Mumbai - On the verge of an implosion

Bachi Karkaria in The Guardian

It used to be India’s urban showpiece. Today, its sceptre and crown have fallen down and, in a phase of cynical destruction masquerading as “development”, Mumbai has become a metaphor for urban blight. 

Consider these statistics. Rubbish could be its Mount Vesuvius. Some 7,000 metric tonnes of refuse is spewed out each day. Dumping grounds are choked, yet there is no government-mandated separation or recycling.

Around 7.5 million commuters cram themselves into local trains every day and the fledgling metro and monorail are unlikely to make a perceptible difference in the near future.

There are 700,000 cars on the road and the authorities indirectly encourage private vehicle ownership by adding flyovers and expressways, instead of building or speeding up mass rapid transit systems. Private vehicle numbers have grown by 57% in the past eight years, compared with a 23% increase in public buses.

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There are around 700,000 cars on the roads of Mumbai causing untold congestion, air and noise pollution. Their number has grown by 57% over the past eight years. Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP

Toxic nitric oxide and nitrogen oxide levels stand at 252 microgrammes per cubic metre (mcg/m3) more than three times the safe limit of 80 mcg/m3. Protests against sound pollution fall on deaf ears.

There’s less than 0.03 acres of open space per 1,000 people. The global norm is four; London has a profligate 12.

There are 12.7 million people jammed into the 480 sq km that comprise today’s Greater Mumbai, that’s 20,680 people per sq km. We are the world’s eighth most-populated city – and dying to prove it.

As a consequence, every sixth Mumbaikar lives in a slum. The premium on land was exacerbated by the Rent Control Act of 1947, which wasn’t amended till 1999. Too little, too late. Real estate prices are unreal. It’s cheaper to buy a flat in Manhattan than in Malabar Hill, and you can be sure that shoddy materials will shortchange you in Mumbai.

Considering that housing is the city’s biggest shortfall, it’s ironic that unbridled construction is indisputably its biggest problem. Many villains have been blamed for Mumbai’s descent into urban hell, from mafia dons to impoverished migrants, but for the past three decades the main culprit is the “politician-builder nexus”. 

In 2005, the entire city was held hostage for three days. On 26 July, suburban Mumbai was lashed by 668 mm of rain in just 12 hours. Unwarned commuters and children in school buses were left high, but not dry, as roads and railway tracks disappeared. Slums and BMWs went under the deluge without discernment for their economic standing. It may have been the country’s financial capital, but in the photographs that followed, swaggering Mumbai didn’t look much different from a monsoon-marooned Bihar village.

For this humbling disaster, the finger pointed at that same culprit: the developer and his facilitator, the politician. There was nowhere for the rainwater to go. For decades the concrete army had been allowed to commandeer all open spaces, and illegal encroachments had done the rest. Public parks, verdant hills, salt-pans, school compounds, private garden plots, beaches, mangroves – nothing was spared.

The built environment in Mumbai had increased fourfold since 1925 – and at its fastest rate over the past 30 years – all at the cost of green cover and wetlands.

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Around 7.5 million commuters cram themselves into local trains every day.Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

The 2005 deluge brought to light the little-known fact that Mumbai had a river. The Mithi had been reduced to little more than a turgid drain, bubbling with the putrefactions of one of Asia’s largest slums, Dharavi. Why blame its desperate inhabitants when the authorities had built an airport runway and much of the swanky new business district of the Bandra Kurla complex over it?

The traumatising flood was a flash-point. Citizens rose against all the civic atrocities heaped upon them. Why must they suffer such acute and chronic brutalising when Mumbai was the biggest contributor to the national economy? It accounts for 33% of income-tax, 20% of central excise collections, 6.16% of GDP (the largest single contribution in India), 25% of industrial output, 40% of foreign trade and 70% of capital transactions.

Activists demanded it should be administered separately under a chief executive-like head, instead of politicians who siphoned off its wealth to their rural constituencies. The municipal commissioner should be answerable to the elected corporate leaders not, illogically, to the state chief minister. But all this sound and fury receded with the flood waters, and it was soon business as usual.

The unequal war between profiteering and civic wisdom was in unabashed evidence some 20 years before this great flood. An eagerly anticipated shot in the arm turned into a wound that still festers. The cotton mills, on which Mumbai’s original fame and fortunes were built, had been killed off by the prolonged strike of 1982 (and chronic neglect by their owners).

