a
#
mobile technology in which you're able to reach people, there is a way to try and be linked, say,
#
PDS from where the person originally lives in, there's a way to try and think about an urban
#
employment guarantee scheme, there's a way to try and think about housing for migrant workers in
#
terms of currently, I mean, of course, most of them live in cheap rental accommodation in slums,
#
and so on. But there's also such a massive gap in what we know, like collecting information about,
#
you know, how do migrant workers actually go about surviving in the city? Like, how do they even
#
access anything from like a bag to a ration to, you know, housing, creating that database of
#
knowledge, in order to inform your policy design, that's important, that's an activity that needs
#
to be taken up again, not necessarily always by the government, it could be philanthropy
#
organizations, it could be NGOs, it could be a partnership, a consortium of these different
#
organizations coming together to do this. But that, I mean, building that knowledge base is
#
also equally important. So I would think that, A, the knowledge creation and collecting information,
#
and B, redesigning or thinking about redesigning your employment schemes, your PDS schemes,
#
and even your other, say, social pension schemes, in order to actually benefit the, you know,
#
the most vulnerable people and reach them is critical. And I think that those conversations
#
are happening. And I'm a little more optimistic about that end of things that I think things may,
#
I mean, we may end up making some interesting policy reforms that hopefully will have much needed
#
and long lasting impact.
#
So I have two questions here, and I'll ask them separately, because one feedback I was
#
also got is when I ask a two part question, guests get confused and answer only the second
#
part, because my questions go on for so long. So I'm going to ask these parts separately.
#
And part one is that it strikes me that in all of this, there are inherent issues with how
#
difficult these are to implement. For example, there's just a question of identifying who
#
should be a recipient or whatever, you know, if you say that, okay, we are going to give
#
some cover for sudden unemployment because of pandemic, and then you have to ask the
#
question of how do you even identify and classify unemployment when you haven't
#
recognized the employment to begin with. And you know, there are so many leakages
#
within the system. So the question here is that, given all of these, assuming that you
#
get the government in power to agree with you that these are the things that need to be done
#
on a scale of one to 10, how likely is it that state companies will be able to do that?
#
That state capacity will actually be up to the task of implementing these.
#
That's, I don't know how to how to sort of,
#
I just realized I might have put you on a spot because if people are listening to this,
#
I mean, that's not the issue at all. I'm just trying to think about how does one
#
quantify these kinds of things at the end of the day isn't any scale like an arbitrary
#
thing. But I know from a qualitative perspective of like really badly equipped to like they'll
#
do a great job of implementing it. It will depend on what we end up designing. And again,
#
I may be a little more hopeful because just because there seems to be enough,
#
a like smart people working on this problem and like, and people, you know, who had very,
#
very deep experience, you know, looking and engaging with state governments who are sort
#
of thinking through these problems is not like some fly by night operators being brought into
#
or like solve the problem. If it is designed well, and if you're using the technology that
#
you have responsibly, and you know, in order to actually benefit the people in terms of ensuring
#
that you're identifying them while you know, all the protection mechanisms are in place.
#
I think I'm more optimistic about this. I feel that we would be able to do something. So I would
#
say maybe in seven out of 10. I did end up giving a number. No, I think it's, you know, even if no
#
one is going to hold you to a number, obviously, because social sciences, so in exact in these
#
ways, but I find this asking people about, you know, on the scale forces them to sort of think
#
a little harder about it. And the exercise of coming up with the number is fun. My instinct
#
would be actually, I mean, it's the question is phrased wrongly. I mean, what are the chances
#
that whatever your design gets implemented, I would say it's obviously zero, because they can't
#
implement it all. But how much of it is likely to get implemented on a scale of zero to 10?
#
I don't know. I mean, seven seems to me to be on the high side of the of my range. But if I had
#
to give it a range, like two to seven, which is a wide range. I think I would rather give a
#
a, be a little more generous. And then I, you know, of course, can correct myself later.
#
And we can have a follow up conversation. You can ask me again.
