Western-style
gated communities are springing up across India, fueled by Bollywood endorsements
and a rising middle class. Are they the latest reflection of the age-old
caste system, or a new threat to social cohesion?
LUCKNOW -- The capital of India's largest state,
Uttar Pradesh, was once the spectacular cultural center of India, a city
of domed palaces, flamboyant Muslim rulers, and Urdu poets. Now the City
of Nawabs has crumbled into the chaos that characterizes most north Indian
cities. Cows and dogs pick at garbage in the ruins of ornate monumental
buildings, and beggars wander the clogged streets displaying the stumps
of their limbs. But amid the remnants of past glory, a modern-day empire
has seized hold of the city, with ambitions to take over more than 200
other cities across India. From its Lucknow headquarters, Sahara India
Pariwar, India's second largest company, has just launched the country's
first branded housing network, with room for some 800,000 homes on about
30,000 acres across India. The company chairman's office and residence
is set on a majestic plot of land dotted with lakes, gardens, and cupola-topped
buildings reminiscent of those inhabited by the city's 18th-century rulers.
At the Lucknow airport, a billboard proclaims, "Welcome to Sahara
City"; across the inglorious skyline, neon signs broadcast "Sahara"
from commercial towers.
The company's five-year-old township here is currently
being transformed into the first of some 200 planned "City Homes"
-- a slicker, more exclusive version of the community. Picture a luxury
housing community that provides its own infrastructure, beginning with
a 10-foot boundary wall and armed guards. In addition to 24-hour security,
the typical City Homes complex will have a private fire department, backup
electrical system, drinking water filtration plant, school, multiplex
movie theater, and a manmade mini-seashore. The homes will be carefully
designed and manicured units in small apartment blocks, each surrounded
by a measured patch of green.
It sounds like an enclave you would expect to find
in the subdivisions of Phoenix or Las Vegas. But Sahara's network of gated
communities is targeted not at the traditional elite but at India's newly
prosperous upper-middle class, largely created by software exports and
service outsourcing. Their tastes altered by media-fed ideals of Western
comfort and Bollywood's images of extreme wealth, this new class is hungry
for the trappings of prosperity.
Planned cities are not entirely new to India. From
Shah Jahan's Red Fort to Le Corbusier's Chandigarh, architects have envisioned
an ideal metropolis distinct from the unplanned concrete jungles of most
Indian cities. Frustrated with inept government services, India's rich
have for years simply created their own infrastructure by purchasing backup
generators and water filtration systems. More recently, they have created
their own cities, like the satellite "Millennium City" Gurgaon,
outside New Delhi. But Sahara, with the help of "brand ambassador"
Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's biggest star, aims to bring Western-style
comfort and reliability to an even broader market.
"For the first time in India, we have envisioned
paradise living," exults S.J. Sarwan, chief marketing manager for
Sahara Housing. "We are giving the dream lifestyle to the common
man."
Of course, the definition of "common man"
is highly relative. India's annual per capita income hovers around $480,
and a recent United Nations report found that it is home to more hungry
people than any other country in the world. Nevertheless, India's is among
the world's fastest-growing economies. Economic growth reached 8.4 percent
in the last fiscal quarter, and foreign-exchange reserves surpassed the
$100 billion mark in December.
There's another factor behind India's luxury-housing
boom: credit. Interest rates on housing loans have virtually halved in
the last five years, making what was previously financially unthinkable
and culturally suspect -- borrowing to buy homes, cars, luxury goods,
and vacations early in life -- commonplace even for middle-class Indians.
According to a recent DSP Merrill Lynch India Economics
Report, bank lending to individuals has almost tripled in the last five
years. Young professionals and businesspeople are buying their own homes
for the first time, usually leaving their parents' house and the traditional
extended family behind. Many of them are avoiding the hassles of construction
by buying into pre-built housing complexes. Sahara's alliances with a
network of banks makes loans even easier to get.
