In defence of Chandigarh, the city with ‘rock-bottom quality of life’

A headline in The Times of India dampened my mood on Tuesday: Chandigarh at bottom of ‘quality of life’ list again. Having visited the city after a gap of almost 10 years, and returned home just a day earlier, I was taken aback. Really, what had I missed?

The roadsides seemed greener, if anything. The air was sparkling fresh, the sky inky blue (I showed my son the constellation Orion on the first night). The traffic was heavier than I remembered but we didn’t get caught in any serious jam despite the city not having flyovers. The traffic police were still unsparing of people jumping lights or braking past the stop line.

Power and water have never been big problems in City Beautiful. Driving around the city, I found some of the shabbier areas — the labour colonies — had gentrified. There were more cycling tracks, and no motorcycles plying in them. The markets were bustling and parking was NOT easy, but still better than in Vaishali or Indirapuram in Ghaziabad, where I now stay.

All in all, Chandigarh impressed me as a city where I might lead a healthy, comfortable life with considerable leisure time, since I won’t be commuting for two hours daily. And it has good systems too. My first car’s registration certificate in 2000 was a smart card. In UP, I got an A4-size sheet of paper as my RC in 2012. Delhi may have fussed the most over high-security numberplates, but Chandigarh called and fitted my father’s 10-year-old car with one last month.

So, how did Chandigarh end up at the bottom of Janaagraha’s ‘quality of life’ index?

To find the answer, I visited Janaagraha’s website. It says ASICS (Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems) is “India’s only independent benchmarking of cities through a systemic framework. ASICS evaluates City-Systems — the complex, mostly invisible factors such as laws, policies, institutions, processes and accountability mechanisms that strongly influence Quality of Life in India’s cities and benchmarks them against global counterparts.”

Mark the words ‘systemic framework’, ‘invisible factors’ and ‘strongly influence’. It is not a survey of ground civic realities but an academic exercise. It is not concerned with how clean a city’s streets actually are, but with whether the city has systems (laws, policies, institutions, processes and accountability mechanisms) to ensure cleanliness. I think all the newspapers that made this report a measure of ‘liveability’ or ‘quality of life’ on the ground jumped the gun.

And since we are discussing Chandigarh, this calls for a Santa-Banta anecdote. No, it’s not a joke.

Santa had a Maruti 800. It was easy to drive and maintain. It started reliably every morning and gave 18kmpl in the city and 23kmpl on the highway. It could turn on a dime and was a cinch to park. The insurance and running repairs cost almost nothing. Santa loved it because it did what it was meant to do, always.

Banta was smarter. He researched carefully before buying his car. I can’t tell you the brand, but he bought a fully-loaded model. It was expensive and Banta was justifiably proud of it. It had adjustable steering and seats. It had climate control and cruise control and smart volume control. It had GPS and an entertainment system. The engine had sport and economy settings. Yeah, it gave only 13kmpl, but what the heck!

It was a far more evolved car than Santa’s 800. True, it was big and unwieldy, and one or the other of those electronic systems malfunctioned (besides draining the battery) from time to time, but still, it was a swell car. The insurance and repairs cost a bomb, but that was the price for pride of ownership.

Banta had the better car. At least on paper. But Santa was the happier man of the two on the ground.

About Chandigarh, then. Well, it is a city that works. Participatory, democratic systems or not, it just works, and people who live in Chandigarh are happy, period.