Bru refugees protest in Kanchanpur on Tuesday. Picture by UB Photos
Agartala, Jun 20 : A large number
of Bru refugees are averse to returning to Mizoram until their demands
are met, official sources in the Tripura relief and rehabilitation
department said today. More than 300 refugees have gone back since
Tuesday.
Over 36,000 Bru refugees are sheltered in
six camps in Kanchanpur sub-division of North Tripura. Kanchanpur is
around 185km from here.
“Nearly 300 refugees returned to Mizoram
on their own in the past three days,” Kanchanpur sub-divisional
magistrate, Nantu Ranjan Das, said over phone. “Those identified as
residents of Mizoram were taken to their respective villages in the
western part of the state. They were given 20kg rice per family and
doctors posted at the facilitation centres conducted thorough medical
check-up of the returnees. He said the repatriation process would
continue for some more days,” he added.
There are reports that some people tried to physically prevent those keen to return to Mizoram.
On the first day of repatriation on
Tuesday, several hundred refugees organised a sit-in at the Kanchanpur
camp for acceptance of their demands, which includes signing of an
agreement between the refugees, the Union home ministry and the
governments of Tripura and Mizoram.
“We want financial assistance of Rs
1,50,000 per family, free ration to every repatriated family for two
years, political settlement of the ethnic problem and adequate security
from paramilitary forces,” refugee leader Ranjit Reang had told
reporters at Kanchanpur.
The Mizoram government had earlier announced they would make necessary arrangements to take back the refugees.
North Tripura district magistrate, Sandeep
R. Rathod, said over phone that they had arranged vehicles for the
refugees to move to Mizoram. “But no one availed of the facility,” he
said.
The Centre has sanctioned Rs 7.87 crore for rehabilitation of the repatriated people, Rathod added.
Over 36,000 Bru people have been sheltered
in six camps since October 1997 after they fled their villages in
Mizoram following clashes with Mizos over the killing of a forest
official.
Rathod said refugee leaders had recently
had told the Supreme Court special commissioner Harsh Mander that if
the Mizoram government ensured their security and livelihood, they would
return.
Mizoram home minister R. Lalzirliana met
senior officials in Aizawl recently and decided to facilitate the return
of the refugees. Only about 5,000 refugees have returned to their homes
in the past three-and-a-half years.
Aizawl, Jun 20 : Ruling Congress nominee Ronald Sapa Tlau today won the lone Rajya Sabha seat of Mizoram by securing 34 votes out of the total 40.
Sapa, 60, was declared elected by Returning Officer for the polls and state Assembly secretary Ngurthanzuala after obtaining permission from the Election Commission.
His only opponent L Ramkinlova of the Mizo National Front (MNF) secured only six votes.
A senior Congress leader and chairman of the state PSU Zoram Electronics Development Corporation, Tlau had earlier unsuccessfully contested the state Assembly polls three times.
Congress has 34 Legislators while MNF has five in the Assembly. MNF's junior partner Mizoram People's Conference (MPC) has only one Legislator.
Assembly secretariat officials said polling began at the Committee Room of the Assembly Secretariat at 9 AM and all the 40 Legislators exercised their franchise by 12 noon.
The project will fund 91 km of roads that are design-ready
Guwahati, Jun 20 : The World Bank today said it has approved funding of $107 million (nearly Rs 650 crore) for a road project in Mizoram, connecting Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Addressing a press conference here, World Bank Country Director in India Onno Ruhl said: "Our board has recently approved the road project in Mizoram, which will connect the state with Myanmar and Bangladesh."
The World Bank board in last week has approved a soft loan amount of $107 million for the 'Mizoram State Roads II - Regional Transport Connectivity Project', he added.
The Project will be financed by a credit from the International Development Association -- the World Bank's concessionary lending arm that provides interest-free loans with 25 years to maturity and a grace period of five years.
The project will fund 91 km of roads that are design-ready.
Roads that will be widened or strengthened include a 22 km section of Lunglei-Tlabung-Kawrpuichhuah road on the border with Bangladesh, the 27.5 km Champhai-Zokhawthar road on the border with Myanmar.
It will also include the 41.7 km Chhumkhum-Chawngte North-South alignment connecting to the border roads with Bangladesh to the west and Myanmar to the south.
The link to Bangladesh will facilitate greater bilateral trade and access to the Port of Chittagong, the nearest shipping port for the North East.
Similarly, the link to the border with Myanmar will facilitate connectivity to Myanmar and the rest of East Asia and beyond.
Another 330 km of road works may be considered for a follow-on project or additional financing when the designs are ready.
The current project will fund detailed studies and designs for these roads (330 km).
The project will also support Mizoram's Road Sector Modernization Plan (RSMP) to strengthen its institutions, enhance accountability, introduce new technologies to promote cost effective road construction and strengthen road safety management systems, helping to transform the state's Public Works Department (PWD) into a modern road agency.
According to estimates, The World Bank said annual intra- regional trade in the region can more than double from $16 billion annually at present to $38 billion a year, if barriers to trading with neighbors were removed.
As per another estimate, investments in transport infrastructure could reduce trade costs by more than 20 per cent in India, and 12.5 per cent in Bangladesh, it added.
The
government is also concerned at lack of internet and telephone
connectivity in more than 3,600 villages in Arunachal Pradesh.
NEW
DELHI : In order to stem the "thinning out of population" along the Line
of Actual Control in Arunachal Pradesh, the government is likely to
propose an additional allocation of Rs 5,000 crore in the Union budget
for resettlement and rehabilitation of population in about 100 villages
situated on the sensitive border.
TOI had on Thursday reported a
communique from governor, Lt Gen (retd) Nirbhay Sharma to the prime
minister's office raising a security concern and seeking the PM's
intervention to relook at the government's rehabilitation policy along
the Sino-Indian border.
