Free From India?

For

• Well-ordered living spaces in which like-minded people can rediscover meaning of community
  
• Good for kids. Can play safely with other kids, be sporty.
  
• Provides good security for large numbers, taking pressure off the police
  
• Good for India because middle class look after themselves, letting government focus on poor
  
• Generates economic buzz in peripheral areas by bringing well-off people to live in them

• Sterile ghettos for people of the same class, shutting out others, especially poor
  
• Give kids no exposure to different types of people. Friends are clones, often at same school.
  
• Makes India safe for some people not others. Without pressure, policing declines.
  
• Bad for India because those with clout no longer have stake in improving the system; become consumers instead of citizens
  
• Social contrasts, environmental impact on neighbourhood cause huge resentment

***

The place is called Palm Meadows, which is exactly the sort of name you’d expect it to have. The first gated villa complex to be developed in Bangalore in the early 2000s, it is still one of the most desired addresses of its kind, though snazzier clones are coming up everywhere. It has been known to print T-shirts saying: ‘Proud of Palm Meadows’. Its residents have been known to wear them.

They are, as you might imagine, a transnational crowd: self-made entrepreneurs, head honchos of mncs and IT companies, NRIs and western expats. Not surprisingly, Fourth of July and Hallowe’en are events on the social calendar. "This could be anywhere in the world," residents tell you, with pride. Yes, anywhere, except India.

Next stop on the bubble trail is ATS Greens Village, at the other end of the country. There are glimmerings of transnationalism here, too, but most residents seem to be down-to-earth North Indians. Many, who bought early and relatively cheaply (Rs 50 lakh four years ago for a 2,800 square foot flat that has trebled in value), are emigres from Delhi neighbourhoods.

Emigre, which means political exile, really is the right word. By turning their backs on power outages and water shortages, they probably took the most political step of their lives. They opted out. Usha Gupta, a government school teacher who moved here from the DDA colony of Sukhdev Vihar, smiles as she recalls how it used to be: getting up early to fill water, parking fights and garbage rows. Other residents also radiate pleasure. It is the pleasure of being in a warm room after a blizzard.

When you take a good look around, it’s clear that while this is not Palm Meadows, it is no wallflower in the amenities department. It has 24-hour electricity, purified water, golf buggies, neat mosaic paths and fountains, a Food King supermarket and an Uncle Sam’s pastry shop.

Then, there is that grass again, maybe not a Palm Meadows green, but a lot better than anything on the other side. To protect it, six notices have been put up by the estate’s developer in the middle of the lawn. No cricket, football, litter, pets or cyclists. "Please report in," says one notice, a little ominously, "if you find someone spoiling your own complex." Gosh, this sounds so Singapore, especially ‘the report in’ bit. Do people get fined for chewing gum? Not yet. But a labourer was thrown off the premises for spitting gutka.

My informant is Shishir Sirkan, who manages the facilities here, on behalf of the ATS Group. He explains that it was the developer who laid down the rules and regulations, so that the place could run as a community. Some residents weren’t too happy with the one-way traffic rule in the complex, but have now fallen in line. These are Dilliwallas, right, why aren’t they throwing the rulebook right back? Usha’s engineer husband Onkar provides the clue: "Don’t Indians behave differently when they go to Singapore?"

When it comes to security, ATS Greens makes Palm Meadows look like a wimp. More than 85 security guards and 96 cameras protect the 650-odd families who live here. Apart from guarded main gates, there are guards and sensor-activated iron gates in every block. "When schoolbuses arrive and leave, guards surround them to protect the children; they are on full alert," says Sirkan. At night, they carry licensed arms.

"We have made our territory impenetrable," he declares. Let no one dare say it is located in Noida.

For many leading developers, the ‘givens’ are actually the minimum. The upper end of the gated market has become a fantasy fulfilment zone as developers compete for jaded palates. Spas instead of beauty parlours, a private hillside or golf course instead of just a landscaped garden, a ‘reflexology path’ embedded with stones pressing your feet as you walk. India enters this zone, if at all, in the form of yoga classes, Bollywood dancing sessions or ayurveda massages.

