The real driving force of the world economy is a new and incredibly powerful economic unit: the mega-region.

Extending far beyond a single core city and its surrounding suburbs, a mega-region is an area that hosts business and economic activity on a massive scale, generating a large share of the world’s economic activity and an even larger share of its scientific discoveries and technological innovations.

While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world’s population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation.

The author, Richard Florida, notes that “The problem is that much of our public policy not only ignores the rise of the mega-regions, it actually works against them. If we want to bolster economic competitiveness and ensure long-run prosperity, we must pursue policies that take mega-regions into account.”

. . . it’s time to stop transferring wealth from our most productive mega-regions to lagging places. In the U.S., the past 50 years have seen a massive transfer of tax money from innovative and prosperous mega-regions on the East and West coasts to the South. While this transfer may be a boon to local politicians and developers, such misguided policy has diverted economic resources away from the core mega-regions where they can be used most productively.

This transfer of wealth from the most productive to the least productive is seen most starkly in Mumbai’s case. Mumbai is starved for resources even though it is one of the most productive regions in India. As I have been arguing for a while, cities are the engines of growth and if one wants to help the people of rural India, India has to move them to where they will be most productive. And that means that India has to build cities that are livable and which will be the target of the inevitable rural to urban migration.

India’s development requires that the rural population is urbanized since urbanization is a cause (and also a consequence) of development.

Though the article is written in the US context but much of it applies to India also. I have been arguing about fast rail connectivity between India’s metros. The WSJ article says:

. . . our urban policy should not be aimed only at improving schools, creating affordable housing and redistributing income. Urban policy must also start to address economic competitiveness. It must strengthen mega-regions by improving fast-rail transit between their nodes, modernizing airports, and achieving greater cross-border flows of goods and people.

I think it is time that India starts to seriously re-think its fetish with villages. One of Gandhi’s fetishes (and he had a few strange ones such nude sleepovers with teenage girls) was villages, and Gandhi is an Indian fetish. So this strange fascination with villages is really fetish-squared.

Related links:

(1) I have a 10-part series which begins with this post: Ancient Cities, Modern Slums.

(2) An Integrated Rail Transportation System (IRTS). And a follow up to it: IRTS Revisited.

Close to the Worli Seaface in Mumbai around 10 am today. The rain has been coming down since midnight last night. The wind is pretty high, as you can see below.

The high tide today was not as high as it was last Tuesday. The Haji Ali mosque seen from my friend’s 13th floor apartment.

Justice was served and how! The police registered a case of robbery against both of them. The passersby not only beat up the child, but they beat up an adult they suspected was an accomplice. They beat up the suspected accomplice so mercilessly that the man is unconscious and his identity is unknown.

Swift merciless justice was meted out by a bunch of average citizens of Mumbai for a petty crime. Was the man really guilty and if so, of what? Does a 10-year old child deserve mercy and compassion? I don’t suppose the upright citizens of Mumbai who beat up the child had time to ponder these questions.

They beat up a child, a 10 year old child, for snatching a purse. Then they handed the child over to the police. Did the police register a case of deadly assault against those passersby who beat up the child? No. The police registered a case of robbery.

The people who beat up the child are powerless. They had to find someone weaker than themselves to vent their rage upon. They would not be able to lift a finger against others who are more powerful but who steal not Rs 20 but millions of times more. The bigger criminals go about with red lights flashing on top of their speeding cars. Those “alert Mumbaikars”, as the MidDay reporter calls them, would shit in their pants if asked to mete out justice to the real criminals.

They beat up that little innocent child and handed him over to the police. The police threw the child in a children’s remand home — for attempting to steal a few rupees. In the meanwhile, Telgi, the criminal who stole hundreds of millions of rupees, is being given extra-ordinary medical care in prison because apparently he suffers from depression which, according to a Times of India report, is due to “too much thinking.”

They beat up a child because they cannot beat up the crooked politicians. Career criminals–some of them charged with murder, rape, and abduction–call the legislative bodies of India their home. Reports surface every now and then about how a significant number of the members of Parliament have criminal cases pending against them.

A bunch of adults ganged up against a child, who for some unknown reason snatched a purse with small change in it, and beat up a little child. Ganging up against an adult is bad enough but to beat up a child is unforgivable. The lack of humanity is stunning. Where is the outrage at this criminal act? Should the police officer who registered a case of robbery be charged with dereliction of duty for not charging the people who beat up the child?