Warning the government of a serious long-term security implication due
to the thinning out of population, Sharma had said unless the issue was
addressed urgently, a "gradual assimilation of our area by China is
along the cards, on the lines already witnessed in north Myanmar".
Sources said the Centre has already put on fast track completion of
projects worth Rs 28,000 crore which were sanctioned during the UPA-1
regime but had a very tardy progress. As part of PM's special economic
package, UPA had in 2008 allocated Rs 37,000 crore for development of
infrastructure in the region. Some of these projects were held up for
environmental clearance and other administrative reasons and need
"renewed impetus".
The Rs 28,000 crore worth of projects
included 4,100 km of roads, including the 1,800 km trans-Arunachal
highway, border outposts, schools, hospitals and electrification of
villages to encourage human settlements closer to the LAC, sources in
the home ministry said.
"The Rs 5,000 crore additional package
is meant to incentivise the people, who had abandoned their settlements
closer to the border, to relocate to more accessible areas," a senior
home ministry official pointed out.
The government is also concerned at lack of internet and telephone
connectivity in more than 3,600 villages in Arunachal Pradesh and has
put them on its priority list to increase the tele-density and digital
penetration in at least 13 bordering districts of the state.
After a recent security review along the LAC, the prime minister's
office was apprised of an urgent need to provide tele and internet
connectivity along the LAC. The move is considered important for
security and disaster management purposes as most of the district
headquarters at present are not connected by reliable tele-network.
All these 3,683 earmarked villages in the bordering districts will be
provided with tele-connctivity either through village public telephone
or digital satellite phone terminals. The government is also considering
upgradation of existing television and radio stations in the state to
reach out to the border and beyond into Tibet, north Myanmar and
Bangladesh.
The government favours a soft cultural entry into
neighbouring countries with Bollywood leading the way. It may also
encourage DTH connectivity in the border belt.
Shillong, Jun 20 : With an eye to China's ageing workforce, Meghalaya Thursday decided to set up three skill development centres to train youths to help them step into the anticipated job spaces, specially in the manufacturing sector.
"It is expected that in the next five to 10 years, because of the ageing population in China, many of the manufacturing giants, which are at the moment operating from China, would be shifting to other regions and India with a young population would gain," Chief Minister Mukul Sangma told reporters here.
Keeping this in mind, the Meghalaya cabinet approved setting up of three skill development "centres of excellence" to train students in the manufacturing sector in collaboration with US-based computer software company, Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) Limited.
PTC would invest to the tune of Rs.160.56 crore in these three centres, while the Meghalaya government will have to invest around Rs.15.55 crore.
Initially, the Meghalaya government has decided to create three centres of excellence - in the existing polytechnics of Shillong, Jowai and Tura - where the global firm would train around 2,500 students in each of the centres.
"These centres would impart students' skills in the manufacturing sector and high-end courses such as development of machines, advanced tool making and similar other courses would be taught," Sangma said after chairing a cabinet meeting.
Moreover, he said the manufacturing sector would open up huge opportunities in creating an environment, where investments and job opportunities would be created, provided India has the manpower required for these manufacturing giants.
"These exercise would help the state not only in countering the human capital development but also create job opportunities for the unemployed youth in the state and the region," Sangma said.
China's population above 60 years of age is expected to exceed 300 million by 2025 and hit 30 percent by 2050. While India is set to become the world's youngest country by 2020 with 64 percent of its population in the working age group.
India's population in the age group of 15-34 years increased from 353 million in 2001 to 430 million in 2011. Current predictions imply a steady increase in the youth population to 464 million by 2021, and a decline to 458 million by 2026.
New Delhi, Jun 20 : The World Bank Group will give $1.4 million to 12 social enterprises in the North-East, working on access to affordable healthcare services, education, water and sanitation services.
The grants were awarded to the 12 social enterprises on Thursday by the India Development Marketplace funded by the World Bank Group (WBG).
“Nine organisations received $150,000 each for project implementation over 24 months and an additional three organisations were selected to receive $25,000 each in capacity building funding to provide innovative service delivery solutions in Assam, Mizoram, and Meghalaya,” said Jitesh Khosla, Chief Secretary, Government of Assam, and Onno Ruhl, Country Director, India, World Bank on the occasion.
The 12 enterprise were selected from 200 proposals received since February 2014 from organisations already operating in the North-Eastern states, as well as from across the country, a World Bank release said.
Hafeez Contractor high above Mumbai in a current project, the Minerva, with his Imperial Towers in the distance to the right.Credit
Mahesh Shantaram for The New York Times
The
offices of Hafeez Contractor, India’s most commercially successful
architect, are on Bank Street, just around the corner from the Mumbai
Stock Exchange. The prestige of the address, however, is undermined by
the beleaguered state of the Raj-era building. In the reception area, a
flat-screen displaying a loop of Contractor’s futuristic projects is
mounted on a cracked, stained plaster wall. Upstairs, hundreds of
designers sit shoulder to shoulder at long rows of computer monitors,
packed in almost as mercilessly as on the commuter trains that ferry
them to work each day. The office has struggled to keep up with the
firm’s expanding work force and is perpetually under construction. Staff
members were known to walk 15 minutes to the five-star Taj Mahal Palace
Hotel rather than brave the employee-restroom line. Contractor has
vastly increased his square footage by building a loft, but a day at the
office now entails ducking through archways, dodging stray wires and
ignoring the wail of power saws.