#
No, I mean, you know, I prefer your approach, because the point is that if you thought it was
#
less than seven, you might think that it is not worthwhile my doing any work here.
#
And therefore, I would be perfectly happy if you thought it was 10. I would not argue with you
#
there. Because, you know, we need people like you more than we need people like me
#
to make change sort of happen. My second question is this, that it's obvious that there,
#
you know, needs to be disaster mitigation, that, you know, when a crisis strikes, you need to find
#
ways to give relief to the people, whatever form that takes. Now, there are sort of two
#
philosophical questions that come up there. Somebody could easily pop up and say that,
#
boss, I lost my job because of COVID. So you're giving me compensation. But if I lose my job at
#
any other time, for any other reason, like, say, demonetization, which was not a natural disaster,
#
but a manmade disaster, then why am I not due compensation? Why are you recognizing one kind
#
of suffering than another, which becomes a philosophical question. And the other issue
#
that then comes up is about the dangers of potentially building patronage systems, which
#
then never get dismantled. And therefore, that sort of becomes a trap. Because the moment you
#
build any kind of entitlement into the system, look, the political economy is such that it's
#
simply never going to go away. And while it is good at that short term moment, again, the pandemic
#
paradox, that there is a disaster and people can't eat, so you obviously have to do something about
#
it. But if you set it in stone, then the opportunity cost of that is the long term reforms and the
#
building the long term structures that would help the whole nation right to prosperity in the long
#
run so that these mitigating measures are not needed at all or not needed the next time.
#
So how does one sort of deal with this? Because one thing that does seem to be happening,
#
you know, is that during pandemics like this or during times of crisis, the state just expands,
#
and then it doesn't contract back to where it was. And a lot of this expansion is not necessarily
#
expansion in the good sense that we would want that it's doing the duties that it should and
#
getting stronger in that regard, but is sort of all these other things. So what are your thoughts
#
on this? Is this a danger that you kind of grapple with? So about the question of, okay, why are we
#
offering stops in one case and why not the other? Why an absolute disaster? Why not a man-made
#
disaster? The point is that you have a large section of population that has been completely
#
devastated. And there's so many, so many, so many examples and stories and news articles and so on.
#
I'm sorry if I'm being a bit wishy washy, but what is the morally right thing to do
#
for the government or for the state? And if the state ought not to do this, then,
#
you know, which is protect its most vulnerable citizens or try in whatever way, given whatever
#
implementation constraints and so on, should it not attempt to alleviate some of these problems
#
and some of these shocks that people have had? And where I come on the side is that the state
#
must do something about it. To your second point about whether or not it ends up being,
#
you know, just something that will never go away and just an entitlement and so on.
#
If we take the case of what the developed countries are doing, they're also offering
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these COVID-related measures and so on. We are also offering the COVID-related schemes. We are
#
also, at the same time, trying to build a system or rebuild a social protection architecture from
#
some sort of different principles, right? So where earlier you were just like, you know, saying,
#
okay, whoever, let's focus on rural areas and let's, this, it's incumbent on the citizen to
#
be able to fulfill 50 criteria to be able to get this. Now we're like, let's tolerate some
#
inclusion error. So it's okay if people who don't need to get it end up getting it. The reason is
#
that you're, I don't think that, so here's the thing. So if you provide a system where you are
#
giving a larger number of people, you're expanding the net and then, you know, whoever gets in, gets
#
in. If you have some self-selecting mechanisms, you may have find people opting out because,
#
I mean, frankly, what will I do with a pension of 500 rupees per month, I mean, per month for
#
the rest of my life? And if I, you know, if I don't need it, I can, I'm happy to give it away.