After nearly a decade of legal wrangling, especially over the laid-off workers’ dues, it was decided to redevelop the defunct land – an eye-popping 600 acres in prime south and central Bombay. Recreational spaces, public housing and private enterprise were each to get a one-third share of the total area.

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The 27-storey personal residence of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani is named after Antilia, a mythical island in the Atlantic. It has three helicopter pads, underground parking for 160 cars and requires some 600 staff to run. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty

But in 1991, the relevant Development Control rule 58 was unilaterally changed by the chief minister, making only “open” land in the mills eligible for the division. This left the lion’s share to the owners, their builder accomplices and, naturally, the obliging politicians. The city got a mere fifth of its desperately needed windfall.

Instead of the imaginative, integrated development plan drawn up by Charles Correa, the renowned Mumbai-based architect, the former mill-hub of Lalbaug-Parel is a soulless cram of skyscrapers, mall-to-mall carpeting and snarled traffic clashing with the tenements housing the dispossessed worker families.

The opportunity for Mumbai’s redemption was obscenely squandered. The greedy, selfish “development” has worsened, instead of alleviating, its two biggest headaches: housing and traffic.

Now, a new phoenix is projected to rise from the 800 acres of decrepit dockland along the city’s eastern shoreline, again in the prime south. Will the city finally get its life-saving leisure space and affordable housing? Or will it be one more land-grab hastening its death by “development”?

Mumbai waits with more cynicism than hope.

I'd vote yes to rid Scotland of its feudal landowners

The scoured, scorched Highlands could be brought to life – maybe an independent nation will have the courage to act

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 19 May 2014 20.43 BST

‘It is astonishing, in the 21st century, that people are still allowed to burn mountainsides for any purpose, let alone blasting highland chickens out of the air.' Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

Power's ability to resist change: this is the story of our times. Morally bankrupt, discredited, widely loathed? No problem: whether it's neoliberal economics, tax avoidance, coal burning, farm subsidies or the House of Lords, somehow the crooked system creeps along.

Legally, feudalism in Scotland ended in 2004. In itself, this is an arresting fact. But almost nothing has changed. After 15 years of devolution the nation with the rich world's greatest concentration of land ownership remains as inequitable as ever.

The culture of deference that afflicts the British countryside is nowhere stronger than in the Highlands. Hardly anyone dares challenge the aristocrats, oligarchs, bankers and sheikhs who own so much of this nation, for fear of consequences real or imagined. The Scottish government makes grand statements about land reform, then kisses the baronial boot. The huge estates remain untaxed and scarcely regulated.

You begin to grasp the problem when you try to discover who owns them. Fifty per cent of the private land in Scotland is in the hands of 432 people – but who are they? Many large estates are registered in the names of made-up companies in the Caribbean. When the Scottish minister Fergus Ewing was challenged on this issue, he claimed that obliging landowners to register their estates in countries that aren't tax havens would risk "a negative effect on investment". William Wallace rides again.

Scotland's deer-stalking estates and grouse moors, though they are not agricultural land, benefit from the outrageous advantages that farmers enjoy. They are exempt from capital gains tax, inheritance tax and business rates. Landowners seek to justify their grip on the UK by rebranding themselves as business owners. The Country Landowners' Association has renamed itself the Country Land and Business Association. So why do they not pay business rates on their land? As Andy Wightman, author of The Poor Had No Lawyers, argues, these tax exemptions inflate the cost of land, making it impossible for communities to buy.

Though the estates pay next to nothing to the exchequer, and though they practise little that resembles farming, they receive millions in farm subsidies. The new basic payments system the Scottish government is introducing could worsen this injustice. Wightman calculates that the ruler of Dubai could receive £439,000 for the estate in Wester Ross he owns; the Duke of Westminster could find himself enriched by £764,000 a year; and the Duke of Roxburgh by £950,000.

With the help of legislators and taxpayers, the owners of the big estates are ripping apart the fabric of the nation. The hills in many parts look as if they have been camouflaged against military attack, as they have been burned in patches for grouse shooting. It is astonishing, in the 21st century, that people are still allowed to burn mountainsides – destroying their vegetation, roasting their wildlife, vaporising their carbon, creating a telluric eczema of sepia and grey blotches – for any purpose, let alone blasting highland chickens out of the air. Where the hills aren't burnt for grouse they are grazed to the roots by overstocked deer, maintained at vast densities to give the bankers waddling over the moors in tweed pantaloons a chance of shooting one.

