What happens when a city is managed almost completely by private corporations? Visit Gurgaon, India, a boomtown of millions without a citywide system for water, electricity or even public sewers.
The city of Gurgaon, roughly a half-hour’s drive south of
New Delhi, has survived without a functioning municipal government for roughly
four decades. If the city of 2 million residents needs to pave a road, or hire
police, firefighters or garbage collectors, a patchwork of private companies
makes it happen. Or … not.
“It’s a weird place,” says Shruti Rajagopalan, an economist
at SUNY Purchase who grew up a short drive away from Gurgaon. She co-authored,
with her colleague Alex Tabarrok, a 2014 study of its strange inner workings.
“It shouldn’t exist, theoretically.” And yet, the city is a magnet for India’s
middle class. The population has swelled by more than 1,600 percent over the
past 25 years. “People are just clamoring to move to Gurgaon,” she says. Which
raises an intriguing question: Should other cities embrace Gurgaon’s radical
experiment in privatization? She explains why, despite its pitfalls, Gurgaon
offers a strangely promising blueprint for urban development.
An unplanned city can grow at astonishing speeds. In 1991,
India’s legislature passed a raft of economic reforms that opened sectors of
the economy to foreign companies. At the time, Gurgaon was an unexceptional
town of 121,000 people surrounded by vast tracts of fallow land. By a
regulatory quirk, the land around Gurgaon was managed by a single agency, the
chief minister’s office in the state of Haryana, versus India’s usual thicket
of competing government agencies. It meant that developers’ plans in Gurgaon
could be approved in a matter of days, not years. The result? Fast-track
approvals for office parks, luxury condominiums, five-star hotels and golf
courses. Half of the Fortune 500 companies launched satellite offices in the
city’s gleaming high-rises, and it’s home to one of the largest shopping malls
in the world. “There are parts of it that look like Singapore or Hong Kong or
any world-class city,” says Rajagopalan. But rushing into a bureaucratic void
posed a challenge for developers: Who, if not the state, would provide basic
public services? “If you ask a regular person, ‘Would you want to live in a
city that doesn’t have a functioning sewage system or garbage disposal or a
good network of roads,’ they’d probably say no,” says Rajagopalan. So the
developers had to convince potential renters to say yes — by filing in the gaps
in the city’s sparse public services themselves.
A patchwork of private services emerges, but only within
property lines. A mere one-third of Gurgaon’s residents are connected to the
city’s main sewage line. Not that the residents of private apartments and
offices would notice. “If you’re living inside the development, everything
looks great. It looks like you have functional sewage, but those lines are not
connected to a main line. They go nowhere.” Instead, the sewage collects in a
septic tank at the edge of the property. The building’s owner contracts a
tanker truck to ferry the sewage to a dumping ground or river. It’s not ideal,
but it’s hardly out of the norm in India. Of the 5,161 cities and towns across
India, 4,861 lack even a partial sewage network. So long as Gurgaon’s
developers provide superior services compared with other towns in India, the
city will keep growing. Gurgaon’s developers can weather shortages in
electricity by using diesel-powered generators … which serve only their own
properties. They’ve beefed up the city’s 4,000-strong police force with an army
of 35,000 private security guards. And one of the city’s largest developers,
DLF (originally Delhi Lease and Finance), opened the nation’s first privately
owned fire station in 2012. The city’s small public fire station didn’t have
hydraulic platforms that could spray water to the top of DLF’s highest towers,
so the developer simply purchased two 90-meter platforms for its own
state-of-the-art firefighting service.
A dystopian world between privatized compounds. Gurgaon does
have some public services; “old Gurgaon,” about 35 sq km in size, is
technically a town with a municipal body to manage it. But there are
intolerable gaps in the city’s infrastructure. Private security guards may
secure the grounds of an apartment or an office complex, but that leaves
massive security gaps in the rest of the city. “Between one industrial park and
another industrial park are empty areas that are not safe areas at all,”
Rajagopalan says. Sewage trucks will frequently bypass treatment plants and
dump their contents on public land, and while it poses a health hazard to
nearby slums, public officials don’t have the resources to counter such
infractions. In short, Gurgaon’s success story is confined to an archipelago of
private compounds populated by those who can afford to live there. Look beyond
those select properties — and into the city’s slums — and Gurgaon presents an
object lesson in the limits of privatization. There, the residents suffer from
power and electricity shortages, and the same unsafe and unsanitary conditions
that shape daily life for so much of India’s urban poor. The pressing question
for them is how a rapidly urbanizing nation will absorb another 404 million
residents into its cities by 2050, according to one United Nations estimate,
and not suffer a complete breakdown of public services.
One paradoxical solution to Gurgaon’s heedless growth — sell off still more of the city.
Rajagopalan offers an unlikely solution to India’s growing pains. Yes, developers
show a dismaying lack of civic responsibility beyond property lines. But a
funny thing happens as they snatch up larger and larger tracts of land. They
develop an incentive to build — and finance — the missing pieces of public
infrastructure. “Right now DLF doesn’t find it in its interest to run its own
huge sewage system, because it has only four or five small developments,” she
says. “It’s not profitable to run to a main sewage line and then treat the
waste. But if it had a large enough property, then it would absolutely do it —
otherwise no one would live there.”
The private city has a precedent: Walt Disney World. In the
1960s Walt Disney bought up a 25,000-acre wilderness known as the Reedy Creek
Improvement District in Florida. Today, you probably know it as Walt Disney
World, and Rajagopalan holds it up as an example of what private developers
might need to do once they own massive parcels of land. They’ll build every
public service imaginable — from roads to power plants to a metro system — in a
bid to retain residents. “Disney benefits if people decide to stay in one of
the Disney hotels when they visit Disney’s theme park,” she points out — so
Disney basically built its own city, though of course sans traditional city
perks like citizen participation and social services. “They have their own
sewage system, police system, fire system — and everything seems to work
completely in the background,” she says. “They are large enough in scale and
they’re large enough in terms of profitability that they can have their own
systems for each of these problems.” Gurgaon’s developers have the same
incentive to serve residents, Rajagapolan suggests — but only if they can unite
their scattered developments into a single, city-sized expanse of property.
Currently, Gurgaon encompasses 730 square km, large enough to hold seven Disney
Worlds — or as Rajagapolan sees it, seven privatized cities competing for
residents. It’s a rather fanciful vision of urban development that leaves some
troubling questions unanswered. Then again, the same could be said of Gurgaon
itself.
