Escaping Coketown

The west reeled for centuries from the aftermath ofindiscriminate industrialisation following the dictates of wealth over healthand wellbeing. The consequences were that urbanisation increased in almostdirect proportion to industrialisation, as Lewis Mumford, in The Culture ofCities records: "Between 1820 and 1900 the chaos of the great cities islike that of a battlefield… In the new provinces of city building, one mustnow keep ones eyes on the bankers and the industrialists and the mechanicalinventors. They were responsible for most of what was good and almost all thatwas bad... they created a new type of city: that which Dickens, in Hard Times,called Coketown. In a greater or a lesser degree, every city in the WesternWorld was stamped with the characteristics of Coketown."

"This childish belief in the industrialist as the divinely appointed agentof a Higher Power", Mumford notes further, "prepared the way for thecomplete un-building of the city." There was no limit to the chaotic urbanproliferation since all established standards of tradition, order, decency andaesthetics broke down, and the sole controlling agent was ‘profit’.

The lessons of the disastrous consequences of rampant industrialisation arewell documented in the centuries since the beginnings of the industrial town.Yet the industrialising countries of the Third World have followed the same pathof regressive urbanisation and the ‘Coketowns’ of the West visit almost allcities of the Third World with their anarchic prosperity, smoky industrialpigeon-holes and massive clusters of slums.

Commenting on the sale of Mill land in Mumbai, anational Daily observed: "In a market economy, there can be no development,even or especially for the poor or those deprived of fresh air, if the market isnot allowed to function." True words these, but where in any of the industrialcities of India do the poor or those deprived of fresh air haveany kind of access to a semblance of healthful living? Will the men who onceworked in the now-defunct mills have such access? Mumbai was once, and Delhi istoday, a thriving city where the phenomenal wealth of the city is directlyproportionate to its growing slums.

The nature and constitution of our industrial cities and towns is stuck in atime warp of, not decades, but centuries. Their growth has not been organic andorganised but haphazard and confused, subject to rampant corruption and thedictates of the land mafia. More often than not, these create and produce severeenvironmental dangers that hold not only urban populations to ransom but entireregions of virgin forest and other ecologically sensitive areas that are scarredand irreparably destroyed. The Bhopal Gas tragedy - to which over 22,000 deathswere ‘directly attributable’ - is one horrific example of what unregulatedindustry can do, and its massive power of destruction. Factories and industriesacross the country continue to discharge effluents and noxious gases untreatedinto the environment, and hazardous industries continue to exist cheek-by-jowlwith overcrowded residential areas and slums in innumerable towns.

Since Independence, the government has promoted the labour intensivesmall-scale industries to help with job creation and encourage decentralisedindustrial development. These industries account for 40 percent of allindustrial production, 35 percent of the total exports and employ almost 17million people in 3.2 million units. The resultant clustering of theseindustries leads to serious environmental problems. One small example can befound in the clusters of textile dyeing industries that have led to severeproblems for towns situated on small rivers like Pali, Balotra, and Jodphur inRajasthan, Jetpur in Gujarat and Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu.

In larger cities, polluting industries are required to be located indesignated areas, but this is seldom implemented. For years, administrationsturn a blind eye to illegal units, ignoring appalling working and livingconditions. In Delhi, thousands of such units flourished for decades, and inlarge parts of the city, residences, industrial smelters and sweatshops meldedinto an indistinguishable mass, chunks of putrefying hell on earth. Suddenly,overnight, in year 2000, the Supreme Court ordered the closure and removal ofthousands of polluting units. In a natural historical cycle, cities continuallygrow and purge themselves of all offending contaminators without such wrenchinganguish, but in Delhi, at one fell swoop, 138,000 workers and their familieswere displaced, with no provision for housing or other facilities in areas wherethese industries were relocated.

Unfortunately, the zeal to develop the industrial sector is not backed with acomparable zeal to develop orderly cities. "When you know how to build citiesand to rule them," said John Ruskin, "you will be able to breathe in theirstreets, and the ‘excursion’ will be the afternoon’s walk or game in thefields round them".

But administrations and city municipalities in Indiacertainly do not know how to build cities, let alone how to rule them.Industrial townships set up by corporate entities and business houses, in somecases, however, have done somewhat better. One of the best of these was set upby that great pioneer Jamshetji Tata. Today, Jamshedpur is the outcome of thecompassionate and far thinking vision of that one man. Inspired by the ideas ofthe great planner Robert Owen and his plans for industrial townships built as‘garden cities’, Jamshetji, who passed away before the town completed, hadalready set the guiding principles that would shape the city.

In a letter to his son, Dorab, in 1902 he wrote, "Be sure to lay widestreets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick- growing variety. Besure that there is plenty of space for lawns and gardens. Reserve large areasfor football, hockey and parks. Earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedanmosques, and Christian churches."

Today, Jamshedpur is among the greenest of India’s cities, with a 75percent literacy rate that is unparalleled in eastern India. The water is ofsuch high quality that it is one of the few Indian cities where one can drinkdirectly from the tap. Each year, Tata Steel arranges for the cleaning up ofover 120,000 tonnes of garbage, spends Rs. 25 crore on the Tata Main Hospitalwhich takes care of employees and the general public, and expends Rs. 139 croreon the upkeep of the city.

The story of Jamshedpur is heartening, but behind the-well intentionedaltruism is another dark secret of industrial development. Set up in the tribalheartland, the success of the township would have come at some cost for thetribal inhabitants of the area.

That is the other face, the flip side of large-scaleindustries that make inroads into virgin territories, and that provide littlebenefit to the original inhabitants and the natural habitat. Today, theecologically sensitive habitat of the Sunderbans,a ‘world heritage site’ and home to the Sunderbans Tiger Reserve, is beingthreatened by a ‘five star mega tourism project’. The Rs. 500 crore-plusSunderbans Tourism Project is part of Sahara India’s tourism circuit in WestBengal, and is intended to "develop five virgin islands in the 36,000 squarekilometres of water area in the Sunderbans." Similar stories are beingrepeated with mega projects in, among others, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh andthat ethereal land of mists, Arunachal Pradesh.

‘Market forces’ must be allowed to function unhindered and developmentmust make inroads into all parts of the country. But when the two run uncheckedand bound by no semblance of rule of law, we set in motion a pattern ofdevelopment that took the West centuries to recover from, harkening back to amodel of industrialisation that the West has long turned its back on.