At the other end of the market, developers are pushing back the frontiers of cities to make gated living attainable for young professionals. Even suburbia is acquiring suburbia. "The average age of apartment buyers is 30. Our marketing feedback showed that we were missing out on young professionals, who couldn’t afford our flats in proper Gurgaon," says Surojit Basak of DLF Home Developers, explaining the company’s moves in Gurgaon’s outer reaches.

They pale before the new bubble lands taking shape at a breathtaking pace across India. The integrated townships, as they are called, are still a work in progress, but when they are built, some in two years flat, they will be the new face of urbanisation. Towns not built up bit by bit, as we have mostly known them to be, but cellular predetermined structures, stretching over hundreds, even thousands of acres, outside the municipal limits of cities. Here, as the developers’ slogan goes, you can ‘Walk to school, walk to work’, screening out even more dissonance. Some even have international schools, so you can sidestep not just power outages but cbse as well.

One typical new township is Amanora, a 400-acre sprawl that is taking shape outside Pune—one of several—and will be ready in two years. Self-billed as "India’s first truly digital town", offering "convenience at a press of a button, and a scan of your fingertip", it will have independent power, water and waste disposal systems, security systems, maintenance systems, cutting-edge architecture, schools, shopping hub, hospitals, colleges, a man-made lake, wide roads and much else. About 60,000 people will live here, and about 10,000 will enter and leave it everyday.

"I sometimes joke with the developer that now you should design your flag and your passport," says Anuraag Chowfla, the Delhi architect who is the master planner for the project. But he is not really joking. What worries Chowfla is that the new townships are bubbles—isolated from each other and from a larger urban space. "There is no big picture. They are not part of an overall plan taking in issues of impact, access, openness and connectivity. They are encouraged to be islands."

Architect Abhimanyu Dalal stresses that with the new focus on enclaves the value of context is diminishing. "Singapore-based firms are designing spaces in Bangalore," he says, "and it is easy to do that when you don’t have to worry about context; just design within defined boundaries."

On the positive side, Chowfla says, Amanora will extend the benefits of a good lifestyle to people with modest incomes. But the cheapest flat, a 465 sq ft apartment, is for Rs 15 lakh, according to Amanora’s marketing office. Where would that leave the poor? Probably in the servant quarter inside the enclave, or in a slum at its borders.

Few people living in gated communities would agree that this is secession. Most argue it is nothing of the sort. They work hard, they pay their taxes, can afford it, have earned it. They drive on the same streets, do the same jobs, fulfil the same social obligations as everyone else. And how is living in a gated community, they ask, such a big departure from the way people like us already live in India?As they point out:

• Gated communities have not invented self-provisioning. Insulating yourself against urban mess with generators, guards and borewells are in-your-face features of Indian urban living. Says Onkar Gupta: "What Narayana Murthy says is true, if the government fails to provide, people don’t wait, they make their solutions."
  
• Gated communities have not invented gates. Fences separate the bureaucracy from the people, the rich from the poor, communities and professional groups—even food groups—from each other.
  
• Gated communities did not invent inequality—there are plenty of ostentatious fortified islands in privileged city neighbourhoods.
  
• Gated communities did not invent middle-class selfishness or political apathy. Points out R.K. Misra, winner of the Times of India Lead India campaign, who lives in one: "The middle class does not care about political parties, and political parties don’t give a damn about them because urban folks don’t vote."

Many point out that they give back. "Life doesn’t end here. I have a social heart, I contribute to the country," says Abraham Kuruvilla, an engineer living in L&T South City in South Bangalore, who works with a voluntary organisation. Misra offers several examples too, pre-eminently his own—a civic activist who has helped build roads and organised benefits for nearby villagers.

So how, then, are gated communities any different from other bubbles of privilege? How does living in them, or not living in them, make a difference—for society, the city, the country?

