Running on empty: How Gurgaon is gobbling up its own future

By Avirook Sen As the Anna revolution had the country in a spin, his constituency in suburbia switched on their computers, punched messages on their cellphones, hopped on to the metro, and joined in. On Sunday, 21 August, 30,000 more people took trains from Gurgaon and Noida (as compared to the previous “normal” Sunday) as throngs headed for Ramlila Maida. Cyber City ‘IT professionals’ in Gurgaon held their own gathering. But an interesting expression of support came through a Facebook page ‘Gurgaon with Anna Hazare.’ They launched a ‘Lights Out’ campaign, which about 1,570 people ‘like’, saying: “Anna, we are with you. We will switch off lights for 10 minutes at 8 pm tonight and every night of your fight.” Ten minutes without power in Gurgaon! That is in addition to the several hours of power cuts each day, unless the electric supply chooses to switch off around that time. But those longer cuts are for the people without the now almost taken-for-granted 24-hour power backup. According to the Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam, Gurgaon consumed 80 lakh units a day five years ago. Now it gobbles up 135 lakh units. In the next five years it will probably jump to about 250 lakh units. The present supply is about 100 lakh units.  Hence the ubiquitous generators. In June, the New York Times reported that the outsourcing company Genpact had “backup diesel generators capable of producing enough electricity to run the complex for five days (or enough electricity for about 2,000 Indian homes).” There are plenty of these ordinary/less than ordinary homes in Gurgaon. Outside the colonies. In the village, the community has gotten used to the power cuts. But if you are renting a room as a migrant worker, you must bear the additional burden of paying at least 20 percent more per unit to your rural landlord for the approximately 30 units you would consume. Giving up another ten minutes to protest wouldn’t be treated as a serious suggestion in these places. The aam aadmi would laugh. This is why some people have caught Anna fever and some haven’t. Gurgaon’s divisions predate the revolutionary ideas that have suddenly gripped India. They have been apparent for decades now because it is both village and city. It has two sets of people: survivors and settlers. It has, unfortunately, only so much in resources to go around. In an earlier article , I had talked about Gurgaon’s elite insulating themselves—ensuring that the problems of the larger community stayed outside the gate. That, according to Jared Diamond, thinker and author, is a recipe for breakdown. But he sees it as a political cause, often tied to the use and distribution of resources. [caption id=“attachment_69062” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Gurgaon has two sets of people: survivors and settlers. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times”] [/caption] The ‘Lights-Out’ campaign, unwittingly paints a very accurate picture of how power is distributed in Gurgaon. But what about something even more basic: water. Of all the stories about the collapse of societies, the tale of the Easter Islands in the middle of the Pacific is probably the most morbidly captivating. Civilisation in the Easter Islands existed in splendid isolation. When the Polynesians arrived there more than a thousand years ago, it wasn’t the tree-less flat with a few hundred heavy, abandoned, stone statues that it was to become. It was a sub-tropical rain forest with a variety of vegetation, which could support a small population if it settled wisely. There was land for agriculture, and fish in the sea. But the Polynesians made the mistake of chopping all the trees down to build their homes and canoes. Without wood to build their boats, they couldn’t go fishing and so turned to killing birds. Soon these were gone too. The only protein source they now had was humans. They literally ate each other up. Jared Diamond tells this story much better in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. And while later research has suggested that other factors—like disease and the introduction of the Polynesian rat which multiplied alarmingly and devoured every last seed—might have contributed heavily to the rapid decline of the Rapa Nui, the story of their undoing is full of lessons. Diamond has a five-point check-list on why societies fail. The first of these is the impact it has on its environment. The Easter Islanders cut their trees down. In Gurgaon, they’re digging wells and drawing water at such a rapid rate that the table sinks by more than a metre every year. In some pockets, such as the huge Cyber City complex—where thousands of call centre employees are on the job 24/7—it could well be 10 metres annually, according to the Society of the Urban Regeneration of Gurgaon (SURGE). Making water available is a private enterprise in Gurgaon, so the developers and tenants drop wells down at will, unregulated, in the absence of any worthwhile municipal oversight. This might be expensive, but while Gurgaon is short of water, corporate Gurgaon it isn’t exactly short of money—for now. The Central Ground Water Board had categorically said as far back as 2004, that Gurgaon’s ground water resources had already been over-exploited by a factor of at least two, warning that there was no more scope to draw more. But the rate at which water is being sucked out is only going to increase. Gurgaon’s population has grown at an alarming 75 percent in the last decade, to reach 1.5 million, and some studies say, by the time 2030 comes along this figure will have quadrupled. All if these people, will need to drink, bathe and flush their toilets—if they have one. A third of the population does not, but that’s another story. By 2030, the borewells in Cybercity will  hit rock bottom literally. Thinking of joining the Lights-Out campaign in Gurgaon? I’d encourage you enthusiastically. In fact, I’d say extend that indefinitely (or till we root out corruption!). Switch off the big genset for half an hour a day too. And use a bucket of water less each day while you’re at it. Avirook Sen is a journalist and author. His first book  Looking for America  was published by HarperCollins in 2010.