They beat up the child because they don’t value children. They don’t value children because there are too many of them. You cannot stop at a traffic light in Mumbai without being faced with children begging for a few rupees. To those who beat up the child, these are mere nuisances and not human beings. Beating up a child is just another aspect of the dehumanization that results in neglected, uneducated, under-nourished, unwanted children.

I read a lot of press about how India is a fast developing (and according to some how India is already a developed) economy. Projections of how many cell phones and how many computers per capita India will have by such and such a year fill glossy magazines and engage scores of management gurus. I know a little secret: cell phones and computers will not make caring humans out of mindless morons.

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay.” Thus wrote Oliver Goldsmith.

Now if you will excuse me, I would like to go and throw up from the disgust I feel at the zero degrees of humanity displayed by the “alert Mumbaikars.”

From the archives: India’s Real Criminals.

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

My days in Mumbai are numbered. Strictly speaking, all the days of our lives are numbered. I will soon be saying goodbye to the city that has epitomized to me all that is wrong with India. I know there are people who swear by the city. I think that they are in a minority. But then, one might say that even minorities in Mumbai are pretty large numbers.

Numbers. That is reason number one for my discomfort with the city. Metropolitan Mumbai has about 12 million to call its own. There are European countries with fewer people than Mumbai. Indeed, about 60 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in an estimated 37,000 slums. That is, 7.5 million people live in Mumbai slums, about one and a half times the population of Finland. Finland, a country that I have a very soft corner for, has around 5 million people living in about 384,000 square kilometers. Mumbai’s 7.5 million people are not as fortunate; Slum dwellers occupy only 14 percent of the residential land in Mumbai, which I estimate amounts to about 140 sq. km. Imagine that: a piece of land about 12 kilometer square and then pack one and a half times the population of Finland into it.

I find it absolutely unbelievable. There are more people living in slums in Mumbai than there are people in Finland. A rough calculation leads me to figure that the population density of Mumbai slums is about 500 30,000 times that of Finland. And the income of a Finn is perhaps about 100 times that of a Mumbai slum dweller.

Mumbai is an astonishing metropolitan city where the so-called first, second, and third world co-exist. I call it The Triple Point of the World at Zero Degrees Humanity. You see affluence co-exist on top of the most degrading poverty. I wish I could erase from my memory all the awful sights of very little children — some as small as toddlers — begging on the streets and on local train stations. It is said that living in California makes you soft because living is so easy there. I guess I had grown soft with my over two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. I hope that the year and a half in Mumbai has not hardened me. I want to retain the humanity that makes me flinch at the sight of suffering.

I feel for the unfortunates in Mumbai. I don’t mean to imply that I alone feel that empathy nor that my empathy is worth particularly much. I have a visceral hatred for the system that creates so much misery so thoughtlessly. I wish those who created, sustained, and continue to control this sorry place did not have the intelligence of scum and the ethical and moral sensitivity of cold tar.

About 10 days ago, they bulldozed 3,000 hutments and reclaimed 8 acres of slum-land, leaving 12,000 people homeless. In the last two months, 120 acres have been reclaimed after 67,000 dwellings were destroyed. [Source: BBC News] I suppose that means about a quarter of a million people who had homes — however modest — do not have a home now. The powers that be have stated that they will remove the slums from 375 acres of government land. In all, I expect that will make about a million people homeless in Mumbai.

A million additional homeless people in Mumbai. About the same number as the total population of Helsinki, Finland.

I grant you that enchroachment is a problem and needs to be dealt with. But why is it that the powers have to wake up so late in the day. Could they not have prevented the problem years ago? How do they justify turning people out of their homes after they have lived there for years, built up their lives around their abjectly modest dwellings, bred children, found employment and built human associations?

There is a lot of breast-beating and wailing and moaning when a natural disaster like the tsunami leaves people homeless. But why the absolute silence when a million people are similarly uprooted by government decree? Losing one’s home to a bulldozer is no different from losing one’s home to a wave, is there?

Why do I feel so strongly about this? Perhaps it is because I am myself a “homeless” person since I don’t have a permanent home and every now and then when I move, I get a feeling of rootlessness and insecurity. But it is more than that. I see this problem as merely a symptom of a larger problem that pervades India. That is the problem of over-crowding arising out of over-population.

