[Reader-list] Fourth Posting:Kalyan:The Idea Of Jamshedpur

[kalyan nayan]

This posting would engage with the apparent failure of planning process
in the Jamshedpur city.
Constant engagement with planning could not prevent Jamshedpur from
falling into the traps that other Indian cities have been subjected to.

Raising the concerns of the typical middle class inhabitant of the city
an article in one of the prominent dailies of the area declared:

"Roads overflowing with traffic, bustees eating into the taxpayers’
prerogatives, inadequate power and clogged drains have raised questions
about our planners’ foresight. Did they not look into the future or
were their plans not implemented properly"? 

	The concern raised in the quote above shows the disenchantment of a
significant section of the population in Jamshedpur. It certainly
reflects the critical scrutiny the Company planning policies have been
subjected to by the general inhabitant of the city. Although it deals
with the Jamshedpur of 90s and does not necessarily link with our
period yet the tone of assessment over the years was never very
favourable for the Company’s planning mechanisms. It might be the
reflection of one of the prominent consideration that the planner is
supposed to engage himself with in planning, i.e., to act as an arbiter
or a corrective weight in negotiating with diversity of interest groups
in an urban setting. Did the planners overlook this aspect? 
We have seen that the majority of the skilled workers were provided
with one kind of housing or another. It was the unskilled labouring
class who was mostly at the receiving end in terms of housing
requirements. Quite naturally for this large section of the population
every other engagement with the city was of secondary importance.
Labour looked to the built environment as a means of consumption and a
means for its own reproduction and, perhaps, expansion. It was also
sensitive to both the cost and the spatial access of the various
components in the built environment for example housing, educational
and recreational facilities, and services of all kinds. It would have
been naturally difficult for the planners to harmonize the immediate
requirements of this class and carry on with the process of building a
model industrial city. This predicament could be seen with every
subsequent plan. Some genuinely tried to address this issue first and
later on look into what respite the plan could provide the city’s
infrastructure. Hence there was continuous emphasis on housing the
labourer. Since the entire housing requirement was to be provided by
the Company, those workers who were not directly employed by the
Company were left unprovided for. One of the logical outcomes was the
development of the bustee areas. 
Part of the problem lay in the formulation of the very ideology of
planning. Michael Ames after a survey remarked three conditions that
influenced the character of Jamshedpur: one was the non local origins
of many of the workers; a second was the westernized orientation of the
upper strata; and a third was a sense of economic scarcity and
insecurity characteristic especially of the lower strata.   It would be
interesting to note Ames’s further observation about the westernised
orientation of the Company elites. According to him,
 
"While the Jamshedpur labour force as a whole is more cosmopolitan than
the general population of Bihar, the senior Company officials in the
city are even further removed from the masses in education and style of
life. The Company elites always have been either Western or westernized
people whose primary ties and interests were with Calcutta, Bombay, or
the Steel cities of America, England, and Germany".

This observation was true in many respects and this has been indicated
in earlier sections. The Tata family and other factory owners never
hesitated to copy Western models of industrial organisation, labour
relations, social welfare, and community planning. They also never
hesitated to import foreign experts, to design or evaluate industrial
and residential areas, or to send their own experts abroad for advanced
training.  This had its obvious impact on the nature of housing
strategies being adopted to tackle the problem of overcrowding. They
assumed that certain social forms like single family dwellings and
occupationally stratified residential areas could be easily
accommodated into Jamshedpur setting. This is not to say that in an
attempt to amalgamate these features, modifications suited to Indian
conditions were not envisioned. But it was also true that in the quest
for more economically rational transformation in the worker outlook the
primacy has always been given to the former. We could see the
reflection of it in the plans as well. In the words of J. R. D. Tata:

"The first question one might ask is whether the problems involved in
the Industrialisation of a country like India today are likely to be
different from those experienced in the West in the nineteenth century
and the first half of the twentieth. I think not. For the process, in
both cases, will have been one of transforming the environment and the
working and living habits of a large proportion of the people from life
on the farm and in small artisan and trading communities to life in
factories and urban areas. Human nature being fundamentally the same
everywhere and at all time, it may be expected to react to such a
change in generally the same way". 

>From the above message it is clear that boundaries defined by early
modern Western standards played a significant part in the ‘idea of
Jamshedpur’. The planners’ application of his ideas in these
circumstances cannot be separated from this necessary ideological
commitment. And planners were striving to affect reconciliation in
conjunction with a rational socio-spatial ordering. We can analyse
Temple’s idea of ‘hexagonal planning’ in this perspective where he
tried to come to terms with aberrations in the surrounding of
Jamshedpur. It was also the recognition of the fact that the efficiency
of the labour might be enhanced by providing a compensatory sense of
harmony with the nature in the living place.  Hence to bring more and
more nature into the city was every planner’s endeavour. 



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