#
The point is that if you expand the net enough, you may have some inclusion errors, but it's fine
#
because it's better to do that rather than to exclude the people who actually need it. And that
#
is a, that is a bigger problem. And as you sort of, I don't know if there's been any rigorous study
#
that looks at whether or not, if once you have a social protection scheme, do people end up, you
#
know, using that as a crutch and, and therefore not end up striving to aspire to improve their
#
livelihoods. I don't see this as a very, it's, you know, mutually exclusive thing that if you have
#
this, then I have no incentives. Perhaps the safety net are so low that you would, you're much
#
better off in the long run if you, you know, want, if you try and get out of this dependency on, on
#
the social safety systems or the social protection schemes. So if that ends up happening, and I'm
#
more optimistic in the sense that I do feel people want to see their lives get better and their
#
children's life getting better. And they know that if relying on doors is not the way that's going
#
to happen, they will also want to strive to, you know, get higher incomes and move out of this.
#
And so you will end up, you may still have the architecture in place. You may have more people
#
coming in as, as other people move out of it. In that sense, it will remain a, it will remain a
#
bad thing. In that sense, it will remain entrenched. But I don't think that, you know, for the same
#
set of beneficiaries, they end up being dependent on it for all their lives. I think it's more of
#
people move out and then more people come in. So let me, let me sort of, as I was thinking
#
aloud, let me continue thinking aloud and kind of clarify what I meant. What I meant was not that
#
patronage is necessarily a bad thing in all contexts. In fact, on the contrary, I agree with
#
that. It is our moral responsibility to alleviate the sort of pain and the suffering that is out
#
there. But I would add to that and say that much as we think of COVID-19 as a disaster,
#
it's also a fact that we are in the middle of an ongoing disaster, which has lasted 73 years and
#
is caused by the Indian state. I wrote a column about this, which I'll link from the show notes.
#
But look, here's the thing. Every day, 3000 children die in India of starvation. That's
#
almost one lakh kids in India dying of starvation every month, right? And to me, that's a disaster
#
and we need to do something about that, but it's normalized. And of course, those deaths are
#
dispersed and those deaths are invisible to us because they're probably happening in areas
#
where the media doesn't go and cover all of that. So we kind of ignore that. And so my broader point
#
of what the state should do about what is happening, for example, if 3000 kids are dying every day of
#
starvation, what do you do about that? And my broader point is that you need a two-prong strategy,
#
which I think most people would agree with, which is that in the short term, you feed them,
#
you figure out a way to get food to them, get money to them, and you sort out the problem with
#
short-term patronage. And you have to do that. It's your moral responsibility to do that. But at
#
the same time, you put in place long-term structures by which they can at some point in time feed
#
themselves. And therefore you don't need to, for example, to use the example of the figure
#
that you named, you don't need to give 500 bucks a month to anybody after a period of time, because
#
everybody is earning so much more that they don't really care for that. That's your long-term goal.
#
I think what often happens in India is that we look for the short-term fixes and then we'll say,
#
ki hume jo karna tha humne kar diya. And now we don't need to do anything else. For example,
#
when it comes to something like the agricultural crisis, we see this where now it's almost become
#
a fait accompli that everyone has to promise farm loan waivers, which is often unnecessary and
#
ascetic in a short-term sense, but you never end up making the long-term reforms that you actually
#
need to solve the problem. Because one, those incentives aren't there. Those solutions are
#
not in demand because they're unintuitive. Very often for most people, a politician's time horizon
#
extends to the next election. And, you know, some reforms could take 10, 15 years to play out.
#
So yeah, I'm not disputing anything you're saying. I'm just kind of clarifying where I was
#
coming from. There's no question at the end of this, but since we are talking about the state,
#
I will get to a question that I did have, which is the writer, Jack Schenker, in a piece on The
#
Guardian, you know, wrote a piece on cities post-COVID, where I found this paragraph quite
#
fascinating, where he writes, quote, South Korea, one of the countries worst affected by the disease,
#
has also posted some of the lowest mortality rates, an achievement that can be traced in
#
part to a series of technological innovations, including controversially, the mapping and
#
publication of infected patients movement. And, you know, so this kind of strikes me as another
#
an interesting example, of course, of the trade-off between security and privacy, in this case,
#
security against the virus, but also then a pandemic like this can become an excuse for a
#
for creeping authoritarianism, where, you know, and you yourself have referred earlier in this
#
podcast to surveillance in positive terms, that it's something that helps you control the disease.
