Two separate studies by ScienceDirect in the past two years reveal the powerful relationship between neta, babu and business at the civic, Assembly and parliamentary levels. The first study, supported by empirical data, relates to the Mumbai builder mafia’s political links.
The second covers a larger area and says Modi’s rural welfare programmes are being systematically distorted by a politician-contractor nexus. It especially refers to rural road construction programmes such as the highly publicised PMGSY. The details are startling and show how the nexus has created new political power structures in large parts of India.
It has spread to organised green violations to grab forest areas and exploit resources like timber and mining, to the extent of driving away the tribals. Look at the wanton destruction of the Aravallis – this nexus between politicians, officials and mafia has been widely discussed.
In the Delhi section of the Aravallis, the lieutenant governor gave approval for massive tree-cutting. This drew a sharp rebuke from the Supreme Court, which said: ‘The LG thinks he is the court’.
Meanwhile, infrastructure is crumbling. Airport canopies and bridges have fallen, highways have sunk, rail accidents are rising amid a failure to install Kavach everywhere and observe safety rules, and fires are breaking out frequently at hospitals and factories.
The canopies of at least four airports – Delhi, Jabalpur, Guwahati and Port Blair – have collapsed in the past six months, raising questions of shoddy construction. The Jabalpur collapse happened soon after the airport’s inauguration by the Prime Minister. The expanded terminal at Delhi airport had been opened by Modi in March.
In July 2022, parts of the Bundelkhand Expressway had caved in within a week of its inauguration by Modi.
In October 2022, portions of the 341km Purvanchal Expressway gave way, months after Modi had inaugurated the highway.
The Sohna highway, also inaugurated by Modi, developed an 18-foot-deep cave-in.
Many of this regime’s showpieces, including the Ram temple at Ayodhya which (who else?) Modi consecrated, have developed leaks and been hit by flooding. Even the temple’s sanctum sanctorum was affected. The magnificent road at Ayodhya caved in and the city’s brand new airport reported a leak.
Last year, traffic came to a halt at Delhi’s busy C-Hexagon because of cracks and cave-ins.
Flooding and leaks also hit the G20 edifices, such as the Bharat Mandapam.
The Rs 920-crore Pragati Maidan tunnel, inaugurated by the Prime Minister in 2022 with fanfare, is plagued by multiple problems, including design fault, cracks and heavy seepage and is closed to traffic most of the time.
On bridge collapses, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, ironically acclaimed as “Sushasan Babu”, takes the trophy. As on July 10, 13 bridges had collapsed in Bihar in two weeks. Modi’s model state Gujarat is not far behind with five. In June last year, three engineers were suspended after a newly built bridge in Tapi district collapsed.
The collapse of Morbi’s suspension bridge in 2022, claiming 135 lives, epitomises the crumbling infrastructure, neglect and the neta-babu-business nexus.
The crumbling infrastructure can be attributed to two factors. First, the Modi government’s distorted priorities.
The railways is an archetypal case. This government’s obsessive priority has been to invest in premium trains, with Modi flagging off more and more Vande Bharat and NaMo Bharat trains, and in showpiece railway stations with malls and luxury hotels, each of which also the Prime Minister must inaugurate.
In the process, a majority of train users have suffered as distorted allocation of funds has resulted in slack maintenance and shortage of staff as well as delay in extending the Kavach across the rail network. The probe panel’s report on the Kanchenjunga Express accident in June has succinctly highlighted this.
There have been on average 44 serious train accidents every year — or three to four every month — during the past five years. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 2.6 lakh people died in rail accidents during the past 10 years, the number including those who fell off trains and those run over by the trains.
The second reason for the country’s infrastructure crumbling is the institutionalisation of the neta-babu-business nexus as the ruling party’s power base at middle and ground levels. The nexus had existed for decades. But the current regime’s contribution has been to integrate it into the political system. The process had begun in Gujarat and has now moved to Delhi.
The Morbi bridge collapse, the fire in Rajkot’s TRP Game Zone and a series of factory fires and building collapses in Surat and elsewhere all point to this dangerous liaison. It is a cosy network — the builders and factory owners gain by cutting costs on safety requirements while the inspectors, engineers and the senior bureaucrats get a fixed cut for looking the other way. The politician gets his funds and votes.
In the case of the Rajkot game zone, the owners had even not applied to the municipal body for regularisation of the infrastructure. They claimed in the trial court that they did register 20 days before the fire, which claimed 27 lives, but the prosecution strongly denied this.
After the fire, the police did act fast. It was found that 18 game zones in Gujarat were running without licence, of which eight were in Rajkot, four in Ahmedabad and six in Surat. The nexus was so perfect that no authority had dared question how they were allowed to operate illegally.
The Gujarat High Court, in its recent pronouncements, has shed much light on the collapse of the inspection system and the violation of rules in India’s model state. It asked why the civic body chief was not suspended. Again, on June 23, the court asked why the government was ‘covering up’ for the contractors and the guilty. During another hearing, the court said it had lost faith in the state machinery.
The SIT formed to investigate the tragedy suggested several measures to avert similar disasters in future but avoided mention of the nexus.
No wonder Transparency International has found that India has the highest overall rate of bribery in Asia. The survey, Global Corruption Barometer-Asia, estimated India’s overall bribery rate at 39% and found that the country has the highest rate of citizens using connections at 46%.
Consider these startling facts:
*Researchers at Princeton University and the Paris School of Economics have found that almost 500 all-weather roads listed as completed and fully paid for under the PM Gram Sadak Yojana were never built.
*The Karnataka State Contractors’ Association alleged that contractors routinely paid a 40% cut for government contracts to politicians and bureaucrats during BJP’s rule.
*Fountains’ nozzles worth Rs 10 lakh installed at Bharat Mandapam, the Prime Minister’s G-20 showpiece, were found stolen.
*Now, in another Gujarat model, officials are allegedly offering contractors in the state the EMI option for payment of bribe.
Hospitals are big violators of building laws, with unauthorised use of basements and frequent fires becoming the norm. According to a 2020 study by the International Journal of Public Health and Community Medicine, 120 people were killed in 33 major hospital fires in the country in two years after 2020. In Delhi, there have been 66 incidents of fire in two years.
The case of Delhi’s hospitals epitomises the collapse of the inspection and compliance regime. A thriving fake medicine business, kidney racket, a culture of disrespect for rules and rising incidents of fire — all this is spiralling. Here are some facts:
Owners of a Vivek Vihar hospital admitted in court that it had employed Ayurvedic doctors as paediatricians as a cost-cutting measure. Many similar facilities in Delhi also had such doctors, the court was told. Confirming this, the Delhi Medical Council warned against such malpractices.
A chargesheet filed in Tis Hazari court in Delhi revealed a big high-cost cancer drug fraud. The culprits collected empty vials, filled them with a fake substance, and sold them through pharmacies and online as critical cancer medicine. Fake medicines worth Rs 4 crore in 140 vials were seized.
Gurugram police arrested the kingpin of a vast kidney racket network.
Investigations found that out of over a thousand hospitals in the national capital region, only 196 have fire NOCs.
The kingpin of another inter-state kidney racket and eight others were arrested in July.
A Delhi doctor was arrested in connection with an organ transplant racket involving Bangladeshis.
Last but not the least has been the attendant systemic degradation, like the doubling of cases of fake visas and donkey route migration during the past six months.
A private university in Rajasthan has been charged with awarding 43,000 fake degrees. But this calls for a separate article.
P. Raman is a veteran journalist.
