Privatise Housing to Save
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Delhi
One can argue that the RWA, rightly concerned about security, may have had its reasons to act vigilante-like, but Lal thinks it is more about keeping the colony under control. “They were paranoid about power, not security, and sought to exercise that power to terrorise members and prevent residents from speaking against them,” he says. Members of the committee at Press Enclave were finally replaced in February this year, but not until their three-year term had ended. “Residents were virtually terrorised. Their tyres would be deflated and their applications for repair work held up without reason,” says Lal.
Photograph by Nilotpal Baruah
Any interference with parks, often the only open spaces in our cities, is reason enough for RWAs to bare their fangs. Ruling against the Rajinder Nagar RWA inNew Delhi Delhi
Essentially a middle-class phenomenon, RWAs are besotted with the idea of creating illusory islands of middle-class prosperity that are divorced from larger realities. Several RWAs inDelhi Delhi
RWAs can also enforce ghettoisation in the guise of enhancing security. In March this year, the Federation of Velachery Welfare Association (East) in Chennai asked its members not to rent out flats to bachelors, especially those from northIndia
The April 15 municipal elections inDelhi
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New Delhi
The Middle Class
By M.B. Lal
The
Times of India has done a service to the youth of India
by highlighting on its front page the plight of Moulshri Mohan, the girl who
obtained 93.5% marks in her CBSE exam and still could not get admission to a Delhi University
College though Ivy League universities
in America
welcomed her with open arms.
Moulshri
is lucky to be born in a family that can afford to educate her abroad. There
are thousands of other equally bright aspirants whose ambitious to scale great
heights in Society are abruptly thwarted by their inability to enter the
portals of good college.
The
answer lies not in opening more colleges but in making life more bearable at
the middle level. This is not as difficult as it seems. The Government can achieve this objective within the frame work of its
existing policies. Today a fresh post-graduate from college starts life
with a monthly salary of either a lakh and above or just Rs.10,000 to 15,000 a
month. Within a few years the former’s salary takes quantum leaps to three or
four lakhs a month while the latter keeps hopping from job to job to get a
raise of few thousand.
The
first question that stares every college student in the face is “where am I
going to live if I do not make it to the top of the ladder?” Life of the slums
scares him but that is all he will be able to afford.
This
is where the Government comes in the picture. The census figures show that 65%
of India ’s
population is below 35 and 50% below 25.
On
their own members of this large segment cannot own a house. At the same time
plots in residential colonies that DLF was selling at Rs.12 a square meter in
1955 are now selling at Rs. Three lakhs square meter, a climb of 25,000 times,
or even higher.
The
Government has done a great deal in the housing sector in Delhi but it has committed three blunders
which mollify much of the good that its policies would have yielded:
First Mistake. The Government has built
tens of thousands of houses and sold them at cheap rates to individuals who use
them as an item of trade and speculation.
If,
instead, the same houses had been sold to a builder or contractor, at the same
price, and allotted to the same occupants on a monthly rent so that the builder
could realize his costs within eight or 10 years, there would be no scope for
private profiteering at public expense. Civic services within each colony could
still be run by an allottees’ cooperative. When a tenant leaves the flat goes
to the next allottee on the waiting list.
To
give an example, the house in which I live, in a cooperative housing society,
was allotted to me 40 years ago for Rs.one lakh which I paid partly from my
provident fund and partly through monthly installments, is now worth Rs.2.5
crores in the market, a climb to 250 times. Oversight I find myself catapulted.
From the middle to the upper class. In my wildest dreams I had never fancied
myself as a crorepati.
Second Mistake. The government has
distributed large areas of land to rehabilitate the poor at the rate of 25 sq
metres per family. This was a blunder a waste of resources. If the same land
had been given to a builder or a cooperative who would build multi-storeyed
houses for the allottees and realize a fixed rent from the they would each have
a more decent living space. For instance, if the 25 sq meter per head allotment
of 12 allottees is clubbed it becomes 300 sq metres on which the builder can
build small multi-storeyed apartments leaving some open space around them for
social purposes.
Third Mistake. DDA has gone upto three
storeyes in the flats it has built. It could go upto seven storeys instead and
provided lifts from going to the upper floors. Statistics clearly show that
urban housing has grown into a horrendous problem simply because it is treated
as wealth first and a place for shelter last. For instance Union Territory of
Delhi has a density of about 10,000 person per sq kilometer which gives 1000
sq1 meters space to each person or 5000 sq metres to each family of five, while
all it needs in a multi-storey complex in 25 sq metres or just 0.2% of its own
share of Delhi ’s
land.
The
fact is that the country’s housing problem is the product of greed which treats
the house as a commodity to be traded rather than a place to shelter the body.