#
So how are we to what are we to make this trade off, especially when we live in times that there
#
are worries about such authoritarianism and about the state getting too much power over
#
the lives of people. So how does one think about this at a conceptual level, and then at a political
#
economy level, how does one sort of negotiate this, because the impulse of the state will always be to,
#
you know, get as much control as they can. So it's great you asked that, because that's my real
#
worry. It's not so much the fact that if you have a patronage system in place, it just won't go away.
#
My worry is that if you have a surveillance system in place, it will just try and, you know, dig its
#
claws deeper and just not go away. And that's a very, very real fear, even in a democratic society
#
like India, because we still have so many draconian laws from the colonial times that have,
#
you know, continued and that have been used time and again by the state as a means to
#
to thwart dissent, to get people to, you know, stop criticizing or stop being critical. And
#
of your, you know, private information through, say, mobile phone apps and the like being collected
#
by the state is extremely worrying. And I'm not a privacy expert or a data governance expert. So
#
in terms of thinking through solutions, I will not know how we can think of safeguarding
#
people's privacy, like what steps should people take. My other concern is also that we don't have
#
enough political leaders who can stand up or like talk about this as an issue and actually be
#
ineffective. That sort of checks and balance in the legislature is no longer there. And so, I mean,
#
I'm very, very concerned and very, very pessimistic about this, about and very cynical about the fact
#
that you are developing systems in which you are giving more and more power to the state and it's
#
going to end up having some unhealthy consequences in terms of what can be done to assure this. And
#
I mean, to mitigate this or whether or not there was another way to go about doing this without
#
giving the state so much power. What would the other alternatives that we could have taken up?
#
I'm not sure that I have the answers to that question either. But it is, if you look at what
#
other states, I mean, not South Korea, but say, if you look at what Europe does, and the Europeans
#
are massively concerned about privacy, right, and individual right to privacy and so on.
#
Perhaps there are models there that could have been used. But I think that that ship has sailed.
#
I mean, we've already ended up doing a lot of things that were unnecessary, but that were
#
intrusive. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if, I mean, that is all the supposedly the courts that
#
that will protect the individual from any kind of state overreach. But I mean, I think
#
I think I'm not very optimistic about that as well. So, yeah, it's all bad news.
#
I'm glad you said supposedly when you said it's supposedly the courts that will protect us.
#
No, we are recording this one, September 9. And, you know, the media hounded Rhea Chakravorty,
#
and she eventually got arrested for drugs possession and cannabis shouldn't even be
#
illegal. But she got arrested for that, even though no actual drugs were recovered from her.
#
It was, I think, on the basis of WhatsApp messages or something where she was, you know,
#
getting something for Sushant Singh Rajput to smoke. So it's kind of ridiculous. I'm also
#
reminded of how, you know, the government released T-Star Settelvard's credit card record once to
#
show that she brought alcohol from a store. I mean, what freaking business is that of anyone?
