India's Optimist

When I tell Indians I cover urban planning in India, the response is almost predictable: ‘What planning’?

Urban India is not known for its orderliness. Indians everywhere view the government as uniformly crooked and inept, unable to provide adequate services. And cities, where services are strained by swelling numbers, are held up as the object lesson.

Bish Sanyal disagrees. Ford International Professor of urban development and planning at MIT and a Kolkata native, Sanyal has researched Indian cities for years. In 2007, he organized a competition around the notion of their hidden success: examples where India's cities manage to buck conventional wisdom by delivering decent public services. An upcoming book, coming out in spring of 2013, will expand on the research. The following is a condensed and edited version of our conversion.

Why did you write this book? What was the central idea behind it?

Basically, what motivated us was this question: 'How is it that some cities are coping better than others in dealing with these kinds of problems?' You have a large number of poor people living in the periphery of cities; you don't have large enough city budgets; there is not enough city autonomy. And yet, we found out that some places were doing a little bit better, in certain sectors, than others.

Generally, in India, when you ask people how things get done, their first response is, 'they do not get done.' There's a pervasive pessimistic approach to municipal service delivery.

I was at a meeting recently organized by the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C. There were hundreds of IAS [Indian Administrative Service] officers. All of them work closely with politicians; these are very high-level bureaucrats. Most argued that if they don't agree with the politicians, they are transferred. But what struck me at the meeting is that some are not transferred, and actually got progressive things done for poor people.

So I am questioning the stereotype we make of politicians and bureaucrats—that the former is corrupt, and the latter is inefficient. Those stereotypes do not explain how things get done.