Judged
in terms of Delhi ’s population density India ’s entire urban population of some 320
million people, can be accommodated in about 32,000 sq km or just one per cent
of India ’s
land area 3.2 million square kilometers.
The
government does not have to buy all this 32,000 sq km of land. It has only to
put a land policy in place which makes a house strictly a place of sheltering
the body and makes it impossible to treat is a commodity to be traded.
This
means that a family is owner of a house only as long as it is in physical
possession of it. If it moves to another place and takes up another house there
it should surrender the present house to the next person on the waiting list.
Save The Middle Class
To Save India
The
Times of India has given its Indian readers two great stories in the last two
weeks. One is the tale (originally told by New York Times) of Moulshri Mohan, the
girl who obtained 93.5% marks in her CBSE exam and still could not get
admission to a Delhi University College
though Ivy League universities in America welcomed her with open
arms.
The
other story is the revelation that urban land prices in upscale areas of Delhi are four times the
circle rates, that is, between eight and 10 lakhs rupees a square metre. This
is about one lakh times the price at which DLF was selling similar plots,
half-a-century ago in 1955.
Most
readers would have missed the intimate link between these two major trend
setting stories. Why are Moulshri and her generation of high scorers so set
upon getting admission into the best institutions in the world?
It
is because these young people have set their eyes on the same plots which they
will need to survive at the top of the social ladder. This is a target a
thousand times more difficult to attain them it was for a young man or woman
starting a career in 1955 (assuming that the price index has risen a 100 times
since then). What is worse for this generation, they have no other option to
survive with dignity. The combined onslaught of rising prices and the cult of
consumerism has virtually wiped out the middle class in India which is the backbone of any
cultured community.
The
first need of any one starting life is the need of a place to live. Surely the
population of India
has not grown 1,00,000 times in 50 years to warrant this rise in land prices.
Thank you very much for your mail
which I have only just seen. You see, I do not use this ID normally but The
Hindu keeps posting it up there on the net! The ID I do use is psainath@gmail.com
The point you make about minimum wages act I fully endorse.
Regards\Sainath
----- Original Message -----
From: Saroj Lal
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 1:39 PM
Subject: Food Availability
Dear Mr Sainayh
Your brilliant study of food availability is most revealing. You are right that
public investment in food farming is shrinking. The Sixties and Seventies were
the glorious decades of the *Gentleman Farmer* about whom I wrote copiously in
The Statesman after touring
the country extensively
In
my humble opinion the solution lies in increasing the purchasing power of the
average worker which means forcing the middle class to part with
some of its ill-gotten wealth and give the worker his due. One of
the first steps in this direction could be strict enforcement of the Minimum
Wages Act about which I wrote the small letter given below in the
local page of your Delhi
ONCE THE COMMON MAN IS ENABLED TO SPEND MORE ON FOOD THE
AGRICULTURAL OUTLOOK IS BOUND TO BRIGHTEN.
Regards
M.B.Lal
Retired Assistant Editor and
Bureau Chief, The Statesman
The Hindu
March 19, 2012
ENFORCE MINIMUM WAGES ACT
The Hindu has done a great service to the millions of
homeless in the country by reporting the seminar on homelessness organized by
the Indo-Global Social Service Society. Allow me to point out the two
factors that are primarily responsible for urban homelessness:
The first is that urban housing has become a safe haven
for Black Money with the result that in the last 60 years land prices have
shot up 100,00 to 300,000 times in posh colonies and at least 2,000 to
10,000 times in the unauthorized slums. Slowly but surely the poorest of the
poor are being driven to living in the streets.
But the second and more important reason for the growing
destitution and homelessness of the working class in the urban unorganized
sector is the refusal of our middle and upper middle classes
to implement the Minimum Wages Act. Ask any messenger delivering goods
worth thousands per day from a nearby store about his salary and he will tell
you he is paid just about Rs 2000 to Rs 4,000 per month for working
from 8 am to 10 p.m. against the Rs 6,422 fixed for an eight-hour day in the
Minimum Wages Act.
The story is the same of workers in all establishments,
be it posh housing societies where the minimum price of a small flat is two
crores, big restaurants, clubs or private educational institutions. While
according to an Indian Census report published in The Hindu Delhiites are the
richest people in the country, the story of the vast working class is
entirely different though
About the Government's complete indifference to the open
violation of the laws against Black Money and non-payment of the minimum wage
to labour, the less said the better.