A person living in a Mumbai slum finds, at the margin, that living in a crowded slum is preferable to living elsewhere in India. So, unless people systematically err in deciding where they live, for the people living in Mumbai slums, the pain of living elsewhere must be at least as much because there are no barriers to migration in India in the long term. The implication is that the dire situation in Mumbai slums is a good indication of how desperate the situation is around the country. It is that realization that makes me despair about the situation in India.

The existence of slums is a sympton of a deeper problem. Merely addressing the symptom can never solve the problem. One can clear the slums every so often and maybe even build decent low cost housing. But there are more people where the present slum dwellers came from. No sooner than you have moved the present millions of people into decent housing, the slums will reappear as soon as the land is cleared. Indeed, building decent housing for slum dwellers would encourage more to migrate to Mumbai and only worsen an already intolerable situation.

The fact is that slums are just an effect of the unsustainably large population of India and unless we wake up to that problem, we will continue to treat people worse than animals. I think that the powers that be need to live in over-crowded slums for a bit to really appreciate what the population problem is all about.

Mumbai, however, is not showing any real monsoon activities. Indeed, a couple of days of dry weather was the reason that it took me about 2 hours to get from Kandivali (the northern Mumbai suburb where I live) to Lower Parel where I go to work six days a week. Most of Kandivali is in the second world while most of Lower Parel is in the third world. I had noted in this journal the distinction between upper and lower Mumbai where I wrote:

Mumbai is a fascinating place. It is place where the rich and the poor live cheek to jowl, where the so-called first world, the second world and the third world co-exist in the same geographical space. In a manner, it is a microcosm which reflects the global economic condition.

The co-existence of the first world and the third world in Mumbai is made possible by a stratification in the vertical dimension. The boundary is approximately around 20 feet off the ground level. About 20 feet above ground level, you have the first world. Below 20 feet above ground level, the second and the third world live, with the second world occupying the higher floors below the 20 feet mark.

Mumbai is what I would call the Triple Point of the World and indicate it as Zero Degrees Human. If you had been paying attention when you were being taught elementary physics in school, you would immediately get my point. For the scatter-brained, here is what I mean. The triple point of water is zero degree celcius and is so called because H2O exists in all its incarnations — solid, liquid, and vapor — at zero degrees celcius. In Mumbai, you have the fabulously rich, a middle-class, and a huge abjectly poor population all co-existing at Zero Degrees Humanity, as I will explain in a little bit.

But I digress. I was going on about how a dry spell was what led to my excellent two-hour journey from my apartment to my work place, a distance of about 16 miles. It was Friday morning when I woke up a bit too late and decided to start off at 9 am. The first bit of my journey is always an autorickshaw to the Kandivali local station about a mile and a half away. It took me an hour because of congestion. The so-called Western Express highway was crawling along. The fumes rising up from the collective exhausts of hundreds of vehicles packed bumper to bumper could have caused the upper respiratory tract infection I am suffering from now.

So we finally get off the “highway” and loop around to go underneath it. At that point, it took about a half hour to move about 100 yards. Here is why. The roads, never great exemplars of their set, had deteriorated due to the rains and sections of it are best described as torture-tracks for vehicles. Craters the size of wash-basins dot the stretch under the highway. Because it had been dry for a couple of days, they who are incharge of “maintaining” the roads decided that it would be a good time to fix the craters. What better time, they must have thought, than 9 AM on a Friday morning to do so. So they parked a truck full of baseball sized rocks right in the middle of a 20-foot wide road and were busy dumping those rocks into those craters by hand.

We are a poor country. Why? Because we don’t have stuff. Why? Because we don’t produce too much stuff and we have a large population. Why doesn’t the large population produce stuff? Because it takes forever to get things done around here. Why? Because we don’t think. We don’t think that perhaps 2 AM in the morning would be a better time to dump rocks on to a road. Silly idea to begin with, but it gets worse when it also adds thousands of hours to the already unbearable commutes. Little things like that add up and we end up being a nation with the lowest productivity in the world. (It is a silly idea to dump rocks in to those craters because after the dumping is done, traffic will rearrange the rocks so that the rocks move to the edges of the road and the craters are back to where they were and now the rocks just add to the friction on that road. But hey, who cares. The Mumbai road people have spent a few thousand rupees fixing the road and that is that.)

