Tag: mumbai

India, Urbanization and Poverty

“Mumbai is the wealthiest city in India. It contributes over 6% of India’s economy, 30% of its income tax, 40% of its trade, and 60% of its customs duties. Its per capita GDP in 2015 stood at $5,328, more than 3.3 times that of the country as a whole. And yet, half of the population lives packed into just 12% of the city’s available land.”

That is from a data rich (and yet pleasant to read) essay about Mumbai and it’s mad policies regarding real estate. Those mad policies are nothing new, some of them are more than a hundred years old, and they have been covered extensively in lots of different places. Not getting urbanization right is a sport that all countries play well – although you’ll certainly get a sympathetic nod from me if you argue that we in India play it better than most. Why, I come from Pune, and you need to come visit our city one of these days to understand just how good (bad is what I mean, but you knew that already) we have become in the last four to five years alone.

Please go ahead and read the whole essay, it is full of delightful little nuggets and not-so-little laments. Did you know, for example, that urban planners planned to limit Mumbai’s population to a maximum of 3.4 million by 1980? This is like I planning to limit my weight gain to two hundred grams around the last week of the year, and I have the same success as Mumbai’s urban planners back in the day – we’re at about 25 million for the Mumbai metropolitan area now.*

And here’s another face-palm worthy statistic:

“The 1999 act is a marginal improvement over the original, but still doesn’t provide adequate incentive for investment. The annual 4% rental increase is below Indian inflation since 1999, below current Indian treasury yields, and far below the increase in demand or the increase in per capita GDP. At the allowable annual increase, the value of rent diminishes sharply over time. If the average Indian landlord received 30% of their income in rent in 1999, and received 4% annual nominal rent increases, they would be making only 8% of their income from rent on those units by 2021. Even more starkly, the act does not address the lag in rents from 1940 to 1999. A unit rented out under the 1947 rent act would have its rent pegged to 1940 prices until 1999, at which point a one-time 5% increase would be allowed, and a 4% annual increase thereafter”

But I wanted to focus on one particular thing in today’s post, and it is this excerpt:

However, the greatest beneficiaries of housing liberalization may be those who are least visible — those newly able to move into the city. One estimate found that migrants who move to cities in the Global South report increases in income as high as 30%. A separate RCT conducted in Kenya, meanwhile, estimated that households with family members who moved to Nairobi experienced an over 150% increase in income.

That is, the idiocy of our urbanization policies keeps people in poverty, and has done so since independence. How? By making it more difficult to migrate into India’s cities, that’s how. An unseen consequence of failed urbanization are the unseen poor, and that is an unseen tragedy.

Urbanization is, and remains, an underrated idea in India, and this has deep implications for our ability to overcome our challenges when it comes to eradicating poverty.

*Questions about my weight gain in the last week of the year will be deemed an invasion of my privacy, and will therefore be ignored. Go away.

Links for Friday, 17th July, 2020

  1. David Perell writes a mid-year review. It is worth reading in full, and there were multiple excerpts that I wanted to include here.

Writing is nature’s way of showing you how sloppy your thinking usually is. My mind tends to skip between topics, and the quarantine has made it worse because my Twitter usage has increased. At its worst, I develop BuzzFeed Brain where I find myself skimming instead of reading, secretly hoping my next intellectual breakthrough is just a thumb-scroll away. Long-form writing, however, re-activates my focus muscle and that’s why I do it.

https://www.perell.com/blog/mid-year-review

2. Scroll on what Mumbai’s coastal road will look like. Next week’s episode on urbanization with Binoy will have this as a primary focus – keep an eye out for that one! The pictures are worth going through – full screen on a laptop/desktop recommended.

But the proposal reflects one of the many flaws that urban planners have found with the Mumbai coastal road project: it is expensive, beyond the city’s means and capacity and is likely to congest the city even further.
A group of architects and urban planners in Mumbai have attempted to highlight these problems through visual representations of the planned coastal road. Since 2016, the group – named the Bandra Collective – has created several animated GIFs that superimpose artists’ impressions of the coastal road on actual photographs of Mumbai’s landmark coastline.

https://amp.scroll.in/article/876929/what-will-mumbais-coastal-road-actually-look-like-an-eyesore-say-these-architectural-projections

3. Varun Grover raises some interesting questions in an article about caste in the Indian Express:

There are two main arguments against reservations — one, they bypass merit and two, they should be given on the basis of economic status alone because otherwise “rich Dalits are taking undue advantage of the policy”.
The broad logical observation here is that one can’t offer both these arguments together. If we are okay with poverty-based reservations then merit is not a genuine concern. That means we hate its bypassing only when a ‘lower-caste’ person gets ahead and not when a poor from our own caste does. That’s casteism 101.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/reservation-vinod-kambli-dalits-varun-grover-6501257/lite/

4. If you have kids at home, this is worth it – I and my daughter are working through it, and it is genuinely fun, and educational!

Welcome to Camp Google. Two engaging weeks of interactive activities and assignments which will make this extended summer memorable for kids at home.
Starting 1st July, 2020, we will share exciting and innovative assignments with your kids to help them explore skills such as painting, writing, storytelling, arts & crafts, coding and cooking. These assignments will also include internet safety tips which will teach you how to be responsible digital citizens while being safe online.

https://events.withgoogle.com/summercamp2020/#content

5. I haven’t read this just yet (I’m writing this on the 15th of July), but it was recommended by Grant Sanderson – and that’s good enough for me!