On what used to be a shantytown, the Imperial Towers now loom over low-income apartments.Credit
Mahesh Shantaram for The New York Times
From
this unlikely office, Contractor is helping to create the face of
21st-century India — a nation of flourishing wealth and entrenched
poverty that looks, according to the economists Amartya Sen and Jean
Drèze, “more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan
Africa.” More than anyone else, it is Contractor who is responsible for
building those “islands.” He has done this in part by designing
elaborate corporate campuses on the outskirts of cities, like his
projects for Infosys, the Bangalore-based technology giant that employs
more than 160,000 people. For Infosys, he built a software-development
park outside Pune that features two avant-garde office orbs, which
Contractor calls his “dew drops,” and a 337-acre corporate educational
facility near Mysore that is laid out around a columned structure
Contractor designed to look like St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
In New Delhi’s D.L.F. CyberCity, Contractor constructed a sprawling
office development for blue-chip companies including Microsoft, KPMG,
Lufthansa and American Express. His most famous project is Hiranandani
Gardens, in suburban Mumbai, not far from the airport, where Contractor
designed the domestic terminal. The 250-acre mixed-use neighborhood
achieved some measure of fame when it served as the backdrop for India’s
breakneck development in the 2008 film “Slumdog Millionaire.” In one of
the movie’s more famous scenes, a character gazes out at the
neighborhood’s skyline, dominated by what appear to be Greek temples
stretched 33 stories into the air, and declares, “India’s at the center
of the world now.”
The
neighborhood, named for the billionaire real-estate-developing
Hiranandani brothers, certainly bears its architect’s signature
flamboyance. But what defines a Contractor project is the feeling that
you are in a world apart. It houses more than 15,000 people and includes
offices for more than 150 companies; it has its own school, its own
hospital and its own recreational amenities, like Nirvana Park. All of
this is supported by a vast system of backup power generators and
sewage-treatment facilities that free the community from India’s
notoriously dysfunctional infrastructure. At Hiranandani Gardens, you
can almost forget you’re in a nation where 300 million people lack
electricity. You certainly don’t have to worry about bathroom lines.
Inside Hiranandani Gardens — taking a meeting at Colgate-Palmolive,
lunching at Pizza Hut — there is little, save the auto-rickshaws buzzing
down Technology Street, to remind you that you’re even in India. And
that is precisely the point.
Contractor’s
projects constitute a kind of alternate India, an archipelago of green
zones in which Indian professionals inhabit a first world behind walls
and security checkpoints, insulated from the chaos that has long
hamstrung their homeland. Unlike most developing countries, India has
pursued professional-services-led economic growth, opting for office
parks over sweatshops. India “looks like no other developing nation,”
the Mumbai-born pundit Fareed Zakaria has written. “India’s G.D.P. is 50
percent services, 25 percent industry and 25 percent agricultural. The
only other countries that fit this profile are Portugal and Greece —
middle-income countries.” Contractor has found his niche in building the
offices where India’s professional services are produced and the
residences, hotels and shopping malls where Indian professionals spend
their time and money.
While
the world wonders whether India, under the incoming pro-market
government of Narendra Modi, can return to the blistering growth rates
it was consistently posting before the global financial crisis,
Contractor only obliquely acknowledges that the recent sputtering of
India’s economy has affected his practice. Certain projects that would
ideally be built quickly, he concedes, are instead being built in
stages. Regardless, he prefers to look forward. The total acreage of an
upscale satellite city he’s currently building near Delhi (when combined
with a neighboring nature preserve) “will be larger than Central Park
in New York,” he crowed. “Now that’s called creating history.”
In February,
Contractor took me to see one of his newest projects, an 85-story
Y-shaped condominium tower called Minerva that is being built atop a
former shantytown. As we rose in the steel-framed, open-air construction
elevator, the oft-obscured fact that Mumbai is a tropical island
revealed itself, with the Arabian Sea stretching out beyond the lush,
green oval of the Mahalaxmi Race Course. We ascended to the 26th floor,
just a slab of concrete that was poured 10 weeks earlier. From this
vantage point, we had an excellent view of the kinds of buildings
Contractor is known for building in city centers — luxury high-rises set
in the middle of India’s slums. To our left, next to the most expensive
home in the world — the industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s $1 billion
personal high-rise — were Contractor’s sleek Imperial Towers, built on
the site of one of the city’s first slum redevelopments. Moving from
left to right, Contractor pointed to the Four Seasons Hotel, which he
worked on. “Atria Mall is us,” he continued, “and we’re doing three
towers in that slum” next to a modern building with a pitched roof.
Squinting out over the metropolis from this altitude, it was easy to
spot the skyscrapers, but the teeming, low-rise slums — just undulating
mounds of tarp and corrugated metal — were harder to locate. When I
spotted the shantytown, Contractor added, “That pitched roof is also
us.”
To
call Hafeez Contractor Bollywood’s starchitect would not do justice to
his fame. He is more like a luxury brand. The entire headline on a
billboard for a new housing development in Kolkata read, “Designed by
the famed Hafeez Contractor.” The architect does product endorsements
for companies as if he were a movie star: computer makers (HP) and
airlines (Swissair). When Indians talk about Contractor, they generally
call him simply Hafeez.
Stylistically,
Contractor’s buildings have no signature, save a penchant for glitz. “I
always say . . . that you definitely like a woman with lipstick, rouge,
eyelashes,” he told me. “So if you make your building more beautiful
with some appliqués, there’s nothing wrong.” Instead of a style, what
most unifies Contractor’s projects is that they actually get built.
Architecture has long been described as the most political of the arts,
and the key to Contractor’s success is as much his mastery of the policy
levers of the world’s largest democracy as his talents as a designer.
Combining the skills of an architect with those of a political
operative, Contractor can read new regulations and immediately find
exploitable loopholes and work behind the scenes to shape legislation
that serves his business. He cultivates friends in high places, and he
has learned to time his public statements judiciously. “There are
several good ideas that I have announced at the wrong time,” Contractor
told me. “Just before [the] election, some party accepts it and — with
good fortune or bad fortune — the other party comes, and he kills it.”