As I had pointed out elswhere, there is the objects gap: not having too much stuff to produce more stuff with; and there is the ideas gap: not having enough brains to make efficient use of the limited amount of stuff one has to work with. Not having expensive road-repairing machines is the objects gap. Not having the brains to fix the roads (for whatever it is worth) at a time which would be least disruptive to traffic is the ideas gap. If you have an ideas gap, it wastes resources. There is no point in trying to make the roads “electronic intelligent roads” when the people so are astoundingly dumb.

All things must pass, as the wise remark. So we too passed through that bottleneck and I ended up at platform number 2 of the renowned Kandivali station. It was 10 AM. Trains arriving on this platform originate from Borivali, the neighboring station. For most of the day (about 16 hours), the congestion is so high that the trains are bursting at the seams when they leave Borivali. Around 10 AM, getting on a train in Kandivali is an adventure, to put it mildly. I have a First Class pass. About a sixth of each train is “first class” meaning the seats have vinyl coverings instead of the uncovered wooden seats in second class. Also, first class costs about fives times as much as second class. The crowding in second class is of course several times worse than in first class.

People who write great works such as Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy or Salman Rushdie (never read the guy but I had to put in an Indian) could perhaps describe in words what one experiences on the Mumbai locals. I certainly cannot. I can only gasp in disbelief, and that too in retrospection because you cannot gasp when you are jammed into a compartment which is meant to accomodate 50 people has about 250 in it. Sardine cans have been put to shame when they are compared to Mumbai locals. Those trains are designed to carry about a thousand people. They routinely transport about five thousand people instead. And most of these five thousand make it to their respective destinations.

I say most of these make it home because a very small insignificant percentage don’t survive the journey. Over 10 people die during the journey on a Mumbai local every day. That is, about 330 people die very month while traveling on Mumbai locals. Every year, about 4,000 people leave home, catch a Mumbai local, and end up dead in an hour. It is like with clockwork regularity, every month a 747 crashes and kills all 330 people on board. And everyone takes that as normal and carries on with business as usual. I chose my words carefully when I wrote insignificant because 4,000 people a year in a place which has 18,000,000 to spare is not a big freaking deal. Due to the astonishing surplus, the people are disposable. There is more where they came from.

Their deaths are unremarkable events. Newspapers which routinely report the latest shenanigans of Hollywood sleaze-bags on their front page don’t even mention the passing of 4,000 humans as they struggle to survive. Once in a while a particularly gruesome death is reported in the third page of a rag such as Midday. For instance, a few weeks ago, that paper reported that a 16-year old fell off of a local and his limbs were severed. He lay there by the side of the tracks for half an hour in agony. Police finally picked him up, put the limbs in a plastic bag and took him to a hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. His mother later said that he was in so much of a hurry to get to his school that he forgot to take his lunch with him that morning.

In the half-hour that he lay bleeding on the tracks, about 10 trains must have passed the scene. Thousands must have seen the boy lying there crying for help. They did not do anything. They could not do anything. Surely the trains could not stop. Because if they did, local train transportation would come to a halt. If you delay a train by an hour everytime someone dies on the tracks, then about 11 trains would have to be stopped for an hour every day. That will cause all following trains to back up and that is that. There is no slack in the system and that is what happens when congestion is the norm. Any minor disruption and the tipping point is reached and the system collapses.

India is a crowded country and in the resulting congestion, everyday humanity is lost. Recently reported, a man gets on a train and is randomly picked on by a bunch of people and severely beaten for no rhyme or reason. People lose their humanity when the pressures reach a breaking point. India has arrived at the triple point of of the world which is zero degrees humanity.

We cannot afford the sort of luxury that I learnt about last July in Sydney Australia. My brother’s friend, JV, is a local train driver in Sydney. I stayed with him and his family for a few days. He was on “disability” and was seeing a psychiatrist. A few months ago, someone died on the tracks when he was driving. As a result of the trauma he experienced, they gave him a couple of months’ leave and was being given counseling and medication to help him sleep at night. When one person dies in a train accident, it is a tragedy; when 4,000 die every year, it is a statistic (as the man said).

At zero degrees humanity, we see children carrying babies and begging and we turn away. We are so inured to seeing the thousands of abjectly poor people we come across every day that we don’t even bother to sit and consider for a moment some way out of this horror. We don’t even want to investigate the causes of this horror, leave alone doing something about it. We are a sick and a dying civilization. A hundred million malnourished children is a statistic that does not keep us awake at nights. We are not civilized by the standards that Bertrand Russell set when he wrote that the mark of a truly civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.

