Shah Alam Khan 
Cities are like organisms. They are born, they age and then they die. But just before they die, they get ruined as a haunting testament to the passage of time. In India, we live in ruined cities. Cities which are dying if not yet dead.
The death by drowning of three young Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) aspirants in the basement of a coaching centre in the heart of Delhi speaks volumes of what we have done to urban existence in this country – both physically and morally. It’s a stark reminder of the ruin that we have created in the name of urbanisation. The unforgiving landscape of death which the citizens of this land navigate every day in cities like Delhi and Mumbai is unheard of in the civilised world.
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Such untimely and cavalier deaths are not new. In October 2018, a mother was crossing a drain over pipes in Delhi’s Wazirabad when her infant son slipped out of her lap and was washed away in the drain. There were no footover bridges connecting her Wazirabad village to the outer main road. In August 2017 a prominent Gastroenterologist of Mumbai disappeared in an open drain which was hidden under flooded rain water. The dead body of the doctor was found a day later. In July 2023, a 10-year-old was washed off in a drain in Hyderabad.
The ghostly echoes of a metropolis just fail to die and astonish us. I don’t know of any other country on the planet which allows its doctors, students and little children to be washed away down a drain. For that matter, there isn’t any other country on the planet which lets its poor impoverished labourers suffocate to death inside drains while trying to clean them manually.
India is surely a unique land which offers its citizens many inimitable ways to die.
The death of the UPSC students in the basement of the coaching centre is not only tragic and ghastly but actually the manifestation of a gigantic crisis of urban India. The careless metrocentric development which this country has seen in the last few decades has not only eroded the urban landscape but has caused a massive influx of people from the hinterlands.
Representational image. Photo: pxhere.com/public domain.
Needless to say, migration into a city is by and of the poor. The outpouring of labourers on Delhi streets following the untimely lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic is a tragic testament to the otherwise invisibility of such a migration. Having said that, it should not imply that the migrants are responsible for poor urban infrastructure. They aren’t by any stretch of imagination. Urbanisation is a capitalist means of opportunity where the poor and the underprivileged become a tool rather than means.
It is interesting to note that cities like Gurgaon which are a glorious embodiment of neo liberalised economy of India are also the ones worst affected by the process of urbanisation. The underpasses of Gurgaon are notorious for becoming death traps in monsoons. Down South, Bangalore, the desi version of the Silicon Valley, limps even in the absence of rains.
To make matters perplexing, the current regime in its first term promised to resurrect the old into what they called smart cities. In a capitalist world, nothing can be smarter than a city which cannot and does not want to be accountable for its common citizens. The appeal of a smart city for an upper-class Indian lies not only in its aesthetics but also in its ignorance and disregard of the poor; in its uncanny ability to purge poor out of its belly. The promise of a smart city reveals the regime’s complete failure to fill in the cleft between the imaginable and the deliverable.
The death of students in a coaching centre in a busy part of the capital is not an accident. It’s provocative in more than one way and we should be very angry. The poor city infrastructure whether it be water drainage, disposal of domestic and industrial waste, poor roads, unauthorised colonies, water shortage or power outages, the onus has to lie on the state and its institutions of implementation. Access to free healthcare and housing in urban India is in shambles. Recent studies have shown that around 35% of urban Indians are extremely poor with difficult means of subsentence.
Natural calamities are common in many parts of the world but the response to such a calamity is what decides whether a nation can be called responsible and efficient or not. We aren’t a nation responsible towards our citizens. Come winters, Delhi reels under a toxic whale of cloud. The onus of that pollution shall also be laid on the farmers of Punjab.
We don’t need smart cities. We need kinder cities. We need cities which breathe and are accountable for the lives of every citizen they inhabit. Cities like Delhi have a centuries-old history. Her body has scars of sorrow and lacerations of joy. Unfortunately, we have disfigured our cities into urban hippodromes of neglect and more importantly, the death of our own no longer matters to us. Our sense of civilization is thus lost.
Shah Alam Khan is a Professor of Orthopaedics at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.