Most crucially, he has mastered the art of rhetoric, of phrasing his
private interests in terms of the public interest.
Inside the high-rises, several million dollars buys not
only granite countertops and Arabian Sea views but also electricity that
never goes out and water that always runs.
Nowhere
is this more evident than in Contractor’s effort to redevelop Mumbai’s
slums. When India became independent in 1947, only a small segment of
Mumbai’s population lived in shantytowns; by the 1990s, after wave upon
wave of job-seeking domestic migrants arrived, roughly half the city’s
estimated 10 million people lived in them.
The
local government has long been vexed by the problem. Until 1970, the
city held that informal settlements were illegal, and it sent the police
to clear them in periodic crackdowns. Then it switched gears and
endorsed so-called slum upgrading, adding basic amenities like
streetlights and public toilets to informal neighborhoods. But between
the government’s penury, endemic corruption and the ever-growing size of
the problem, progress was limited. Today Mumbai’s best-known slum,
Dharavi, packs a population comparable to San Francisco’s into less than
one square mile of urban space. Its jerry-built structures can rise
several stories, the upper floors accessible by ladders that extend down
into darkened alleyways. Though families are large and child labor is rampant, the average household income in the neighborhood hovers around $60 a week.
Contractor
had long supported a grand bargain in which developers would be given
the opportunity to build market-rate projects on valuable land covered
by slums in exchange for providing new, free housing for slum dwellers.
He argued for such a policy in the media as well as in private
conversations with politicians. In 1995, when the conservative Shiv Sena
Party took power in elections in Maharashtra state (Mumbai is its
capital), Contractor saw an opening. But it required cozying up to one
of the least savory figures in Indian politics: Bal Thackeray, the
leader of Shiv Sena and a political cartoonist by trade, who openly
admired Hitler and rose to power by pitting Mumbai’s ethnic groups
against one another. His followers called him by the honorific
Balasaheb. The local press dubbed him “the uncrowned king,” because
Thackeray was not an elected official but a party boss. He controlled
Mumbai through a devoted following of Hindu youths that he could call
upon to paralyze the metropolis with protests — or riots — if he didn’t
get his way.
Shiv
Sena came to power on a platform of “free housing for slum dwellers”
but lacked a concrete policy for putting it into effect. After the
elections, Contractor says he set his staff to work on a comprehensive
study of Mumbai’s slums. His team came up with a plan to allow
market-rate development of skyscrapers with extended height limits in
exchange for rehousing the slum dwellers. In a closed-door meeting,
Contractor recalled, he presented his proposal and got Thackeray to
endorse the grand bargain over the objections of his deputies.
As
Contractor spoke with me, he couldn’t hide his disdain for Thackeray’s
populist pretensions. But he had a grudging respect for his ability to
get things done — specifically Contractor’s own agenda. “You need a
strong guy,” Contractor said.
Although
he credits Thackeray, Contractor calls himself “the real architect of
slum-redevelopment policy.” It’s an audacious claim, given that the
policy details were worked out by a committee on which Contractor did
not serve. But whatever the extent of his role, in the years since
enactment, Contractor has become the go-to architect for transforming
shantytowns into plots that combine low-income apartments and
ultraluxury condominiums. Inside the high-rises, several million dollars
buys not only granite countertops and Arabian Sea views but also
electricity that never goes out and water that always runs.
Given
Mumbai’s surreal inequality, Contractor’s market-based plans have made
him the architect that Indian intellectuals love to hate. P. K. Das,
Mumbai’s best-known radical urbanist — he is known as an
architect-activist — is the nemesis of market-friendly architects like
Contractor. Das rails against slum-redevelopment policy as a ruse to
privatize prime plots of real estate, tarring it as the “greatest bluff
ever perpetrated on the city’s poor.” While Contractor claims his
structures, with their reliable utilities and sewage treatment, model
best practices for the rest of India, critics like Das worry that giving
India’s most influential citizens high-quality infrastructure amid
India’s poverty removes the political will to make basics like reliable
power and potable tap water universal. Providing basic services to the
rich and not the poor bespeaks “a state of underdevelopment, not a state
of development,” Das told me in his studio.
At the Infosys campus outside Pune, Contractor built two avant-garde orbs that he refers to as his “dew drops.”Credit
Mahesh Shantaram for The New York Times
Following
the tour with Contractor of his Minerva project, we headed across town
in his chauffeured white S.U.V. to have lunch at an upscale Indian chain
restaurant in a shopping mall. The busy street life passing our windows
— fruit sellers hawking their produce, young rag pickers filling their
giant tarp sacks with scavenged recyclables, women in abayas going about
their daily chores — seemed to be far removed, as if we were watching a
documentary about Mumbai’s poor from the comfort of a well-appointed
theater. At the Jacob Circle roundabout, a teenager gunned his motor
scooter the wrong direction around the one-way traffic circle, his
helmetless friend hanging on tight behind him. “Look at this guy!”
Contractor offered, more in amusement than in anger. “Bombay” — he still
calls it that — “has gone wacko.”
As the surname
suggests, Contractor’s family has deep roots in the building trades.
Family lore has it that his great-great-grandfather helped build what is
now the University of Baroda, 250 miles north of Mumbai in the state of
Gujarat. The Contractors were part of the tiny Parsee community in
Western India privileged by the British. By the early 20th century,
Contractor says, his ancestors were wealthy industrialists, well
diversified into power plants and liquor.
Hafeez
was born in Mumbai in 1950, part of the Midnight’s Children generation
that never knew the British Raj. Despite the joys of freedom, it was an
inauspicious time to be born — and not only because Hafeez’s father died
unexpectedly just 13 days before his birth. The family was foundering.