M.B.Lal
|
OUTLOOK
Magazine, May 14, 2012
Resident’s
welfare? Vendors are often the target of
RWA ire
housing: RWAs
Drunk
on power, RWAs are exceeding their brief
At 83—if you live that
long, that is—you would naturally look forward to well-earned repose in your
twilight years. But M.B. Lal, a former journalist, finds himself battling not
just his physical infirmities but also a recurring urban woe these days—the
neighbourhood cliques of power-hungry busybodies, otherwise formally known as
resident welfare associations (RWAs). In Press Enclave, a south One can argue that the RWA, rightly concerned about security, may have had its reasons to act vigilante-like, but Lal thinks it is more about keeping the colony under control. “They were paranoid about power, not security, and sought to exercise that power to terrorise members and prevent residents from speaking against them,” he says. Members of the committee at Press Enclave were finally replaced in February this year, but not until their three-year term had ended. “Residents were virtually terrorised. Their tyres would be deflated and their applications for repair work held up without reason,” says Lal.
Meant
to better the lives of residents of the colonies they represent, RWAs today can
do exactly the opposite with our lives, when misused by individuals intoxicated
with the power—and sometimes the money they can bring. Especially when
residents like Lal begin to ask uncomfortable questions.
“Our
RWA was paranoid about power, not security, and used that to terrorise
members from speaking against
them.”—M.B. Lal |
“Our
RWA was paranoid about power, not security, and used that to terrorise members
from speaking against them.”—M.B. Lal
In Bangalore
Any interference with parks, often the only open spaces in our cities, is reason enough for RWAs to bare their fangs. Ruling against the Rajinder Nagar RWA in
Essentially a middle-class phenomenon, RWAs are besotted with the idea of creating illusory islands of middle-class prosperity that are divorced from larger realities. Several RWAs in
RWAs can also enforce ghettoisation in the guise of enhancing security. In March this year, the Federation of Velachery Welfare Association (East) in Chennai asked its members not to rent out flats to bachelors, especially those from north
The April 15 municipal elections in
An example of this transformation
being Sanjay Kaul, who, thanks to his role as chairperson of the United
Resident’s Joint Action (URJA), went on to become the BJP’s Delhi spokesperson.
And he, having used the might of RWAs to campaign against hikes in electricity
tariffs, defends their actions. “The civil society gets castigated for not
being interested in civic issues. So what’s wrong when conscientious and
sensible citizens assert themselves?” he asks, especially when public agencies
fail to address civic issues or the police fail to ensure security. But must it
happen abrasively, riling residents and riding roughshod over those less
privileged?
Death of the Middle Class
One hot
topic of gossip in cocktail circuits and drawing rooms of the elite in Delhi is
not Anna Hazare or the war in Afghanistan but the pathetic story told by New
York Times of Moulshri Mohan, a girl who secured 93.5% marks in her CBSE exam
and still couldn't get admitted to Delhi University colleges though Ivy League
colleges in America welcomed her with open arms. Some even offered
scholarships.
The story
was picked up by Indian media and has caught the imagination of the capital's
elite because this is the dilemma facing every other upper class parent in the
city and, in fact, the whole country though the malady is more pronounced in
metropolitan cities where you are either 'up there' or 'nowhere'.
Moulisha's
story set me thinking. Is it a sign of the progress India
has made since Independence Allahabad
"I
shall be a school teacher". I replied. How will you support a wife on a
teacher's salary?' It took me but an instant to say "she will also be a
school teacher. Like me, she will also have a bicycle and on holidays we shall
go on long rides together into the countryside".
I could
speak to him with such confidence about my future because I could clearly
visualize (or so I thought) what my life would be like as a school teacher.
Though paid a low salary I would still be a respectable member of the middle
class. I would take on rent a small house in a lane or mohalla. Both rich and
poor would salute me and invite me to their homes. My children would go to the
same school and college as the off spring of the rich. The same doctors would
attend on me when I am sick. When I die the whole locality, rich and poor
alike, would modern for me, and my widow, children and grand children would
continue to live in the same rented house as if it was their own property.
Today,
unfortunately, with her 93.5% score, poor Moulshri Mohan cannot look forward to
her future with the same confidence as I, “a branded failure”, could in 1945. Let
me explain as graphically as possible why Moulshri cannot afford to be as complacent
about her future as I could be sixty-five years ago. Some thirty years ago with
my small rural inheritance I bought a three bed-room flat in Delhi at what
would today seem to be a throw away price. After putting it to other uses, in
2003 I started renting it out. Within these eighty years my rental income has
trebled. How have I achieved this miracle? I look for young high salaried
tenants like what Moulshri would be on completing her education, with or
without their spouses, sign eleven months bond with them and make sure that
they leave without fussing within two years. With each change of tenant the
rent shoots up 50%. Being a highly mobile lot, normally they leave on their
own. But having a roof of their own to escape this itinerant existence is their
first priority in life. This is not easy. Within the same eight years the
capital asset value of my flat has jumped to six times of what it was in 2003
and the spiral continues unabated. Likewise, the house in which I live in a
cooperative society came to me almost free forty years ago. Its value has taken
a 250 times jump in this period. (A plot of land which DLF was selling for
Rs.12 per square metre in 1955 now sells at Rs.3 lakhs a square metre, a jump
of 25,000 times in half-a-century) Moulshri and her group of high scorers must
slog to attain salaries high enough to live a luxurious life and also pay back
instalments of home loans from banks to acquire flats of their own in high
class condominiums.
