One letter gave me the idea for this week’s column. Dilip Risbud from San Jose, USA, wrote: “One could argue that a small village of 1,400 people is easy to transform into an ideal one and maintain it as such, ...but how do we lift our crumbling cities?” Turning somewhat autobiographical, he said, “I am an NRI currently vacationing in India. I have been living in the US for the last 28 years, but the pull towards home is only getting stronger and stronger! I have gone well beyond ‘write-a-check-feel-good’ stage and have been getting actively involved. These projects need time involvement more than money. My mission is to promote basic cleanliness.”

A good question: “How do we lift our crumbling cities?” It prompted me to ask myself several other questions. We talk of Ideal Villages. Once in a while, we visit them or read about them. The government launches schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Adarsh Gram Yojana, as the finance minister announced in his latest budget. But why doesn’t anyone talk about creating Ideal Cities? I know of no government that has launched an Adarsh Shahar Yojana. Is it because we have convinced ourselves that it is an impossibly lofty goal to pursue? Why have we given up hopes of turning any Indian city into an Ideal City? And if we city-dwellers are unwilling to set such an ambitious goal for ourselves, what right do we have to expect villages to become ideal villages? Isn’t it all the sign of our failed idealism, of idle romanticism, of an obligation-free fascination for the vanishing Indian Village?

The night I returned from Hivre Bazar to my home in Mumbai, my daughter was watching Slumdog Millionaire on a cable TV channel. The shocking-but-true scenes of Mumbai slums in the movie made me recall the following words of Lewis Mumford, the great American historian of urban civilisations. “Never before in world history had such vast masses of people lived in such a savagely deteriorated environment.” Mumbai may be India’s commercial capital and the abode of many fabulously rich people. But it is also a city where more than half the population lives in slums, many of them hellishly squalid. Other rapidly growing Indian cities are only comparatively different. In his book The City in History, Mumford takes a harshly critical view of the sprawl of modern cities and predicts that they would someday collapse under the weight of their own unsustainable growth. One may or may not agree with his prediction, but there is no denying that even the greatest cities in India and elsewhere in the world are nowhere near being called Ideal Cities—if by ‘ideal’ we mean the sum total of criteria such as equity, good physical and social infrastructure, care for the environment, harmony between man and man and man and nature, absence of crime, and a place where, as Mumford puts it, “the physical design and economic functions are secondary to their (cities’) relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community.”

As India gets urbanised at a maddening pace, there is a strong desire and demand among all sections of our urban population for better infrastructure and civic amenities. The demand is legitimate since its fulfillment is basic to both economic growth and better living standards. But, sadly, we are following an unbalanced approach to urban development, with too strong a focus on physical construction and too weak a focus on the human and moral factor. We are trying to create great cities, comparable to the best in the world, but not good cities. We associate ‘greatness’ with size and grandeur, but are turning a blind eye to the needs of a good city, since “good” refers basically to the ethical-cultural quality of human life.

Lawrence Haworth, a philosopher of urbanisation, writes in his book, The Good City, that a good city has two hallmarks: opportunity and community. Our present model of urban development puts a premium of enhancing economic opportunity, and that too for a minority section of the urban population, but it has proved to be a big failure when it comes to preserving and nurturing city-wide community relationships. When I visited Hivre Bazar, an aspect of its achievement that left the deepest impression on me was the villagers’ determination, in spite of their amazing economic progress, to preserve their original ethos of the village community, which Pawar extolled as the “people’s unity cutting across caste and other barriers, commitment to a common purpose, the spirit of cooperation, the readiness to share each other’s joy and sorrow.” Where is such community ethos in our cities? We are building wonderful new buildings, airports, bridges, stadia, etc, but where is the willingness among the privileged to share life’s joys and sorrows with the under-privileged?

Which is why Mahatma Gandhi was so full of despair about the city-centric modern civilisation. In Hind Swaraj, a brilliant little treatise whose centenary of publication is being observed this year, he wrote in his characteristically restrained style: “Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy. This civilisation seeks to increase bodily comforts, and it fails miserably even in doing so. It takes note neither of morality nor of religion. This civilisation is like a mouse gnawing while it is soothing us.”

Write to: sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com