Russell encapsulated a lot of meaning in that one statement. If you were to be physically injured, you hurt. Direct injury every type of animal reacts to, including humans. But humans with even rudimentary degrees of empathy feel psychologically distressed when they perceive someone else in front of them in pain. Then there is the next level: where you don’t see the suffering of another sentient being but are told about it by someone else. You hear that your friend’s brother’s father-in-law is dying from cancer and you feel empathy for your friend’s brother’s father-in-law. Our ability to read gives us a very wide window to the world, and often what we learn about the world through that window causes us sorrow. I am sure that you felt some pain when you imagined what it must have been like for that 16-year old who died on the train tracks. It was words, symbols that we have learnt to derive meaning out of, and your empathy that caused you to feel that pain. Abstractions can be painful for one sufficiently trained in symbol manipulation and who have basic humanity within. Numbers are even more abstract than words. It is a far remove from actually being physically hurt to being hurt just by reading a column of numbers.

We should be weeping when we learn that so many millions lead lives of grinding poverty. We don’t because that is the first step to a very long and hard road. If we did, we would be forced to give up our cherished notions of how it will all work out. We will have to admit that, for instance, IT (information technology) may not have the answer to our persistent poverty and the root cause is somewhere else. We may have to let go of our ignorance which says that we can grow ourselves out of this trap — if we only get the right amount of subsidy to the poor, we will have solved the poverty problem. Or if we had sufficient number of job reservations, we would all be fine. Or if we were sufficiently socialistic or communistic or whatever, we would have solved the problems.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we have arrived at Zero Degrees Humanity. How did we get here? By being ignorant of, or even deliberately ignoring, one simple little truth taught in Econ101: the law of supply and demand.

Goodbye, good night, and may your god go with you.

The co-existence of the first world and the third world in Mumbai is made possible by a stratification in the vertical dimension. The boundary is approximately around 20 feet off the ground level. Above that, you have the first world; below, the second and the third world live, with the third world spilling on to the streets.

Around where I live, you will find enormous high-rises. A couple of dozen 20-storey buildings dot the landscape. Here live the residents of the first world, people who have air-conditioned cozy living rooms and bedrooms, fat cars, massive bank balances, all sorts of gadgets and gizmos fill their huge apartments, have expensive parties and go on foreign vacations. They live above the invisible 20-foot divide. Below that live the struggling unwashed masses. They are literally unwashed because they have little access to basic utilities such as running water and toilets. About 50 percent of Mumbai lives in slums. They are the laboring class and their labor is valued very low because of the iron law of supply and demand: the supply is so plentiful that the market price for their labor is astonishingly low. This fact works very favorably for the first world residents of the high-rises which basically means that all labor intensive activities is not expensive in Mumbai.

Lower Mumbai (below the 20-foot vertical divide) has the same relationship to Uppper Mumbai (above the 20-foot vertical divide) as India or other over-populated third world country has to the developed first world countries. Lower Mumbai supplies cheap labor to Upper Mumbai. Third world countries supply labor to first world countries by exporting labor intensive goods and tradeable services. Upper Mumbai enjoys the fruits of the over-population of Lower Mumbai as much as the first world enjoys the fruits of the over-population of third world countries.

This far the story is simple but uninteresting. Now we come to the interesting part: when the rich descend below the 20-foot vertical divide. They find they are in the third world. This descent is necessitated by the need to move from one part of the first world to another part of the first world. The roads and the entire transportation system is in Lower Mumbai. That explains the sorry state of the transportation system. Not just the transportation system, the sewage and garbage system as well.

Around where I live, the roads are … well, they are not really roads. They are more or less narrow open tracts of dusty land paved over haphazardly which serve a million purposes for the residents of Lower Mumbai. The sewage system consists of open gutters and canals with stinking black masses of stagnant sludge carrying god alone knows what from where. Their primary purpose as far as I can tell is to serve as a breeding ground for disease bearing insects.

Lower Mumbai is where Upper Mumbai dumps its garbage. (Again, the same story as the one where the rich countries export their toxic waste to poor countries and get all dirty manufacturing done in poor countries.) The residents of LM sort through that garbage and use what they can and leave the rest to be where it landed. The garbage piles up in the creeks and open canals which occassionally I suspect flow into the sea during the monsoons.

I think it is instructive to inquire into the nature and causes of this division between lower and upper Mumbai, into the nature of public and private goods, into externalities, into what is clearly an instance of the tragedy of the commons. This I will take up the next time.