The newborn Republic of India looked with disdain on the Contractors’
industrial concerns. Private power plants would have no place in
Jawaharlal Nehru’s state, and alcohol would be banned in Gandhi’s
spiritual nation.
But
if politics destroyed the Contractor family’s fortune, under Hafeez’s
savvy guidance, politics would rebuild it. After barely securing a spot
in architecture school, the young Hafeez excelled. His senior project
was displayed at Mumbai’s leading contemporary art museum, and he won a
postgraduate scholarship to Columbia University, where he earned a
master’s in 1977. Contractor came to find Manhattan seductive, but
unlike many Indian professionals, he vowed to return to India rather
than use the fellowship as a ticket out. “The temptation was so great,”
he recalled, “that I said, ‘Graduate in the afternoon, catch a flight in
the night.’ And I literally meant it. I left for my flight from the
farewell dinner.”
In
the India he returned to, apartments meant for low-income residents
were hemmed in by a square-footage limit that was part of the Urban Land
Ceiling and Regulation Act, passed while Contractor was in New York.
The legislation capped some apartments at just 40 square meters (430
square feet), but nearly as soon as the regulations were enacted,
Indians found a simple way to flout them: Husbands and wives would buy
adjoining units and then remove a wall to combine them. That was just
the first step. The race was on to come up with a design that could
conjure the feel of luxury within the still-modest 860-square-foot
flats.
In
the impeccably air-conditioned glass-and-steel sales office of the
Minerva condominium tower, Contractor recalled how the Mumbai developer
Kirti Kedia approached him and demanded apartments that included
10-by-14 bedrooms and 20-by-20 living rooms, straining the limits of the
regulations before even considering necessities like hallways and
bathrooms. “I said, ‘Come on, Kirti, I can’t beat arithmetic,’ ”
Contractor recalled. “Kirti said, ‘Raja’ . . . he calls me Raja — raja
means king — ‘that is why I have come to you.’ ” Contractor took out his
red felt-tip pen and legal pad and showed me how he did it.
Starting
with the living room, Contractor drew a 20-by-20 square — 400 square
feet. Turning the height of the square into the diameter of a circle, a
bit like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Contractor shaved off the
top two corners. This little move cut some 40 square feet off the room.
He applied the same trick to the rectangular bedrooms. “And I got it. I
beat the arithmetic. I showed him the plan the next day. . . . This was
the rage of that time!” Contractor had outsmarted the regulations by
literally cutting corners. The result was the Megh, Malhar and Raag
Towers, a set of organic-shaped buildings. The towers weren’t finished
until years later, but commissions for other buildings rolled in, and
Hafeez became a household name. A 1987 print ad showed him standing atop
his latest bullet-shaped high-rise holding airline tickets. It said
simply: “Hafeez Contractor Flies Swissair.”
Contractor can read new regulations and immediately find
exploitable loopholes and work behind the scenes to shape legislation
that serves his business.
In 1991,
when an economic crisis forced India to adopt I.M.F.-imposed
free-market reforms, Contractor was perfectly positioned to benefit.
Foreign capital poured into the country, and domestic companies boomed.
One day, Contractor was sitting in the restaurant of the Taj Palace
Hotel in New Delhi when he spotted Narayana Murthy, a founder of the
software outsourcing giant Infosys. In 1981, Murthy started the company
with six partners and $250 in pooled capital; now he was a billionaire.
Though Contractor had never met the tycoon before, he seized the
opportunity to pitch his services. As Murthy tells the story, Contractor
walked up to him and asked, “Can I disturb you?” When Contractor
introduced himself, Murthy recalls, “I thought, This guy is so humble,
almost a zero-ego person, and yet he is the most creative architect from
India. After just a brief chat, Murthy concluded that he wanted to work
with Contractor.
In
the early days of Infosys, the company was headquartered in an office
building in downtown Bangalore. But Murthy saw no way to expand there.
The city’s transit system was hopeless. Murthy recalled telling his
colleagues: “Look, if we try to expand in the city, we won’t have enough
car parks. . . . We will create India’s first software campus.”
Contractor
was initially enlisted to add “show buildings” to Murthy’s new
Bangalore campus, including the glass pyramid television studio from
which the company beams its quarterly results to the world. (Murthy told
me he liked I.M. Pei’s addition to the Louvre so much that he had
Contractor build him one.) Soon Contractor was tasked with designing
entire campuses for the company. “We fight a very tough battle here,”
Murthy mused. “We go through all this pollution, traffic, noise, and we
reach our campus, and in a jiffy we are expected to satisfy the needs —
the technological needs — of the most advanced customer from the first
world all day. We have to create an environment where it becomes
easier.” To this end, Murthy demanded all the amenities of a large city
behind the gates. “It has to have bookstores, it has to have food
courts,” he said, “it has to have a swimming pool, it has to have a
cricket pitch.”
As
Sadaf Khan, an Infosys communications staff member, told me bluntly
when I arrived at the gates of the Bangalore headquarters: “This campus
is a different world compared to the rest of the city. When you’re
inside the campus, you might as well not be in Bangalore.”
If
the goal is to conjure a “different world,” Infosys’ campuses are
indisputably successful. But not everyone is happy with the results.
Varun Singh, a 30-year-old middle manager, was enjoying a smoke with his
team of programmers outside the gates of the company’s Pune campus when
he told me that employees didn’t have much access to the recreational
facilities, “because we’re loaded down with work.” His underlings stood
by nodding, impressed with his candor. Working in a chic,
Contractor-designed “dew drop” wowed his parents when they came to
visit, Singh continued, but on a day-to-day basis, the campus irked him.
