Bangalore's health crisis

 Earlier this month, I had written about Bangalore's garbage crisis, among other things, and about Bangalore's civic authority(the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Pallike, or BBMP) and it's much ballyhooed drive to segregate wet, dry, recyclable and toxic trash which it claimed was the solution to the crisis. I had opined that the net result, given the fundamental incompetence of the BBMP, would be the accumulation of uncollected piles of segregated trash all over the city. Three weeks into the BBMP's segregation drive, that is in fact what has happened, with upward of 20,000 tons of rotting trash piling up all over the city and further clogging the inadequate drains.

This remains as common a sight as ever, post-segregation

 The inevitable consequence of refuse lying about the streets is a deterioration in the health environment. That has manifested itself already with a significant rise in mosquito, rat and fly-borne diseases in and around the city. An avian flu epidemic has broken out on a government-run turkey farm on the outskirts of the city, with a ban on all poultry products from farms within a 1 kilometer radius, possibly being escalated to a 10 km. radius. With segregated trash laying around, dogs, cats, birds and rats are feeding better than ever, not having to burrow through mixed trash to find food. This carries with it the probability of bird and flea-borne epidemics, such as the plague that hit Surat, being imminent. Heavy rain could further aggravate the health situation by polluting the water supply and spreading out the disease vectors. With no urgency on the part of the BBMP, this is turning into a rapidly escalating health crisis of epidemic proportions, and if serious steps are not taken in the next few weeks, Bangalore very well could see itself being quarantined. This is a serious, serious crisis.

 I am amazed that there is no action on the part of either the state government or the central(federal) government to contain this incipient crisis. One would be hard-pressed to find another part of the world with such apathy on the part of government or the people when faced with a major developing health crisis. Is this lassitude an Indian cultural trait? Indians come out in militant multitudes at the least hint of religious insult, but when faced with lethal crises far more important and urgent, they seem to lapse into torpor. This is a crisis that demands that political differences be set aside, and the state and federal governments attack this situation on an emergency basis. Not merely because millions of people are at risk, but also because Bangalore is the center of India's IT industry, contributing a third of India's substantial IT/ITES exports. The outcome of this crisis could very well determine if it deals a crippling blow to this industry and, longer-term, to the country's competitiveness and desirability as an outsourcing destination. Hundreds of billions of dollars hinge on how this developing crisis is handled. If nothing else, that alone should have moved government to action.

 Finally, I believe the BBMP has to be thoroughly cleansed of its thoroughly incompetent, inefficient and corrupt offices, and capable replacements brought in. This is an organization which has proven its unworthiness since inception. I am inclined to use much harsher language, such is my exasperation at the way I see this incredible joke of a civic authority function. Even over the past year alone, Bangalore has become a markedly filthier city. Have we come to the point of indifference where only a plague can spur decisive action?

Updates:
 Bangalore is doing its bit to celebrate the upcoming Year of the Snake: Snakes feast on garbage rats

The BBMP is now imposing fines on businesses and homes with standing water which potentially provide breeding spots for dengue-carrying mosquitos. Apparently, the BBMP believes that its own rivers of raw, stinking sewage are unattractive to egg-laying mosquitos. Like an armed robber denouncing pickpockets.

Half a million idols, many with toxic paint, dumped in Bangalore's lakes.

All of India remains apathetic toward the filth which surrounds human habitation. And yet I encounter people who insist that it is well on the way to becoming a "superpower"!

Bangalore Civic Services: Cash and Carry? Part One

 There is an anonymous civic group(leastwise, I think it's a group!) in Bangalore called The Ugly Indian, which has transformed many "Ugly Spots" into clean areas with an emphasis on sustainability through the involvement of local stakeholders like businesses, homes and city workers. Their motto is "Kaam Chalu Mooh Bandh", which roughly translates as "Close your mouth and work", referring to their preference for anonymity. The core proposition is that when government is not up to the job, the citizens should step up.