Hanging over the nation is the shadow of Balmoral, whose extreme and destructive management – clearing, burning, overgrazing – overseen by Prince Philip, president emeritus of the World Wide Fund for Nature, is mimicked by the other landowners. Little has changed there since Victoria and Albert adopted an ersatz version of the clothes and customs of the people who had just been cleared from the land. This balmorality is equivalent to Marie Antoinette dressing up as a milkmaid while the people of France starved; but such is Britain's culture of deference that we fail to see it. Today they mix the tartans with the fancy dress of Edwardian squires, harking back to the last time Britain was this unequal.

But despite this lockdown, there is, if not quite a Highland spring, the beginnings of something different: on one side of me, here in Boat of Garten, is the bare, black misery of the Monadhliath mountains; on the other, the great rewilding that is quickly but quietly spreading through the north-west of the Cairngorms national park. Across 100,000 hectares, the RSPB, the Forestry Commission, the National Trust and Wildland Ltd (owned by the Danish textiles billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen) are seeking to reverse the destruction, reduce the deer to reasonable numbers, and get trees back on the braes. On Povlson's estates the area of woodland has doubled (to 1,400 hectares, or 3,450 acres) since 2006, solely through the control of deer. It's not land reform, but it's the best that can be done with the current, dire model of Scottish ownership.

The forests at the moment are bright with birdsong. In some places, looking down on lochans surrounded by marshes and regenerating pines, you almost expect to see a moose emerging from the trees. Trees are racing up the denuded hillsides: in Glenmore I've come across young pines, birch and rowan growing at 800 metres. Already people are talking about reintroducing lynx here within 20 years.

As the return of the ospreys to the lakes and forests in this part of the park shows, the potential for ecotourism, which spreads income and employment through the economy, is vast. The contrast with the scorched and scoured grouse moors of the east side of the national park, which employ hardly anyone, concentrate wealth in tax havens and are unmysteriously devoid of most birds of prey, could not be greater.

It doesn't reverse the other injustices, but it begins to undo the centuries of physical destruction. I would vote yes in September if I lived here, on the grounds that it presents an opportunity to do something new, and I furiously hope, despite the evidence, that an independent Scottish government will take it.

It should list all the beneficial owners of the land; impose the taxes Westminster refuses to levy; ensure that only farmers get subsidies and cap them at £30,000 a head; ban burning; control deer numbers; and turn Scotland into a land where you can actually see green shoots of recovery. On Friday the Land Reform Review Group, set up by the government at Holyrood, will publish its report, and it's likely to be devastating. Will Scotland get off its knees at last?

How Much Land Does a Man Need?

"How Much Land Does a Man Require?" (Russian: Много ли человеку земли нужно?, Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno) is an 1886 short story by Leo Tolstoy about a man who, in his lust for land, forfeits everything.

Synopsis

The protagonist of the story is a peasant named Pakhom, whose wife at the beginning can be heard complaining that they do not own enough land to satisfy them. He states that "if I had plenty of land, I shouldn't fear the Devil himself!". Unbeknownst to him, Satan is present sitting behind the stove and listening. Satan abruptly accepts his challenge and also tells that he would give Pakhom more land and then snatch everything from him. A short amount of time later, a landlady in the village decides to sell her estate, and the peasants of the village buy as much of that land as they can. Pakhom himself purchases some land, and by working off the extra land is able to repay his debts and live a more comfortable life. 

However, Pakhóm then becomes very possessive of his land, and this causes arguments with his neighbours. "Threats to burn his building began to be uttered." Later, he moves to a larger area of land at another Commune. Here, he can grow even more crops and amass a small fortune, but he has to grow the crops on rented land, which irritates him. Finally, after buying and selling a lot of fertile and good land, he is introduced to the Bashkirs, and is told that they are simple-minded people who own a huge amount of land. Pakhóm goes to them to take as much of their land for as low a price as he can negotiate. Their offer is very unusual: for a sum of one thousand rubles, Pakhóm can walk around as large an area as he wants, starting at daybreak, marking his route with a spade along the way. If he reaches his starting point by sunset that day, the entire area of land his route encloses will be his, but if he does not reach his starting point he will lose his money and receive no land. He is delighted as he believes that he can cover a great distance and has chanced upon the bargain of a lifetime. That night, Pakhóm experiences a surreal dream in which he sees himself lying dead by the feet of the Devil, who is laughing.