The location on the edge of town was inconvenient, and after the long
ride from his apartment each morning on a company bus, he still had to
walk a third of a mile from the campus gate to his office. (The golf
cart that I traveled in, he informed me, was reserved for visiting
clients and journalists.) Singh said he would prefer Infosys to operate
out of a more ordinary office building in the city center. But Murthy
tapped Contractor to build exurban campuses precisely because he
concluded that expanding in India’s dysfunctional downtowns wasn’t
feasible.
Contractor
is changing the makeup of those dysfunctional downtowns by building
luxury residences alongside the slum redevelopments he advocated for
with Shiv Sena. In those constructions, the two Indias sit side by side,
but still painstakingly sealed off from each other. As the architect
explained to me, his firm lays out the redevelopment-site plans with an
eye toward keeping the slum dwellers and the condo buyers segregated.
Each group is from a “separate class,” he said. “If you had it combined,
neither the slum guys nor the prospective clients would like it.”
According
to Contractor, prospective clients and slum dwellers alike support his
efforts. At the ribbon-cutting for what would be the first
slum-rehousing apartments abutting the site of his Imperial Towers, the
tenants who inhabited the 2,500 huts that covered the 13-acre site
conducted a religious ceremony to mark the opening. Contractor says the
women put on their finest saris and approached him and the developer
reverently with an oil lamp. “They were taking our aarti,” or
making an offering, Contractor recounted, “giving us as much honor as
they’re giving to a god. So I asked this lady, ‘Why are you doing this?’
She said: ‘Do you know what you have done to our lives? We, all ladies
in the slum, cannot go to a toilet after the sun rises and before the
sun sets, but you are giving us tap water, 24-hours water.’ ”
The architect Hafeez Contractor, center, with members of his staff at his office in Mumbai.Credit
Mahesh Shantaram for The New York Times
The
day after meeting Contractor, I visited the low-income housing next to
the Imperial Towers. Beside the nine-story concrete parking garage that
constitutes the condominiums’ base, teenage boys were absorbed in their
game on an improvised cricket pitch. Inside a building bearing a
spray-painted mural of Bal Thackeray and other local heroes on its
facade, an old man was busy at an ironing board he had set up in the
stairwell as an informal laundry business. Up one flight and down the
dimly lit hallway, I met the seven members of the Khan family in the
225-square-foot apartment they received after the community voted to
give developers the right to build the multimillion-dollar flats.
The
Khans’ original home had been on the footprint of the building where
they live today. Back in the 1950s, the family patriarch moved to Mumbai
as this community was being carved out of steep, flood-prone jungle
land that nobody else wanted. Until their slum was razed, the Khans were
living in a 90-square-foot hut with only corrugated metal sheets to
keep out the rain.
When
I asked the Khans if they were satisfied with the redevelopment, every
member of the family agreed enthusiastically. Even when they become
eligible to sell their flat — after 10 years of residency, as mandated
by the redevelopment policy — they told me they planned to stay. The
access to jobs, markets and services afforded by their central location
outweighs the temptation to part with their 225 square feet of Mumbai,
which was worth, they estimated, $65,000.
In
order for a developer to secure the rights for a coveted plot, 70
percent of the shantytown’s occupants have to vote in favor of that
builder. Developers vie to win over influential community members,
sometimes promising to sweeten the deal with add-ons. Contractor
mentioned providing a free refrigerator in each unit. When I noted the
rampant rumors that development companies pay cash bribes for votes,
Contractor didn’t deny it. “Every country has to go through this kind of
a phase,” he said. “In your country, it was the 1920s and 1930s.”
In
their apartment, however, the Khans told me that there had been only
one developer making an offer for their slum and that there were no
handouts. The community simply accepted the baseline offer to redevelop
the parcel to the minimum standards required by the law. Contractor
points out that under the law, the slum dwellers’ costs are covered by
the developers for 10 years. But the Khans said there were additional
fees associated with the elevators and the fluorescent lighting in the
common hallways. Before redevelopment, they had to pay only a 50-cent
tax to the government each month; now they have to come up with nearly
$9 a month. Covering that cost takes nearly every member of the Khan
family pitching in to augment the $50 a month that 37-year-old Amina
earns as a maid.
As
for Contractor’s story of being thanked for 24-hour running water, the
Khans told me they get running water for only one hour a day — 30
minutes in the morning and another 30 minutes in the evening. When the
water goes on, they fill up buckets to use for the rest of the day or
night. Just next door, in the Imperial Towers penthouse (asking price:
$20 million), the swimming pool is the size of seven slum-redevelopment
apartments combined, and it is always full. Still, the Khans insisted,
they were satisfied with this situation.
Contractor
sees his slum redevelopments as studies in communal harmony in which
both rich and poor “enjoy their own freedom, but they don’t disturb the
other guy’s freedom.” But Sheela Patel, the director of the Society for
the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, an organization that advocates
for the urban poor, considers the rehousing units “vertical slums.” In
many redevelopments, she said, “the space between the [buildings] is six
feet, so the first three or four floors don’t even get sunlight during
the day.” Patel served as the sole NGO representative on the committee
that helped redesign the slum-redevelopment policy after Shiv Sena won
the 1995 elections on its free-housing pledge. “This thing of 70 percent
of the community agreeing to do it, that was our contribution,” she
said. “The developers were violently against that.” But, she says, in
the decades since the policy was enacted, greed and corruption have
rendered it “one more thing that it is done in the name of the poor but
hasn’t improved the quality of habitat for the poor in the sense that it
was meant to be.”
Mumbai’s best-known slum, Dharavi, packs a population
comparable to San Francisco’s into less than one square mile of urban
space.