  Of course, all such activity is certain to bring up the issue of whether private citizens should be doing the work that city government collects taxes to provide as a service. That debate on Facebook turned a bit lively, and TUI brought up the question of whether the house/property taxes, modest in relation to property values, were sufficient to warrant the services which people expect from the city. I wrote back, if I recall correctly, that while the taxes were admittedly low in relative terms, one needed to be sure that submitting to a higher tax rate would not simply result in the city administration siphoning away the added money, without providing promised services, and also take into consideration that many property owners were "house rich, cash poor", as it were. TUI then asked me to expand on my remarks, which I promised to do in a blog post, as I had too much to say to put into an FB conversation. So here- better late than never!- is my take!

  A maxim of city planning is to plan for the future, rather than just for the present. The thrust of Indian city “planning” has been to address yesterday's problems. Bangalore has been no exception to that rule. My experience of Bangalore has been that each passing year brought declining levels of service from the city administration, from trash disposal to street maintenance to animal control. Likewise, BWSSB, the autonomous water utility, has also deteriorated with each year. The hallmark, if you will, of the failure of these services has been the lack of foresight and, more importantly, the corruption and lack of will on the part of these agencies.  I wrote about this in another post.

 The crux of TUI's question was this: do you think that the current taxes justify your current expectation of services and are you willing to pay more in taxes in order to receive a better level of service? Both points require a more nuanced response than a simple yes or no. To the first, there is no doubt that the total revenues generated by the city are insufficient to adequately provide services on a level commensurate with the ambitions of a "world class city" or, indeed, of a second-world city. But, more importantly, are they getting the level of service now that the taxes warrant? Those of us who live in better neighborhoods need to be more cognizant of the services provided in less-affluent areas, and not assume that the same level of service, however unsatisfactory it is, obtains citywide. As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the more affluent generally have a greater ability to get their squeaks heard.

 

  TUI noted, with a degree of optimism, that the average home in the Indiranagar neighborhood was worth close to a million dollars, while the average property tax was less than two hundred dollars a year. I would be inclined to value the average home in this area at closer to half a million dollars, which is still quite substantial. But the value is in the land, not the home, and rarely does the value of the house figure into an actual selling price. Moreover, many of the long-term residents are retired civil servants, ranging from police officers to civil service officials to military officers. These are people of modest means(current government salaries seem positively luxurious in comparison), and now survive on modest pensions of three or four hundred dollars a month. Not your typical million-dollar homeowner. Doubling or tripling their property tax might force them to seriously consider selling the homes they built with every intention of living out retirement here with their circle of friends and family.

 

These are homes on a street in Indiranagar, which sit on lots currently worth in the neighborhood of $500,000. Do they look like half-million dollar homes?

 

 Typically, someone who lives in a million-dollar home in the US would have an income north of $250,000. On my street here in Indiranagar, perhaps three residents fit that bill. One is a businessman, another is a builder and the third is a politician/restaurateur, and each of them have multiple homes. Of the rest, I honestly don't think anyone makes more than $50,000 a year, and most make probably between $6,000 and $20,000. As I said, house rich and cash poor. That said, I think most of them would be able to withstand a doubling-or even tripling- of property tax without too much stress, but allowances must be made for pensioners and others on fixed incomes.

Please go on to Part Two.

 

Bangalore Civic Services: Cash and Carry? Part Two

 The largest portion of a typical property tax bill in the US typically are school taxes, which can be up to 80% of the total bill in some areas. There are some middle-class homes who pay $10-12,000 a year, with close to $8000 being billed as school taxes. Conversely, there are properties in Pennsylvania, for example, with property taxes of less than $2000 a year which include trash removal, street maintenance, snow removal, policing and school expenditures. A large part of the disparity can be explained by the relative cost of living and the quality of services provided. Even so, I would rate the basic sanitation and street maintenance services in the least expensive and most rundown American towns and cities far superior to that of Bangalore, which is a disgrace to this city. The administration, however, seems only to indulge its propensity for unwarranted bombast.