#
So the thing here is, even if we had a proper laws protecting us the way the state is,
#
and how, you know, it's also dysfunctional, it probably wouldn't even matter. Let's kind of
#
go back to the fourth of the suggestions that you and Ruben made. And I also want to explore
#
one aspect of this bit where you said, quote, countries such as India with large out of pocket
#
expenditures in private health care must restore the balance between health care and robust public
#
health that focuses on improving health outcomes for all. Only a capable state can deliver the
#
latter. And what I'd like to ask you about and elaborate on, because I think this is a subject
#
that confuses a lot of people, is the difference between health care and public health, that
#
sometimes when you talk about, you know, public health, people assume that, oh, this means that
#
the state will pay everybody's medical expenses, which is their health care expenses, which is,
#
you know, not the case. It means something entirely different. It means not necessarily
#
treating diseases, but preventing them from arising in the first place. So, you know,
#
it's rising in the first place. So, can you talk a little bit about, firstly, this distinction? And
#
secondly, what can the state now do to sort of make sure that whenever such a pandemic next occurs,
#
its effects are relatively mitigated? So, you're right. So, we're talking about, you know,
#
prevention of communicable diseases, prevention of infectious diseases, and everything that
#
can be done to prevent that, including, say, fumigating your streets to, like, making sure
#
there's no saturated water that can be breeding sites for mosquitoes, to ensuring there's clean
#
water available for citizens to drink, and, you know, there's no chances of contamination,
#
and also ensuring that your sanitation systems are not, you know, leaking into your water pipe
#
systems. All of these things are unheld. I mean, the reason why they should exist is to have a
#
healthier population and a healthier citizenry, so that, you know, a healthy population can,
#
you know, be more productive, and the gains are, in terms of, again, increased revenues for the
#
state. So, that's the entire justification for having a public health system, not as opposed to
#
a public health care system, which is taking care of, like, an individual, sort of, once
#
there's a prognosis, then helping with the curing and the, you know, those other post-illness
#
treatments and so on. That's the major sort of difference. So, what we are saying is that
#
we need to have, what do our departments of public health actually have power over,
#
say, in the municipal body? Is it just looking after public hospitals, or is it actually having
#
a say in terms of, you know, what is your plan for augmenting your water infrastructure? What
#
is your plan for augmenting your sewage networks? And this is a point, again, that I made earlier,
#
that it's not the slacker thing. It is generally, okay, as fumigation and so on, these other
#
activities may come under public health, but not this idea of infrastructure investment.
#
And so, you need to think about all of these state functions and state services from a,
#
as a public health function, and not just a public service function. The second thing is, I mean,
#
and we obviously caveat it by saying only a capable state can do this, which should clue you
#
into our inherent cynicism to actually expecting a state that is not capable, which could be,
#
many of our local governments are not up to the task to be able to do these things,
#
and for aforementioned reasons of not having any real powers or avenues to be able to do that.
#
So, A, although public health needs to be looked at from this angle, it's very, even, I mean,
#
even after a pandemic, I don't think that until we solve the problem of decentralization, we can't
#
really expect at the municipal level, things to really change and governance systems to really
#
change at the municipal level to actually look at it as a integrated thing. I mean, it would be
#
it would be great if maybe one or two cities tried it. I guess it may be easier to do in,
#
not in a Bombay or a Mumbai mega city, but in a smaller city in a relatively prosperous state
#
government, maybe that may work. I mean, in a relatively prosperous state, a smaller city may
#
be able to do it. But yeah, I think it's necessary, but it's not, at least I personally don't see
#
it happening like anytime soon. Fair enough. Let's kind of move past this narrow depressing
#
context of what the state can do and all of that and just talk broadly about cities and COVID in
#
general. Now, what we've seen as we were discussing, you know, trends of the past,
#
you know, Ed Lazer wrote a great piece on this, which would forward it to me, which we'll link
#
from the show notes that pandemics happen, cities bounce back, that there's an inherent need for
#
cities and that kind of agglomeration. So, you know, things will continue as usual, but at the
#
same time, leave the pandemic aside, you know, is there a case to be made that we need to redefine
#
how we think of cities and how we think of networks and communities in the sense that
#
I was reading this excellent paper for Bain and Co by Karen Harris and a couple of co-authors,
#
where I came across this phrase, the cost of distance. And her point, of course, is that
#
looks, the reason cities come together is because of the cost of distance, because distance is
#
expensive. It is hard to communicate and to send goods and services across too much space. So
#
therefore you need to all conglomerate together in close distances. And that's why cities are
#
there. But the trend that has been happening over the last couple of decades is that the cost of
#
distance is reducing massively. For example, just think about messages. You can send an email to
#
anyone anywhere in the world and it, you know, you're not actually sending a letter where
#
the cost of transporting a physical letter, you know, gets the rises with the distance covered.