He stays out as late as possible, marking out land until just before the sun sets. Toward the end, he realizes he is far from the starting point and runs back as fast as he can to the waiting Bashkirs. He finally arrives at the starting point just as the sun sets. The Bashkirs cheer his good fortune, but exhausted from the run, Pakhóm drops dead. His servant buries him in an ordinary grave only six feet long, thus ironically answering the question posed in the title of the story.

A Telling Silence

The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do. And the loudest silence surrounds the issue of property taxes.

GEORGE MONBIOT

You can learn as much about a country from its silences as you can from its obsessions. The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do. While the government’s cuts beggar the vulnerable and gut public services, it’s time to talk about the turns not taken, the opportunities foregone: the taxes which could have spared us every turn of the screw.

The extent of the forgetting is extraordinary. Take, for example, capital gains tax. Before the election, the Liberal Democrats promised to raise it from 18% to “the same rates as income” (in other words a top rate of 50%), to ensure that private equity bosses were no longer paying lower rates of tax than their office cleaners (1). It made sense, as it would have removed the bosses’ incentive to collect their earnings as capital. Despite a powerful economic case, the government refused to raise the top rate above 28%. The Lib Dems protested for a day or two (2), and have remained silent ever since. In the parliamentary debate about cuts to social security, this missed opportunity wasn’t mentioned once (3).

But at least that tax has risen. In just two and half years, the government has cut corporation tax three times. It will fall from 28% in 2010 to 21% in 2014 (4,5). George Osborne, the chancellor, boasted last month that this “is the lowest rate of any major western economy”(6): he is consciously setting up a destructive competition with other nations, creating new excuses further to reduce the UK rate.

Labour’s near-silence on this issue is easily explained. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who were often as keen as the Conservatives to appease corporate power, the rate was reduced from 33% to 28%. Prefiguring Osborne’s boast, in 1999 Brown bragged that the rate he had set was “the lowest rate of any major industrialised country anywhere, including Japan and the United States.” (7) What a legacy for a Labour government.

As for a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions, after an initial flutter of interest you are now more likely to hear the call of the jubjub bird in the House of Commons. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a tax rate of just 0.01% would raise £25bn a year, rendering many of the chamber’s earnest debates about the devastating cuts void (8). Silence also surrounds the notion of a windfall tax on extreme wealth. And to say that Professor Greg Philo’s arresting idea of transferring the national debt to those who possess assets worth £1m or more has failed to ignite the flame of passion in parliament would not overstate the case(9).

But the loudest silence surrounds the issue of property taxes. The most expensive flat in that favourite haunt of the international super-rich, One Hyde Park, cost £135m. The owner pays £1,369 in council tax, or 0.001% of its value(10). Last year the Independent revealed that the Sultan of Brunei pays only £32 a month more for his pleasure dome in Kensington Palace Gardens than some of the poorest people in the same borough (11). A mansion tax – slapped down by David Cameron in October (12) – is only the beginning of what the owners of such places should pay. For the simplest, fairest and least avoidable levy is one which the major parties simply will not contemplate. It’s called land value tax.

The term is a misnomer. It’s not really a tax. It’s a return to the public of the benefits we have donated to the landlords. When land rises in value, the government and the people deliver a great unearned gift to those who happen to own it.

In 1909 a dangerous subversive explained the issue thus. “Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.” (13)

Who was this firebrand? Winston Churchill. As Churchill, Adam Smith (14) and many others have pointed out, those who own the land skim wealth from everyone else, without exertion or enterprise. They “levy a toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry.”(15) Land value tax recoups this toll.

It has a number of other benefits (16). It stops the speculative land hoarding that prevents homes from being built. It ensures that the most valuable real estate – in city centres – is developed first, discouraging urban sprawl. It prevents speculative property bubbles, of the kind that have recently trashed the economies of Ireland, Spain and other nations and which make rents and first homes so hard to afford. Because it does not affect the supply of land (they stopped making it some time ago), it cannot cause the rents that people must pay to the landlords to be raised. It is easy to calculate and hard to avoid: you can’t hide your land in London in a secret account in the Cayman Islands. And it could probably discharge the entire deficit.

