I have seen the effects of almost unbridled growth.
In India.
I’m just back from a month’s visit after 48 years.
Development isn’t pretty and it isn’t good for people, either.
With the exception of the British Empire’s cantonments, cities in India were never planned. They grew; they grow, like octopi. When I was interviewing people in Jabalpur back in 1970, I had an object lesson in what unplanned development meant. I had addresses and names, but the addresses were building numbers, not streets, because the streets were really just meandering spaces between buildings and the numbers were in order of when the building was built, not some rational numerical order down a straight street. The only way to find somebody was to ask someone who knew you, trusted you, or someone with you. Then my interviewees were easily found.
While new parts of cities, like the new Kochi, and the new Sagar, have relatively straight streets, there are no regulations enforced that prevent people from putting up any sign, of any size, building extensions out into the street, or shelters for unlicensed shops. In the oldest continuously inhabited city, Varanasi, there are no traffic lights. There are free-for-alls at every intersection, even ones where police try valiantly to direct traffic (they don’t succeed). Motorcycles outnumber cars, pedestrians equal motorcycles; trucks and buses vie for space; cows and bulls wander imperturbably down streets and everyone avoids them, even stops for them. Traffic stops for little else.
India is developing rapidly: averaging over 7% GDP per year, but it’s not planned, not regulated; it’s out of control. It looks like what rapid, unregulated development looks like. It’s not pretty.
Delhi, Mumbai, even Agra, had air pollution that was visible; people had hacking coughs, some wore face-masks. Even in Darjeeling, even in Sagar, in the virtual center of the subcontinent, air pollution is present. Only out in the hinterlands, far from mega-cities is the air somewhat clean (Delhi 25 million, Mumbai 23 million, even Bhopal in central India 3.3 million).
Development (the Union Carbide explosion of 1984) killed our driver’s father in Bhopal, when he was 2, and his mother 10 years later. (Note: the American corporation responsible never paid for the damage). Mr Asif had to quit school at age 12 to feed his remaining family.
Development is killing people every day. Many Indians expressed dismay at what is happening to their land. Houses, huts, shops, temples, mosques, churches, mega-malls, shops under awnings, hotels, all sprout almost spontaneously along any right of way, whether it be a straight street, a boulevard, a highway, or a meandering alley. Traffic is incessant all day, an assault of motorcycles, a flood of people, cars, buses, trucks--many way overloaded---cows, bulls and even dogs. Opposing lanes keep shifting, but there are two, except at an intersection, where it looks like a free-for-all in slow motion. Cars, buses, motorcycles, three-wheeled taxis converge, cows and un-wheeled people, dart in and out between vehicles. Lanes get seriously blurred. So do the edges of the roadway.
It was in one of those free-for-alls that a motorcyclist, coming from behind, accelerating his way through what he saw as a hole in the mass of traffic ahead of him, grazed inches of skin off my arm. I wore a large bandage for about a week. I had been as far over to the side of the road as I could manage, skirting around trucks or taxis parked halfway into the road, following a guide.
In Darjeeling we had a guide, Amit, who lives in a village in the valley below. He told us that he won’t sell his ancestral home and land, but that people all around him have moved out, have become absentee landlords. All are happy to sell to any developer, as long as the price is right.
There are no regulations, or regulations enforced, that would prevent almost any kind of development, anywhere. Amit said that in the monsoon, all the drainage of the new construction wells up as sewage in the streets.
Further, climate change is worrisome: flowers blooming now that should be later, marked changes in rainfall—if the monsoon fails most will starve—Darjeeling is subtropical, but high in the hills. Our view of the Himalayas was completely blocked by clouds and mist the whole time we were there.
When we drove from Delhi’s Ring Road to Agra, about 4 hours, there was nowhere along the way, even in what looked like the pastoral Gangetic plain, heavily cultivated, that the haze of pollution went away. Most of the air pollution was from either Delhi or Agra ( the latter a little over 1.5 million in 201l, probably closer to 2 million now), but a lot of pollution was from brick kiln production out in the hinterland, burning coal to feed the building boom.
Neither climate change nor development are kind to human beings, or other living things, especially when India has no control over either. The people are wonderful: kind, patient, friendly, helpful, but many expressed anxiety and helplessness about what was happening to their land.
It’s what unbridled growth looks like, like the “beautiful” modern buildings thrown helter-skelter, next to huts, tiny shops, jerry-built apartment towers along a crowded highway, or the piles of trash, some being eaten by the wandering cattle. Trash is also burning, adding to air pollution.
India is a vision of what the US could look like if Trump and the GOP are successful in eviscerating all regulations and all environmental rules.
However, there is one crucial difference: when I worked in India in 1970, the population was about 450 million (100 million more than the US now). Now, India has 1.324 billion people, almost three times US figures, and on a territory about 1/3 the US mainland.
And India is getting even hotter than it was already, with temperatures on the Gangetic plain often climbing above 120 F. How long will 1.324 billion people be able to survive there?
Will humans leave barren deserts and poisoned wastelands?
I haven’t mentioned the Modi Government, until now. Narendra Modi was (is?) a Hindu extremist, member of the RSS, a former member of which assassinated Gandhi. He organized the Bharatiya Janata Party in Gujarat as an RSS assignment. Now, the BJP rules India and most of its states. Modi is readying to run for his second term as PM. Hindus and businesses are inclined to like him, Muslims distrust him and have reasons. “He drives people apart,” said one of our Muslim drivers. Other, non-Muslims said the same thing. He’s not succeeded in taking over Kerala, now ruled by the Communist Party India, Marxist, but the BJP took over the CP’s other state, Tripura. In Kerala, Hindus, Muslims and Christians live in apparent harmony: they have been doing so since the 7th century, but the BJP still tries to drive them apart
As far as his economic policies go, Modi is for deregulation, (much needed in India after the corrupt “Indian Socialism” of the Congress, bound up in (literal) red tape, courtesy of the Raj) but he’s also for protecting his friends, cronies and Indian billionaires. He says he’s “pro-business.” The likelihood is that his government will continue to appeal to the super-rich, and continue to allow development to go on unregulated. Inequality will probably worsen. The environment will probably be further compromised.
I love India, still, but it’s not a pretty picture.