Notes from Davos: Fixing India’s Cities
Last month I had the privilege of speaking at the 2018 edition of the World Economic Forum in Davos. I was selected to represent the voice of young people as one of 50 Global Shapers selected from around the world. As a civic entrepreneur focused on liveable cities, the conference couldn’t have come at a more pivotal time.
A month before my talk at Davos on “liveable cities”, Cape Town announced to the world that it would run out of water in less than 100 days. There was talk of calling in the military & police to prevent violence and oversee water rationing. As a stunned world tried to grapple with the idea of a global city running out of water in our lifetimes — voices across India that have been speaking out about the water crises in our great cities (Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai etc.) suddenly grew stronger.
Every hour, 1800 Indians migrate to a city in search of better economic opportunities. We will need to build a city the size of Chicago every year for the next 2 decades to accommodate for this migration. All this while our existing cities are failing us on most quality of life metrics. We need to fix our cities before they implode, in a Cape Town-esque fashion.
I walked into Davos with some early hypotheses from my work with Lakeer in India, and walked out with five insights:
- The world’s biggest challenges are challenges of cities
- At the heart of it — the cities challenge is a democracy challenge
- We cannot have liveable cities without engaged citizens
- The relationship between city governments and citizens is based on grievance redressal; this needs to change
- The moral case for action on urban liveability is insufficient; we need to build the political & business case for action
The world’s biggest challenges are challenges of cities
Sustainable urbanisation in the developing world is important. Everyone knows it. Some people talk about it. No one has truly figured out how to do it. A lot of issues that we do talk about and focus on — better education, jobs, access to quality healthcare — are all increasingly becoming challenges of urban planning & administration. In fact, Our greatest challenges are challenges of cities.
To truly address the heart of these issues, we need to figure out how to build cities that work for all people. From Hanoi to Hyderabad, we’re struggling to build cities that do not hard-code inequity and unsustainability into their foundations.
At the heart of it, the urban liveability challenge is a democracy challenge
The stewards of our urban futures — our city and national governments — have no incentives to prepare us for the future.
Five year political terms have a predictable “rule of five” split. One year of settling in & planning, two years of work, one year of PR around the work, and one year of hitting the campaign road. What worsens this for cities is when the government at the national level is not aligned or supportive of city-level government. Cape Town’s government had a 10 year warning of the water crisis that they face today. The city-level machinery did a great job, but the national government dropped the ball — net result being ‘Day Zero’.
Traditional democratic institutions wear blinders, and this can be a good thing. It incentivises political leaders to act in ways that address immediate pains of citizens in return for votes that keep them in power.
But what of the pain that citizens don’t feel today? How can we expect political leaders to face the backlash of voters who see funds redirected from their current & seemingly more real challenges — to challenges of a future that they may not even understand? There is no right or easy answer to this. In my own country, budgets for rural sops and subsidies often shortchanges investing in our urban future because the results are not as “visible” to voters.
We cannot have liveable cities without engaged citizens
Switzerland, the host country of Davos, has roughly as many citizens as my home city of Hyderabad has. A top-down governance approach can still achieve liveability in a country like Switzerland with its spread-out population and high GDP.
That approach is next to impossible in India. As citizens, we have to get more involved in making our cities more liveable — but sadly the mechanisms to do so are lacking.
Thanks to the rigid top-down approach to democracy we inherited from the British a common citizen (without any major connections) can only accomplish a little in our cities. She can vote, she can file grievances or an RTI. On a good day she’ll be counted as a data point for the government.
What is missing is the space for her to weigh-in on if a plot of land should become a park or a library. Where does she go to talk about the skylines she wants to wake-up to? Where does she go to talk about the future of slums? Our urban governance mechanisms require a massive overhaul to stop seeing citizens as voters and complainants — and instead engage with them as people with an equal stake in (& dare I say expertise to contribute to) the city’s future.
The relationship between city governments and citizens is based on grievance redressal; this needs to change
Most large (>5 Million) cities in India have apps for citizens to report problems to the government. The best of these have around 100,000 downloads. A citizen shouldn’t have to download an App to be counted. Apps aren’t the answer to complex, systemic problems and often exclude more people than they include. We need to look beyond grievance apps with high barriers to entry.
Millions of people everyday talk about liveablility issues they face. Our challenge lies in capturing their voices. Building an app is easier than developing systems to engage with citizens while protecting their privacy. Anonymised social listening and sensor-linked infrastructure are a good start. But perhaps more fundamentally — how can a relationship built on complaints & reactive responses to those complaints be successful at all?
The moral case for action on urban liveability is insufficient; we need to build the political & business case for action
Before Davos, my team and I were quite careful to never use the word “politics” while talking about our work. We noticed this hesitation to speak about the relationship between politics & urban development among other civic engagement organisations too. However, the political establishment remains the most significant mover of all things city-related in India. So why shy away from that reality?
The lack of engagement from political structures is not always a case of apathy or unwillingness to act. City administration structures are a complex tangle of independent departments and municipalities. Often cities just simply don’t have the budgets to address all issues. I searched Davos for factors that incentivised governments to act with thoughtfulness and urgency, and brought back my stories to my team & other Hyderabadis.
The incentive for government action, we’ve come to realise, is simple but also contrarian. Just like in any system where something of value is traded (e.g. in politics it is power & influence) — the case for action needs to be clear.
So the case for action in urban liveability is to meet the unspoken government question of “why should I act”, with a hard-hitting answer around “this is how it will impact voting patterns.” It is to tell businesses who ask “why should I care about liveability in this neighbourhood?” that “this is how it will help you make more money”.
Our hypothesis is that building the political & business case for action on urban issues will nudge the governance machinery towards faster action. For instance, if a neighbourhood is reporting an issue with the water utility, we’re building our platform to estimate how many voters are impacted by it, their voting patterns in the past, and how solving the issue might impact those patterns.
In conclusion, Indians who live in cities can already anticipate the challenges coming our way. We know that our lives will get a little bit harder every day. Right now, we adapt by adjusting our baseline of what normal is because someone else sets that baseline for us and we have very limited say.
This is broken, and does not give us the power to determine our own destinies. We’ve abdicated all civic responsibility except for voting. The simple truth is this: a city of 10 or 15 or 20 million cannot be fixed by a handful of people. It’s time for all of us to step-up.
If this sounds like something you want to talk about then let’s connect at dipika@lakeer.org.
Lakeer is working on improving urban governance and liveability in India through civic tech and citizen engagement. In the next 2 decades 300 million Indians will move to cities in search of better quality of life. Our urban governance machinery is not ready for this future. At Lakeer we think citizen insights and action are essential to well-governed and liveable cities. We make this happen by gathering data from citizens and working with governments to prioritize limited resources.