The recent garbage crisis in Bangalore stemmed from three events: a sanitation workers' strike, a protest by villagers that closed one landfill and a fire at another. That still left two landfills available after the strike, and thus no reason not to keep moving the garbage out of the city. The issue is not primarily of the amount of garbage or the lack of segregation. It is the consistent inability of the city administration to provide even the most basic service in an efficient and timely manner, as old-time residents will know. It isn't enough to merely collect trash door-to-door, and then dump it around the corner and set fire to it every now and then. The existing system, as Americans like to say, "does not work as advertised". Before we talk of segregating and reducing the quantity of trash, we need to have in place an effective system of collecting and transporting trash to proper disposal facilities. Otherwise, what we will end up with is piles of segregated but uncollected trash in the city.

 

This is a corner nearby which was cleaned up about a year ago. The stenciled bi-lingual exhortations and image of Ganesha notwithstanding, the pourakarmikas(sanitation workers) continue to dump and burn trash there. When I took this picture, part of the trash was still smouldering.

Roads in Bangalore are another example of how not to run a city. I have noted before that there is not a single pothole-free road in Bangalore, and many resemble rural dirt tracks. A perfect example is this stretch of Richmond Road coming off Trinity Church Road, which has been in a state of abysmal disrepair for more than five years, despite being a central artery for people travelling from the east and northeast parts of Bangalore to Electronics City and Hosur. It's more fun if you watch the video in fullscreen!
 

 

With its unusual width, fixing the road without major traffic disruption should have been a piece of cake, but the disconnect between the BWSSB and the BBMP combined with the natural inertia of both entities ensures that the ordeal continues.

 So now we come to the second part of TUI's question. I think it is worth paying more in taxes if we get better service, but we need to ensure that the extra money will be properly utilized, and that residents on pensions and fixed incomes are spared undue stress. It's not only a matter of efficiently utilizing additional taxes, but also of efficiently utilizing existing taxes. For example, in many middle-class areas, trash collection can be segregated and done on a weekly basis, since they usually have the space to locate trash cans and recycling bins within the premises. Such collection routes can utilize small compactor trucks. Street sweeping can be mechanized using small electric sweepers, perhaps every other day, and residents should be made responsible for the cleanliness of their own sidewalks. As an aside, residents should also be required to remove gardens, fountains, statues, parking slots, and any other obstructions from the sidewalk in front of their properties.

  Businesses also need to be educated on taking ownership of the sidewalk in front of their stores/offices in a different way than they are accustomed to now: i.e., not as parking space, work space, display space or trash space. They also could pay more in a sort of categorized business tax, depending on how the business would impact local infrastructure and services. A restaurant, for example, would pay more than a book store of similar square footage. Taxing businesses a bit more and actually providing them service would discourage them from dumping as they do now. Additional revenues can be raised, for example, by licensing private enterprises to construct utility conduits(cables, gas, water, electric) alongside storm drains that they could lease to operators, which would also rid the city of those unsightly tangles of cables hanging between homes and running through the trees, or drooping from the trees threatening to strangle taller pedestrians. That needs to be addressed very soon, and it is better to build a solution before it gets out of hand.

 City officials need to demonstrate that they can responsibly utilize their current revenues and efficiently perform the jobs they are tasked with, before people will consent to paying higher taxes. Right now, there is not a single neighborhood in Bangalore which can be considered clean and well-maintained. That is the standing record of the BBMP. An independent audit of BBMP revenues and expenditures, preferably by accountants with certification in International Standards of Auditing, needs to be done prior to any tax hikes to make sure that the taxpayer is getting the best bang for the buck. A thorough analysis of the processes the Pallike uses should suggest ways of streamlining and making them more efficient users of the available resources, and thus also reducing the toll in time and expense for citizens who visit various city agencies. When citizens see wastage of their taxes, it is difficult to convince them that they need to pay more. The BBMP may need to have an outside team brought in to do a ground-up overhaul before more money flows into their coffers from a charged-up citizenry. Certainly we need to pay more to get the sort of services a world-class city deserves, but we also need to ensure that the city is ready, willing and able to put the added revenues to efficient use.
 