#
You are reaching a stage where you will have, say, delivery drones, where you will have eventually
#
self-driven cars and trucks and all of that. So the cost of distance is reducing massively.
#
And what these lockdowns, you know, imposed because of COVID-19 have also taught us,
#
though it's a cliche to say that we'll be working from home forever. I sincerely hope not. But
#
what they've also shown is that it is possible for a lot of people to work from a distance,
#
that what we really miss is not so much in terms of efficiency, but what at least,
#
you know, I of course don't work for a company. So I, you know, I don't have personal experience
#
with that aspect of it. What I miss is just going out and physically meeting friends and that can,
#
you know, change any way with time. But it seems to me that in many different ways, therefore,
#
as we redefine our communities and we redefine who our neighbors are, because I think the whole
#
concept of who your neighbor is, is not necessarily only a geographical concept that, you know, when
#
we'd spoken about doing this episode three months ago, we'd said that, you know, let the lockdown
#
end and we are in Mumbai, we'll meet up at a studio and do it. But now we've decided to play
#
it safe and we are doing it remotely, like I record with my guests from all over the world.
#
So that space doesn't matter, the distance doesn't matter, it no longer matters so much that we are
#
in the same city. In fact, you know, up to a couple of years ago, I thought I can live in any city,
#
it doesn't really matter to me. And then I realized when the podcast took off, that I have to be in
#
Mumbai, because I have access to a studio and I have access to some guests. So I have to be
#
in a big city. And now with this pandemic, I'm realizing that, hey, even that's actually not
#
really true. All I need is a great internet connection and I'm sorted. You know, everything
#
else is remote. So there are these, sorry, if I feel like I'm rambling, but there are these sort
#
of two questions. One, that do you think that at a conceptual level, the notion of a city
#
and the notion of why it's necessary was going to change anyway as time progressed? And if so,
#
do you feel that might have been accelerated by it coming into such sharp and concrete focus
#
because of the pandemic? To a certain extent, this is a lot more relevant to a developed
#
country context. And to, you know, even in India, certain section of the population, right, who
#
can set it at home and have a stable enough internet connection, although I can't claim that
#
mine is stable at all. But there's even, okay, so taking care of like, let's say those constraints
#
are taken care of, right? Everyone gets like great access to great internet and, you know,
#
so there's no problems of information technology or all these things are taken care of. Why would
#
you still want to be in a city? I think it is, in a sense, there is an idea of wanting to be able
#
to do some things that cities can afford you to do that other things can't. You can't, so for
#
instance, going to the, again, not very relevant in other cases, but in Mumbai, you can enjoy a
#
nice like classical concert, you know, at the NCP and then the next day, you know, go to another
#
go to another film, sort of club and watch a lovely film and do all these other things which
#
are possible because these your arts and your culture needs some densities to be able to survive.
#
And that's what cities afford. So it's not it, of course, it's your livelihoods
#
that matter and that bring you here in the first place. But what matters to you is also sort of
#
something like going and watching a great movie at a film festival and going and watching a nice,
#
you know, opera somewhere. And those things are not something that I don't think the cost of
#
distance argument applies. And I still I think there are enough people that want to be able to
#
sort of have Thai food one day and then have like order in some Chinese the next day and, you know,
#
enjoy some good food again. And these these kinds of places will only thrive if there's a certain
#
number of clientele there. So in a sense, there is value to the city for all these other pleasures
#
that it affords for which will not be addressed by this thing of cost of distance going away.
#
So you know, you can of course, watch some concert online and rent a movie online. But I mean, I don't
#
I think I'll be it'll be safe to say that it's not the same thing as watching a live performance.
#
The other reason why cities are important is also the anonymity and the social mobility that they
#
afford certain sections of people. If you are stuck in a rural farm somewhere with the, you know,
#
with the same kind of oppressive systems around you, and you happen to be somebody who's not from,
#
you know, one of the socially privileged communities over there, then they're moving
#
to cities will afford you a level of anonymity, they'll afford you an opportunity for social
#
mobility, which again, it's not something that it's not a cost of distance problem per se.