For Arun Shet, a US-returned Bangalore doctor, who lived briefly in an exclusive gated community, a defining insight was an incident in which his domestic helper was barred from bringing her teenage daughter into the complex. "I complained that the staff should have checked with me, as they would do for any guest of mine, and was told that it was a security issue. What also bothered me was that other residents were not at all empathetic." It was one of the reasons he was glad to leave.

In fact, more than any other urban constellation, gated communities are about efficiently classifying and separating people by income level. Class segregation is integral to the model; it is the junction where aspiration meets good business sense. Developers emphasise that it makes ‘no sense’ to put ‘studio flats’ or ‘900 sq ft’ people in a very ‘high-end’ place. They don’t really need air-conditioned lobbies, and would cavil at high maintenance costs. So they get their own ‘middle end’ complexes.

Real world neighbourhoods, even elite ones, are not composed of people of the same class and their servers. There is plenty in between. Big houses often coexist with the modest rooms in which struggling writers are said to have penned the first drafts of their novels. Townships, while necessarily less sterile than gated communities because of their size and range of activities, will also internally gate and segregate.

And while they might create economic opportunities for their neighbours, they also unleash conflicts over water, land use, the destruction of roads during construction and dumping of sewage into lakes. Adjacent middle-class plot-owners are bitterly resentful that Brigade Millennium, a Bangalore development, jumped the queue for piped water. "There is no piped water 50 feet outside the development. The water tank that supplies their homes is clearly visible from ours," says G. Jagadish, president of a federation of local resident welfare associations.

Scale also affects the way the individual responds to her environment. "Something happens when you increase the scale of privateness (from a private home to a complex); it becomes easier to blot out what you see around. You have fewer reasons for being angry, for being forced to engage," points out Lalitha Kamath, who works on urban governance issues in Bangalore. Centralised maintenance systems run by the developer, or by a professional management company, aid insulation.

Kamath says: "When there is a problem, the system does the solutioneering at the first level. You don’t have to meet the people who are solving the problem; you don’t even have to be at home. It is only if the problem is serious, involving the whole community, that you have to get involved. And that rarely happens; micro problems are far more frequent. In the larger sense, it means less people complaining, less people demanding accountability, less grassroots pressure."

The voices that are falling silent are powerful and influential ones. "People who have the clout to leverage the system to change public service delivery don’t have a stake in doing it. Those who have a stake, can’t do it," says Jayal. Water, Kamath says, is a strong example of lack of pressure from a self-provisioning middle class having disastrous consequences for the poor—who are sometimes forced to buy water for 300 times the price the middle class pays for for it.

C.V. Madhukar, director of the Delhi-based PRS Legislative Research, makes a similar point about security. "We need to regain our cities and living areas. We can’t say let’s put a fence here and make it safe for some. Egalitarianism, a founding pillar of our democracy, is at stake. The more it becomes possible for urban elites to stay in gated communities, the less pressure there is to increase spending on the safety and security of the general public. This can be very detrimental to our very sense of democracy."

Pushpa Arabindoo, a research scholar in urban planning at the London School of Economics, who studied several enclosed apartment complexes in Chennai, felt their associations were more concerned with ‘well-being’ than ‘welfare’. At an Annual Extraordinary General Meeting that she attended, the discussion moved quickly from civic issues to collective bargaining with service providers, and with retail outlets, for discounts; and about ways to make money by displaying ads. "You can see stalls selling consumer products like fridges and washing machines at many of these complexes on the weekends. These people are using their empowerment as citizens to reinforce their position as consumers. I call them citizen-consumers," she says.

Scholars studying middle-class associations say all elite associations are not like this. They are slowly engaging with wider urban governance issues and even putting up candidates for municipal elections. Says Karen Coelho of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, who is engaged in a group studying rwas: "Even in middle-class neighbourhoods there is a sense of being part of a more complex phenomenon of urban living. With slums, there is an attitude of ‘get the buggers out’, but rwas and middle-class residents know they have to grapple with issues like resettling them.