UPDATE: To buttress my point that the BBMP currently does not efficiently use tax monies:

" N R Ramesh, BJP corporator from Yediyur, claims that Bangalore is the only City in India that spends about Rs 430 crore(about $80 million) a year on garbage disposal. Mumbai, that has twice the population of Bangalore, spent Rs 191 crore in the last fiscal, Delhi spent Rs 177 crore and Chennai, which too is larger than Bangalore, Rs 135 crore."
Source: The Deccan Herald



 

India: Health amarjhansi

 The title of this post is a play on words that might need a little explanation. "Amarjhansi" is a phonetic expression of the way people from the Hindi belt pronounce the word "emergency", as in "Indira Gandhi wonly declared it amarjhansi!". But my synthetic compound word amar-jhansi also has meaning. Amar means ever, always, eternal, immortal. Jhansi is the name of a town in Uttar Pradesh which has roots in a word which translates to "vague", ethereal, indistinct or tenuous. Put together, the title provides a delightful double-entendre for the content of this post.

 It's no secret that India is witnessing an unfolding of lifestyle diseases of epidemic and historically unprecedented dimensions. While most lifestyle diseases are placed in the context of affluence and leisure, in India they can affect- and are affecting- people who don't exactly fit the picture of affluence and leisure. Instead, these diseases, primarily diabetes and heart disease(and of course the associated side effects of kidney, liver and eye disease), are being boosted not by conventional lifestyle changes that come with what would be considered affluence, but by culturally-nurtured dietary preferences indulged to excess by increased income not actually amounting to wealth or affluence. Increasingly, these diseases will disproportionately impact the poorer sections, because the wealthy will be able to diagnose, treat or prevent them better, just as in the west. It is truly a paradox of our modern world that it is the poor who increasingly suffer from the diseases which historically primarily afflicted the indolent wealthy. As an aside, during Elizabethan times(circa 16th century AD), the wealthy suffered from blackened and rotting teeth because sugar was an expensive luxury only they could afford. No doubt they also suffered from undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes and related issues.

 Every Indian meal, whether breakfast, lunch, teatime snacks or dinner, has excessive amounts of any or all of the following: sugar, salt, fat, starch. Coffee and tea are usually consumed sickly-sweet and often with more milk than water. In those parts of the country which are predominantly vegetarian, the potential advantage of avoiding animal fat and cholesterol is negated by the liberal use of vegetable oils(some of them hydrogenated or rich in saturated fats) and frequently ghee, which brings all the ill-effects of meat consumption to the vegetarian in a delicious, aromatic, convenient and religiously-sanctioned form. Even steamed foods are frequently accompanied by unhealthy condiments. A staple Kerala breakfast is rice(sometimes brown rice or whole wheat) flour steamed in a cylinder, with grated coconut steamed along with it on either end of the cylinder. But it is typically eaten with mashed bananas, ghee and sugar. Another staple was steamed plantain eaten with- you guessed it- ghee and sugar. Rice, I found out recently, is cooked in salted water here, something I have never done in all the years I have cooked rice. The saving grace for the poor who lived on this cuisine was the fact that they could not afford as much sugar or oil as they would have liked. Indeed, they frequently could not afford as much food as they required- paradoxically shielding them from "lifestyle diseases"- and that is only gradually changing for some. But they are discovering, with the proliferation of cheap Indian fast food on the streets, that scanty doesn't have to mean tasteless, and are dousing their food with as much salt, sugar and fat as they can afford, although- mercifully for them- ghee is still out of reach.