“If you ask me
what am I most happy about, I wouldn’t say I made a building for the
richest man or that I made one of the tallest buildings in this city,”
Contractor told me in the Minerva sales office, puffing his chest and
flexing his biceps for comic effect. “What I’m really happy about is one
fine day, I got an idea for slum redevelopment. I used to say that
until we do something about the slums, we’re not going to have anything.
We must have a good social-housing policy.”
But
critics like the Mumbai writer Naresh Fernandes dismiss Contractor’s
enthusiasm for market-based policy as self-serving folly. “Instead of
building the sort of public-housing projects that have proved effective
in London, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Fernandes wrote in his 2013 book,
“City Adrift,” “Mumbai decided that its housing crisis should be left to
the whimsies of the private sector.” As a result, only those slums
located on the most desirable plots of land have proved tempting to
developers. When Shiv Sena enacted the redevelopment policy, Fernandes
wrote, it estimated that it would rehouse 800,000 slum dwellers. Now,
nearly two decades later, it has served only 127,000.
Contractor
stands by the policy and insists that even his high-end projects are
not exercises in excess but models of best practices. They set standards
for a developed India that the government must emulate. In talking
about the potable tap water on the Infosys campuses, Contractor offered:
“If Infosys can do it, why can’t the Bangalore city do it? Why can’t
the Mumbai city do it?”
His voice took on a pleading tone: “If we can do it, why can’t you do it?”
Indeed,
in America’s development, what began as private amenities available
only to the rich — indoor plumbing, electric lighting — were eventually
incorporated into public building codes and universalized. In
neighboring China, the pro-market reformer Deng Xiaoping argued, “Let
some get rich first,” and in the decades since his reign, even average
Chinese have seen remarkable improvements in their living standards.
Today 99 percent of Chinese have regular access to a toilet; in India,
the figure is only 49 percent.
Some
argue that if India really is following this well-trod path of
development — just with a late start — the concerns of Contractor’s
critics are misplaced. But China’s rise out of poverty was based on an
authoritarian model that is a nonstarter in democratic India. And even
America’s broad middle class is beginning to look like a 20th-century
anomaly. Besides, Contractor’s projects suggest India is on a different
path altogether.
India’s
social commentators dismiss Contractor’s gaudy creations as real-life
Bollywood sets. But taste aside, they are nothing to sneer at.
Developments like CyberCity and Hiranandani Gardens are more than just
symbols of India’s rise; they are a key part of it. Inside Contractor’s
corporate campuses, with their private, reliable infrastructure, it’s
always business as usual; outside the gates, you’re at the mercy of the
nation that hosted the largest blackout in human history, which left 600
million people without power in 2012. When, for example, the Bangalore
authorities initiate a multiday shutdown of their municipal water system
for “maintenance,” as they have been known to do, you can still make
tea with the tap water at Infosys headquarters and get back to your
spreadsheet. And by permitting Indian professionals to approximate a
Western standard of living without emigrating, Contractor’s residences
can lure Indian executives back to world-class businesses in Mumbai and
Bangalore instead of New York and Silicon Valley.
Discussing
the blackout, Amartya Sen told an audience in Jaipur last January that
the media neglected an important fact. “Two hundred million of those 600
million people never had any power at all,” he said. Equally notable,
though, is the converse: That for the privileged few working on an
Infosys campus or living in one of Contractor’s residential compounds,
the generators kicked in and the lights stayed on. The Indian poor live
in perpetual darkness, and the Indian rich live in perpetual light.
Sen
concluded by exhorting his countrymen to “start making intelligent use
of the resources that economic growth generates” to close India’s
unconscionable social gaps. It is a sensible prescription. But it is not
a politically pressing one in the world’s largest democracy, because
the nation’s problems are no longer an issue for its most fortunate
citizens. They live in a different world now, even when they are right
next door.
Daniel Brook is the author of “A History of Future Cities.” This is his first article for the magazine.
Northeast of India has been in the news recently with the coming to
power of the new NDA government at the Centre. With the appointment of
Gen (Retd) V. K. Singh, former Chief of Army Staff, and now a federal
minister of Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), the
arresting signs are that India is serious about both development and
security in this strategic region, bordering Bangladesh, Bhutan, China
and Myanmar. Tensions along the China-India border in Arunachal Pradesh
compounded by China’s territorial claim, cross-border crime in the
India-Bangladesh and Indo-Myanmar borders and the presence of non-state
armed actors with bases across the international border vindicates the
critical need to mainstream the Northeastern imagination. What is,
however, interesting, and of strategic significance, besides China’s
growing military presence in Tibet, is its activities in Myanmar
especially with regard to ambitions for better access to the sea via the
Myanmar coast. China has been assiduously building up its ‘second
coast’ in Myanmar overlooking the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.
While this build up has the undivided attention of India’s Navy and
defense establishment, it would be vital to add the future implications
for the Northeast, to make a holistic strategic and security assessment.
China in the Indian Ocean Region
A report by Future Directions International, Australia
speculates that China’s overarching strategy for the Indian Ocean Region
(IOR) includes constructing military bases and support facilities on
foreign soil in proximity to its trade and energy shipping sea lanes of
communication (SLOC).1
These areas also called “String of Pearls” in the IOR originate from
Hainan Island in the South China Sea, Sittwe in Myanmar, Chittagong in
Bangladesh, Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Marao in the Maldives, Gwadar in
Pakistan, stretching to Kenya and Sudan in the horn of Africa. The
strategy includes a canal through the Kra isthmus in Thailand bypassing
the Malacca Strait. While these “Pearls” provide the logistics for trade
in the SLOCs, it is the Chinese moves to militarily secure both the
“pearls” and the SLOCs that have interesting side-effects: capabilities
of monitoring Indian Naval activity and the potential to encircle India
militarily in the IOR.2
Figure 1 - Overview of the Indian Ocean region
Source: Namrata Goswami
The ‘Second Coast’ and its implications for Northeast India
Myanmar’s 2,276 km long coastline in the Bay of Bengal has the
potential to provide the ‘second coast’ to China to reach the Indian
Ocean and achieve strategic presence in the Bay of Bengal and the
Andaman Sea. Especially transportation logistics to the ‘second coast’
from landlocked south west Chinese provinces like Yunnan have both
economic and strategic benefits.