But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream. He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-incompleteness-theorems-work-20200714

Links for 8th May, 2019

  1. “The god question is not easy to answer conclusively because god’s existence is a matter of faith, not science. There is no mathematical proof. God is a construct of belief. The great Austrian-American mathematician Kurt Gödel once attempted to prove the existence of god. His ontological proof of god, by definition, is more axiomatic and derived from semantic logic than from real mathematics. It was not long before it was discredited and the axioms questioned. Undeterred, a group of mathematicians from around the world is using open-source documentation to formalise Gödel’s proof to a level where it can be proven by computer programs. We will wait.”
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    Sachin Kalbag, a guy worth following on Twitter, writes about a near death experience he had some years ago, and asks questions about god, faith, belief and logic.
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  2. “You guys are so angry and militant, you’re going to cause havoc,” he recalls being told, delivering his anecdote with a comic’s timing. “You are not getting any arms. You are not ready to fight. You are raaaaw,” he says, disintegrating into laughter. Instead of war, the 21-year-old studied economics, ending up at the University of East Anglia in England. “When all this fighting is over,” he was told, “there will be a country to run.”
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    A short interview with Tito Mboweni – my only criticism is that it is too short, but then again, that’s the style of the Lunch with FT series. By the way, you might want to try Googling the series. Some extremely interesting interviews.
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  3. “The first two factory acts, one in 1881 and the other in 1891, neglected to shorten working hours. When the 1890 Factory Commission gathered workers’ voices, both male and female workers overwhelmingly demanded a shorter working day. Doorpathee told the commission: ‘It will be better if the hours are shortened.’ The 1891 Factory Act declared Sunday a holiday, limited the work day to 11 hours for female workers and seven hours for child workers (aged between nine and 14). But it left out adult males from the ambit of a shorter work day, and men continued to work between 13 to 16 hours per day.”
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    A truly lovely read about Bombay workers, their living conditions, and about the night schools that started in Bombay at that point of time.
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  4. “In short, strange as it may seem, industrialisation of India is the soundest remedy for the agricultural problems of India. The cumulative effects of industrialisation, namely a lessening pressure (of surplus labour) and an increasing amount of capital and capital goods will forcibly create the economic necessity of enlarging the holding. Not only this, but industrialisation, by destroying the premium on land, will give rise to few occasions for its sub-division and fragmentation. Industrialisation is a natural and powerful remedy…”
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    1918. Dr. Ambedkar wrote the essay from which this excerpt is taken in the year 1918. 101 years later, we still retain policies that keep people tethered to agriculture. Also worth reading is the rest of the article – and indeed, therefore the writings of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
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  5. “Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)”
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    Never be too confident of anything, least of all about whatever it is that you think you know, is my key takeaway from this article – but implementing this is easier said than done!

Links for 12th April, 2019

  1. “Due to these challenges, the Belt and Road has provoked growing international resistance, most acutely in the Indo-Pacific. This rising backlash has not gone unnoticed in Beijing.3 Yet it is unlikely that China’s approach will fundamentally change in the years ahead. The sheer size of ongoing Belt and Road projects limits China’s ability to refocus on smaller and less controversial efforts. Moreover, the Belt and Road is ultimately a vehicle for China’s geopolitical ambitions. Liabilities for host countries – loss of control, opacity, debt, dual-use potential, and corruption – are often strategic assets for Beijing. ”
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    Worth reading in its entirety, both for how well they have framed it (10 issues, 7 challenges) and for understanding the scope, the scale of OBOR – as well as why China wants something like this to happen.
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  2. “Krugman’s assertion that capacity keeps on rising might be correct – but that probably depends on one of the following conditions:The recession is short enough not to significantly affect innovation and investment
    Growth depends on factors that are not (negatively) affected by recessions
    Underlying capacity growth will accelerate beyond trend as the recession endsThe first we can yet hope for, but it’s looking less likely every month.”
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    This was written ten years ago. It is a great way to understand the following: business cycles, trend stationarity, unit root hypothesis, innovation, capacity building, endogenous growth theory. It is simply written, engaging, understandable – and because it was written ten years ago, can be validated. Worth it!
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  3. “Whereas Liverpool’s pursuit of the league title has been characterised by anxiety, drama and late winners, since the turn of the year City have been gracefully efficient at tearing into opponents, getting an early goal and so being able to control a game. Gabriel Jesus’s header against Brighton in the FA Cup semi-final on Saturday was the sixth goal City have scored this season inside five minutes, the 12th before the 10th minute and the 26th before the 20th. That is clearly part of a policy: rip into opponents, prevent them settling and have the game won before any doubts can begin to creep in. It may be that in a two-leg tie there’s less impetus to do that – but then an away goal can make a huge difference.”
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    You might find this choice weird, especially if you don’t like football, but this resonated with me as a way to do more than just play football. Think about it!
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  4. “Mumbai is the engine of the prosperous western state of Maharashtra, India’s largest regional economy with a GDP somewhere between $350-400 billion; the city contributes well over half the total. For Maharashtra to become a $1 trillion economy, Mumbai would need to double or triple the size of its economy, on the back of its preeminent role in service industries, especially finance. That means competing with the likes of Singapore and Shanghai to attract global banks and other world-class financial institutions to the humid, traffic-choked city.”
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    Rueben Abraham and Shashi Verma in Bloomberg on how the port near Mumbai has the potential to change Mumbai into a truly global financial hub. The cynic in me wonders if it will be possible, but the nascent urbanization enthusiast hopes that this, at least, gets off the ground!
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  5. “Amsterdam transit commissioner Sharon Dijksma announced Thursday that starting this summer, the city plans to reduce the number of people permitted to park in the city core by around 1,500 per year. These people already require a permit to access a specific space (and the cost for that permit will also rise), and so by reducing these permits steadily in number, the city will also remove up to 11,200 parking spaces from its streets by the end of 2025.”
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    Speaking of urbanization done just right, here’s Amsterdam with a plan to reduce parking spaces in the city centre – and beyond.