More riots expected due to rising food prices

In January 2007, Goldman Sachs  published a very interesting paper on India (India’s Rising Growth Potential by Tushar Poddar and Eva Yi).  It forecast that the Golden Quadrilateral — which runs through 13 states and 17 other cities (each with a million or more inhabitants) — would mark a turning point for India.

It would cause at least 140 million people to migrate before 2020 and another 700 million to urbanise by 2050.
It is a scale of migration that the world has not witnessed ever before, not even in China, where travel curbs have prevented this from happening. These projections have recently been further buttressed by another report on urbanisation by McKinsey.

All the predictions of Goldman made in that report are coming true. But it did not envisage the danger of food shortages. It did not look at the way rapid urbanisation, when coupled with a lack of vision on the food front, could actually provoke a nightmare for India. It could set the clock back for the country.

The Golden Quadrilateral project was indeed the turning point for India.  It was built with hardly any time or even cost overruns, an achievement which subsequent governments have failed to match.

In fact, the NDA government did something that 50 years of government had not been able to do. In those 50 years, points out the Goldman report, the government had built just 334 miles of new 4-lane roads. The Golden Quadrilateral project built much of 3,625 miles of 4- and 6-lane highways in just 6 years.

The report also pointed out how this effort would echo the US’ construction of its national highway system in the 1920s and 1950s, which fuelled commerce and development, and created the suburbs.

“More importantly, the highways will open up, and out, the closed worlds of India’s villages. They will facilitate increased rural-urban migration, and when migrants return to their villages, they bring back new views and aspirations, encouraging others to follow in their footsteps. The process is unlikely to be smooth or to happen overnight. Motorists could strike against taxes and tolls, speeding cars may have to contend with animals and bullock carts on the roads, local sensitivities to religious structures in the path of the highways may have to be taken into account, and there could be difficulties with the rural poor adapting to the highways. However, the potential for productivity gains and the boost to the economy are substantial,” Poddar and Yi said.

As a result, the growth is happening not in large cities, but in small and midsized towns. In 1991, India had 23 cities with a million or more people.

A decade later, it had 35. In 2001, India had 1 billion people spread across 544 districts of which 310 million people were in 5,161 urban agglomerates.  The remaining could be found in around 600,000 villages.

Currently, India has 1.2 billion people (24 crore households) spread over 640 districts, 7,742 urban agglomerates, 608,786 villages.

The number of urban agglomerates (and villages) has already begun to grow.

Urbanisation is fuelled by both pull and push factors. The lure of higher incomes, depleting opportunities in farms and the growth of services — all contribute to this development.
“This is because India’s urbanisation rate of 29% is still very low compared with 81% for South Korea, 67% for Malaysia, and 43% for China. Rural-urban migration in India has the potential to accelerate to higher levels as, judging by the experiences of other countries, migration tends to hasten after a critical level of 25-30% urbanisation is reached, and due to faster economic growth,” explain the authors of the report.

Urbanisation is inevitable.  But it makes demands on infrastructure, sanitation, health and education that rural life does not normally get.  When discontent is spread out in rural areas, it is relatively easy to control.

But when discontent begins to take place in highly concentrated areas of human dwelling, it becomes all too visible, highly infectious thus spreading like wildfire, and extremely difficult to control

If the looming food shortage situation is not addressed quickly, other dissatisfactions like the lack of employability (because of a virtual collapse of school education), medical facilities and sanitation will suddenly get concentrated in the roar of protest against rising food prices.

India’s urbanisation can be a boon; but not if food is not provided at reasonable prices.