There have been reports of Chinese built SIGINT listening stations in
the Andaman Sea at least at Manaung, Hainggyi, Zadetkyi and the Coco
Islands in Myanmar. Chinese technicians and instructors have worked on
radar installations in naval bases and facilities near Yangon, Moulmein
and Mergui. The Indian Coast Guard has intercepted fishing trawlers
flying Myanmar flags off the Andaman Islands. On inspection all the crew
turned out to be Chinese nationals on expeditions with radio and depth
sounding equipment for submarine usage. To what extent these activities
and facilities support the Chinese military in monitoring the maritime
region around the Andaman &Nicobar Tri command is not yet confirmed.3
Additional reports indicate that the Chinese maybe pushing Myanmar for
a listening facility on Ramree Island, Rakhine state, which also holds
the deep sea Kyaukpyu port developed for oil and gas transportation.
China is building an integrated transport system linking the Kyaukpyu
port to Yunnan Province in South West China with the sole aim of
reducing energy shipping through the Malacca Strait and South China Sea.
The plans include a railroad project from Kunming, the capital of
Yunnan, to Kyaukpyu to complete the logistics loop to the ‘second
coast’. In 2010, Chinese warships on anti-piracy operations in the
Indian Ocean made their first port call to Myanmar.4
China has discussed with President Thein Sein for the PLA Navy’s
access to Myanmar’s territorial waters while patrolling the Indian Ocean
specifically to provide naval escort and protection to its energy
shipments and port facilities at Kyaukpyu in the Bay of Bengal.
Figure 2 - The ‘Second Coast’ of China
Source: Namrata Goswami
Further north from Kyaukpyu port is the capital Sittwe of Rakhine
state where China has assisted the Myanmar Navy built a naval base.
Interestingly, India’s northeast serving Kaladan River Multi modal
transport system feeds off the Sittwe port being developed by India,
being the closest to the Kolkata port. As per Indian Navy’s assessment,
China’s control of Myanmar’s ports from Sittwe in the north to Cheduba,
Bassein and a string of other military assets on the ‘second coast’ can
enable it to enforce anti-access/area denial to deny the Indian Navy
the ability to operate in its littoral waters in the Bay of Bengal. Such
escalating scenarios have grave implications for Northeast India from
clandestine arms shipments that pass through these waters for the
insurgent groups in the region. Contraband arms shipments seized in the
past from Chittagong port and Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh originated
through arms traffickers in Cambodia and Thailand ports. The coastal
border points between Bangladesh and Myanmar have become a haven for
contraband arms transit due to inadequate patrolling of their huge
coastline in the past by these two countries. These shipments can land
on the coasts of South Bangladesh and Northwest Myanmar and then
smuggled inland in smaller consignments into Northeast India. The
neighboring transit state in Myanmar namely Rakhine has rampant ethnic
strife and Chin state has ethnic insurgencies and is not fully
controlled by the Myanmar government.
Contiguous to India and Myanmar in Southern Bangladesh several
inactive Rohingya militant groups such as the Rohingya Solidarity
Organization (RSO) are located out of the Cox’s Bazaar District of
Bangladesh. The RSO has the support of terrorist groups in Pakistan and
Afghanistan including the Hizb-ul Mujahideen of Jammu and
Kashmir. The larger Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO)
organized all the different Rohingya insurgents into one group with
alleged links to Al Qaeda.5
Taliban instructed military training camps have been spotted across
the coastal border in Northern Rakhine state, Myanmar. These
organizations have the support of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and its allies, whose members have been convicted for crimes of arms trafficking for the ULFA and the NSCN (IM).6
Pakistan’s ISI has also been reportedly implicated in facilitating the
shipment of contraband arms through the Bay of Bengal meant for
northeast insurgent groups.
Figure 3 - The Northeast India Connections
Source: Namrata Goswami
There have been reports circulating in the local press of Myanmar of
China pressing its proxy militia aka United Wa State Army (UWSA)
soldiers from North Myanmar to be deployed in strength along the new
Kyaukpyu-Kunming pipeline for security. If such a scenario proves true
on the ground, that would make any Indian security analyst sit up and
take notice because of the UWSA’s infamous record of drug trafficking
and contraband arms supplied to Northeast insurgents. Ironically, if
China backed elements in Myanmar do get access to the Northeast’s
borders, insurgent groups may have no further worries of elaborate
transportation for purchased Chinese ordnance from Norinco and its illicit franchises in Wa state.
India needs to put in place a well-coordinated approach to secure the
maritime and land neighborhood of the Bay of Bengal and Northeast
India. This would include strengthening naval and coastal patrol assets
in the littoral waters off the Andaman and Nicobar islands as well as
enhanced strategic assets at the Northeastern borders opposite the
‘second coast’.
India has to work with Bangladesh, which faces a huge national
security threat as the landing zone of trafficked arms through the Bay
of Bengal by conspiring foreign terrorist organizations operating from
its soil with support of local elements. The Myanmar government is
challenged by insurgent militias still running loose, who are aided and
abetted externally for short sighted strategic gains inside the country.
India needs to support Myanmar in establishing the firm rule of the
laws of its government throughout its length and breadth. India would
need earnest diplomatic efforts to push relations with both Bangladesh
and Myanmar in a mutually supportive security partnership against common
foes of all the legitimate stakeholders in this strategic theatre.
Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.