It is altogether remarkable, in these straitened and inequitable times, that land value tax is not at the heart of the current political debate. Perhaps it is a sign of how powerful the rent-seeking class in Britain has become. While the silence surrounding this obvious solution exposes Labour’s limitations, it also exposes the contradiction at heart of the Conservative Party. The Conservatives claim, in David Cameron’s words, to be “the party of enterprise”(17). But those who benefit most from its policies are those who are rich already. It is, in reality, the party of rent.

This is where the debate about workers and shirkers, strivers and skivers should have led. The skivers and shirkers sucking the money out of your pockets are not the recipients of social security demonised by the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party, the overwhelming majority of whom are honest claimants. We are being parasitised from above, not below, and the tax system should reflect this.

Putting a price on the rivers and rain diminishes us all

Payments for 'ecosystem services' look like the prelude to the greatest privatisation since enclosure

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 August 2012 20.30 BST

Our rivers and natural resources are to be valued and commodified, a move that will benefit only the rich, argues George Monbiot. Photograph: Alamy

'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody'."

Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is not the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.

The effort began in earnest under the last government. At a cost of £100,000, it commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England's ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported – with a certain understatement – that this exercise was "theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavour". Some of the services provided by England's ecosystems, it pointed out, "may in fact be infinite in value".

This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a natural capital committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don't call it nature any more: now the proper term is "natural capital". Natural processes have become "ecosystem services", as they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now "green infrastructure", while biodiversity and habitats are "asset classes" within an "ecosystem market". All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become exchangeable.

The argument in favour of this approach is coherent and plausible. Business currently treats the natural world as if it is worth nothing. Pricing nature and incorporating that price into the cost of goods and services creates an economic incentive for its protection. It certainly appeals to both business and the self-hating state. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force speaks of "substantial potential growth in nature-related markets – in the order of billions of pounds globally".

Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate power: aren't these the processes driving the world's environmental crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them.

Payments for ecosystem services look to me like the prelude to the greatest privatisation since Rousseau's encloser first made an exclusive claim to the land. The government has already begun describing land owners as the "providers" of ecosystem services, as if they had created the rain and the hills and the rivers and the wildlife that inhabits them. They are to be paid for these services, either by the government or by "users". It sounds like the plan for the NHS.

Land ownership since the time of the first impostor has involved the gradual accumulation of exclusive rights, which were seized from commoners. Payments for ecosystem services extend this encroachment by appointing the landlord as the owner and instigator of the wildlife, the water flow, the carbon cycle, the natural processes that were previously deemed to belong to everyone and no one.

But it doesn't end there. Once a resource has been commodified, speculators and traders step in. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force now talks of "harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitisations enhance the ROI [return on investment] of an environmental bond". This gives you an idea of how far this process has gone – and of the gobbledegook it has begun to generate.

Already the government is developing the market for trading wildlife, by experimenting with what it calls biodiversity offsets. If a quarry company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by paying someone to create another somewhere else. The government warns that these offsets should be used only to compensate for "genuinely unavoidable damage" and "must not become a licence to destroy". But once the principle is established and the market is functioning, for how long do you reckon that line will hold? Nature, under this system, will become as fungible as everything else.

Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the commodification of nature forestalls democratic choice. No longer will we be able to argue that an ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and delight; we'll be told that its intrinsic value has already been calculated and, doubtless, that it turns out to be worth less than the other uses to which the land could be put. The market has spoken: end of debate.

All those messy, subjective matters, the motivating forces of democracy, will be resolved in a column of figures. Governments won't need to regulate; the market will make the decisions that politicians have ducked. But trade is a fickle master, and unresponsive to anyone except those with the money. The costing and sale of nature represents another transfer of power to corporations and the very rich.

It diminishes us, it diminishes nature. By turning the natural world into a subsidiary of the corporate economy, it reasserts the biblical doctrine of dominion. It slices the biosphere into component commodities: already the government's task force is talking of "unbundling" ecosystem services, a term borrowed from previous privatisations. This might make financial sense; it makes no ecological sense. The more we learn about the natural world, the more we discover that its functions cannot be safely disaggregated.

Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by comparison to other investments. If we allow the discussion to shift from values to value – from love to greed – we cede the natural world to the forces wrecking it. Pull up the stakes, fill in the ditch, we're being conned again.