Swati Saiwal, 25, and her new husband bought an
apartment in Sahara's flagship Lucknow housing complex just nine months
after they married. A hefty bank loan made it possible, but so unworried
are the newlyweds about cash flow that they already have plans to buy
a second Sahara property for their children to move into eventually. Sitting
on a floral couch in their brochure-perfect living room, Saiwal says it
is the safety and cleanliness of the community that attracted them.
Security seems to be Sahara's primary draw. Applicants
are carefully screened for financial viability, and residents and workers
have to show ID cards at the gate. "Safety is more than protection
from terrorism or robbery," says Neelima Saxena, deputy senior manager
of marketing for Sahara Housing. "It's a feeling."
"Gating communities is partly an understandable
response to the rise in urban riots, petty crime, and rape," says
Abhimanyu Dalal, an architect and urban designer in India's capital, New
Delhi. Recent statistics show that rape and robbery are much higher in
urban areas, where the population has ballooned nearly fivefold in the
half-century since India's independence.
But Dalal says that the middle class's urge to
create safe enclaves only makes urban areas more fragmented and insular:
"If you live in such a community, you tend to become comfortable
with people similar to you and less tolerant of outsiders."
Other architects and planners echo his fears. "Gated
communities will only further polarize India according to economic stratification,"
warns Krishna Menon, director of the TVB School of Habitat Studies in
New Delhi. He believes these townships are just one example of how Indian
city planners increasingly focus on the upper strata of society and ignore
the vast majority of city dwellers. "Who really creates the Indian
city?" he asks rhetorically. "It's the slum dwellers, who build
illegal shanty towns so prolifically the authorities simply cannot stop
them."
Even critics like Menon concede that while the
image of Sahara is rooted in Western ideas of comfort, its mentality is
compatible with Indian tradition." Thanks to the 4,000-year-old Hindu
caste system, which has always separated villages by economic and social
type, the gated community perfectly suits Indian society," he says.
For its part, Sahara says the company is actually
improving the Indian city by providing what the Indian government has
never been able to supply its citizens with: clean water, reliable power,
and open space. "Middle-class people step out of their nice houses
and see the same filth, pollution, and chaos," says Shahkar Faizal,
one of 30 Sahara architects who designed the City Homes project. "That's
what we have changed."
Sahara claims to be eco-friendly, too. At each
of Sahara's current complexes, residents are encouraged not to use plastic
bags, for instance, and 50 acres of each "City Homes" development
will be kept as open green space. That's certainly rare in Indian cities
and suburbs, which tend to be a tangle of streets and slums and where
recycling is a project reserved for street scavengers. "People feel
the government has failed them," says Sahara Housing president I.
Ahmad. "We want to set an example."
Usha Raghupathi, a researcher at the partly government-funded
National Institute of Urban Affairs, knows the state's limitations only
too well. She blames the country's spiraling population and government
corruption, and argues that gated communities like Sahara's will actually
help everyone. "If the city cannot support the middle class -- and
there is tremendous pressure on infrastructure -- then of course they
should leave," she says. "If they go, their share of water and
electricity will go to someone else."
Sahara certainly has some satisfied customers,
like Binti Srivastava, who lived in 22 houses before buying a place in
Sahara's Lucknow complex. "Whatever maintenance I need done in my
home, the Sahara people take care of," she says. "If my kids
go out to play, I don't have to think about whether they're OK."
On a recent evening, the Lucknow complex was almost
empty as dusk fell. The fountain -- an almost unheard of extravagance
in a country with chronic water shortages -- rises and falls gracefully
into the Sahara silence, broken only by strains of Hindi music drifting
over the massive wall from the nearby slums. The wide Sahara boulevards
are eerily empty of cars. It takes a moment to comprehend what else is
unusual about these roads: no garbage, no cows, no pigs, and no beggars.
Welcome to the brave new India, swipe your ID card
at the gate.
|
OTR Dispatches - February, 2004