#
So I still think that as much as we think that cities are, you know, likely going to be redundant,
#
or you don't need cities around anymore, we undervalue the these softer aspects of
#
like the non measurable aspect of urban living. And those I feel are not non trivial. And they
#
do sort of, you know, they will continue to persist. And that's why I mean, I'm, I'm pretty
#
optimistic that we that cities are not going to go away. I mean, a lot of people may wish them
#
away, but I don't think that that's going to happen.
#
No, I agree entirely with you. In fact, you know, I love cities, you know, whenever I go on
#
vacations, or whatever, I'd rather go to a big city than to some really secluded nice place on
#
a hill or whatever, because just taking in that new life of a new city is something I find
#
wonderful. And I'm both your reasons are great. And you know, the second one that you gave me
#
the social mobility reason, I thought that they're what applies that you know, if you're
#
a Dalit stuck in a village with an entrenched and oppressive car system, then forget the cost
#
of distance, there is a cost of proximity. And you actually want to put some distance between
#
you and wherever you are. So, you know, that's a great reason. And your other reason is something
#
that I kind of viscerally feel like my being in Bombay, the highlight of every year for me,
#
clearly not yours, because I've never seen you there is a mommy film festival, where I will just
#
make sure that I have that week off and I watch some 29 films in those seven days. And it's just
#
totally the highlight for me. And that's made possible by the fact that there is a city. So
#
there are all these viewers and all the economies of scale work out. Now, one could argue that here,
#
you could just sit at home and on your big high definitions, screens recreate the experience.
#
But I guess that depends on how much you value the social part of the experience. But one thing
#
that you definitely cannot recreate and that you will not have without cities is, you know,
#
specialty cuisine restaurants, because, you know, those depend on these large networks of people to
#
for those, you know, for it to make feasible to serve those little long tails. So I couldn't
#
agree more with all of this as I think you've taken enough of your time and you've been very
#
patient and generous with your insights. I'll leave with a sort of a question that you must
#
have been expecting, which is that, you know, talking about not just cities, but your work
#
with cities and the way Indian cities are going and so on and so forth, just in that context,
#
over the next 10 years, what gives you hope and what gives you despair?
#
What gives me hope is actually this very famous. I don't know if it is actually that famous.
#
Ellen Barry wrote a piece in New York Times about these girls who had come from Odisha to work in
#
Bangalore in a textile factory and just it was about their lives and it was a lovely piece about
#
how where they went, what they did after work and how for many of them, they were tasting freedom
#
for the first time, financial freedom, freedom to discover who they are. And that sort of,
#
you know, that it's maybe I'm looking at it from a very rose-tinted perspective, but it gives me hope
#
that we are still affording these kinds of opportunities to people to actually be able
#
to experience independence and freedom and thinking about what their dreams and aspirations are.
#
And to come to what gives me despair, it is that, you know, that story was written a few years ago
#
and things have changed since then. We're seeing, I mean, the economic situation is not great and
#
the pandemic has just completely led to all sorts of breakdowns of economic systems, social systems
#
even. And I mean, as much as I'd like to believe, I'm not, I think it's going to be a long time
#
coming before we actually get back to those levels of, you know, growth and prosperity and
#
that track, going back to that track of growth and prosperity is going to take us some time.
#
And things can, I mean, things can go wrong in all kinds of ways. So it's not a given that
#
we'll get there eventually. And, you know, it's just a small few years of, but those few years
#
are very, very, very costly in terms of what they mean for so many millions of people who are
#
experiencing, you know, going back under the poverty line and so on. So that gives me some despair.
#
Yeah, that's a lot of despair and some that I share with you. So I shall end on the note of hope
#
that, you know, this is not the last that I've seen of you on the Scene on the Unseen and hopefully
#
the next time we can record in person. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do follow Weatherhee on Twitter at weatherheetandale,
#
one word. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes
#
of the Scene on the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of the Scene on the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
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