 On a previous visit to India, I employed a cook, a young woman in her early 20s. While she had an acceptable repertoire of culinary abilities, her preparations had too much salt, sugar and fat for my tastes. So I asked her to dial it way back for me, if not for the rest of the household. I lectured her on the drawbacks of such a diet. She countered that the methods I preferred were tasteless and inedible. One day, she had to go to the doctor, and had her blood pressure taken. It turned out that it was way high(I remember it as being something like 200/100), especially considering her age. Of course, I tried to reinforce the health benefits of the food angle, and urged her to at least tone it down. Recently, through the grapevine of the domestics, I heard that she had gotten married, had a couple of miscarriages, then developed kidney and heart issues. Now, according to the grapevine, she has renal failure. And she's not yet 30 years old.

 wherever you walk in an Indian city, you are likely to encounter sweet shops around every corner. And if that isn't enough for your sweet tooth, most restaurants("hotels") and even ordinary hole-in-the-wall convenience stores will provide you with goodies made nearly of pure sugar. It seems to me that Indian sweets are essentially varieties of flavored sugar. So you will find sweetmeats that are basically almond-flavored sugar, milk-flavored sugar, ghee-flavored sugar, cardamom-flavored sugar and so on. Sometimes, they are topped or stuffed with something like nuts or shredded coconut flavored perhaps with cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, or soaked(of course!) in sugar syrup. One of my favorite Indian sweets is the rasagolla, a cottage-cheese ball soaked in sugar syrup. Another is the gulab jamoon, which is essentially a dough ball deep-fried and served(surprise!) with rosewater-flavored("gulab" means rose) sugar syrup. In the US, we get them with barely a teaspoon of syrup. In India, they are served with so much syrup that you need to put your goggles on and dive in to find the cheeseballs and, before you are done, colonies of ecstatic ants and bees are bucket-brigading the syrup away like the Little Rascals after Alfalfa accidentally set the clubhouse on fire.

 

One of Bangalore's ubiquitous sweetshops

 Of course, if your food cravings run to more than sweets, you can happily indulge in fatty and salty just as conveniently, virtually on every street in every city. We used to have a maxim back in the day that, in India, you could never go wrong with starting a restaurant. It seemed that restaurants never went out of business, they just sometimes went on to bigger and better. Nowadays, I do see some closures, but they are usually of the relatively more expensive or themed variety. Ordinary working-class joints do a roaring trade, serving hyper-fatted sodium-saturated foods that could transform a starving Somali child into the image of a supine bourgeoisie brat in fifteen minutes flat or your money back. Even the ubiquitous grilled kebabs contain enough fat to make your teeth feel like they are being coated with Teflon. I remember an Indian expression which said, to paraphrase, "He's so rich that if you squeeze his arm, ghee will ooze out of it!". The cultural association of a high-fat, high-sugar diet with affluence or an aspirational lifestyle is so strong that it permeates Indian cuisine across the board, making it that much more difficult to contain ill-effects with any rise in income.

 I believe that the Indian government could do a lot worse with their healthcare budget than launch a massive awareness and education program to fundamentally alter the way Indians look at and prepare their staple dishes. It wouldn't require changing the recipes so much as adjusting them, but it would mean altered judgement of what taste means. My sisters both cook Indian food low in salt, sugar and saturated fats, and turn out absolutely delicious meals. Indian proponents of the vegetarian lifestyle(who generally seem to have a one-point religious agenda: ban meat) trumpet the health advantages of vegetarianism, while blithely ignoring the reality of the health crisis sweeping through the vegetarian community. The current situation is like pressure building in a volcano, and when the volcano blows, the country will be ill-equipped to deal with the fallout. Two sayings come to mind: "A stitch in time saves nine" and "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". The ounce of preventive education applied immediately and intensively would also be the stitch in time, and this is one "amarjhansi" the government needs to declare right now.