Like me,
there are millions upon millions of idle Indians whose wealth is growing
exponentially without their doing anything to increase it. Moulshri and
youngsters of her generation can ignore this trend only at their peril. Besides
possessing two air conditioned cars, they will have to educate children who
would want the best of everything including visits to malls, five star hotels,
foreign resorts, buying expensive gadgets and paying for special high priced
courses. For health either you go to the best (read costliest) hospital or a
third grade government facility. There are no mixed colonies for rich and poor.
Your class is determined by where you live. There are no middle class colonies
either. The new system takes in only a limited number of people who will be
paid salaries in millions of rupees a year. The rest must be content with a around
lakh or two which is what even a peon’s family earns. The so called middle
class must move to the slums and ghettos of the city.
Intellectuals
who keep count of the assets of Ministers top bureaucrats and politicians would
do well to start with their own capital gains and how they acquired them.
India has enough clout to emerge a winner in global power
By Kiran Karnik
Independent policy and strategy analyst
India has, for long, been regarded as a soft state. Gunnar Myrdal is credited with inventing this term, intended to mean a country where law enforcement and social discipline are low; by extension, one that is as timid and diffident in its dealings with other nations as with its own citizens.
M.B. Lal January.
4,2013
D-30
Press Enclave, Saket,
Ph.
26863321, 4051-4993
E-mail saroj_lal@yahoo.com
Websites
: www.gandhionline.org,
www.greenairconditioner.org
Dear Justice Verma
I am an 84-years old journalist and served The Statesman for 31 years from 1957
to 1988.
My submission is that according to UN statistics about two million rapes
are committed in the world every year. India India
Enactment of a law, however strict, will not eradicate this evil though it will
certainly help to check it to a certain extent. Partly it is crime of passion,
but often it is pre-planned with a well laid out trap for the woman to walk
into. Consensous sex gone sour by breach of trust, through going back on a
promise of marriage, falls in an entirely separate category.. For this
"live in" arrangements should be registered.
Part Two
Rape has also to be seen as a spontaneous urge to satisfy sexual desire or
craving which can sometimes be as keen as the hunger for food. Indian society
provides pair bonding, or matrimony, as the only option to satisfy this hunger.
I would respectfully submit that your eminent committee may examine whether
other options can be legalized. It is a delicate matter but it has to be
addressed in any realistic assessment of the issue. It is also a known fact
that, despite the laws of pair bonding, man is a promiscuous animal. At times
he seeks variety. Many eminent men like H.G. Wells, George Orwell, J.F.
Kennedy, President Clinton and so on can be cited in this context.
Numerous Indian names that fall in this category cannot be mentioned in
this list . Unlike the West where a celebrity's personal life is fully in the
public domain, Indian leaders indulge in similar activities on a larger scale
under the veil of laws that protect their " private" lives. The Verma
commission should go into all aspects of this kind of exploitation of
female employees by our leaders and examine whether it amounts to rape.
The question is can we liberaliize and
legalize prostitution as an option? Why I am making this suggestion is
because we have to face a reality. We are not only against male vices but
against Nature itself. In the West prostitution is recognized as a fait
accompli, an acceptable profession Here sex workers are treated as worse than
scavengers. Their useful contribution to society is not recognized. Lord
Buddha is himself credited with ordaining Amrapalli, a prostitute, into his
Order.
The commission should also
examine paedophiles. Sexual abuse of children is rampant in India India
Homosexual rape is another
field for close scrutiny. I have learnt that innocent male prisoners are
routinely and brutally gang raped by hardened male convicts in our jails.
Part Three
Ultimately, the last weapon is self-defence. Women should give up being
delicate and demure. They should be strong enough to fight back rapists.
According to Wikepedia there are also numerous cases of rape of men by females.
When I was posted by The Statesman as its special correspondent in Chandigargh
for four years in May 1969, one if the first stories I heard was of an instance
of gang rape of a man by four high society college girls. They shut a
young servant in a room with them and forced him to have sex with all of them,
one by one, till he fell down exhausted.
The moral of the story is that women should be strong and given training to
defend themselves.
Yours sincerely
M.B. Lal
Retired Bureau
Chief and Assistant Editor The Statesmantm
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