by Aditya Nigam
Guest post by TAHA MEHMOOD
A pilgrimage to the cave
One day Cleinias, a Cretan invites Athenian and Megillos, a Spartan for a religious pilgrimage. Cleinias proposes to visit the cave of Zeus, just as Minos used to do. Minos was the legendary Cretan king. Every nine years Minos would walk along a path to the cave where he will hear revelations on the laws from Zeus. Perhaps the act of a man going to the cave to seek revelations from God was part of an ancient Cretian tradition. In the island of Crete Minos played the role of a Lawgiver, in Athens– Zeus, while in Megillos’s state Sparta this role was played by Apollo.
Magnesia: The last idolum of Plato
This was the setting of the last dialog of Plato. He called it The Laws. In this dialog Plato tries to define the legal framework of an imaginary state named Magnesia. Throughout his life Plato was preoccupied with the question of how to name and define things. He believed one could even name abstract entities like numbers and define it as even or odd. In this dialog Plato makes an attempt to name various types of laws and define it.
The space
During the journey Cleinias tells the Athenian how Crete has given him responsibility to found a city-state called Magnesia and asks Athenian to help frame its laws. Magnesia was a land locked country. Athenian proposes Magnesia to be divided into twelve sections. Each citizen must have two dwellings one near the center and one at the country side.
People
The Athenian suggests Magnesia should not have more than 5,040 citizens. The population of slaves and foreigners could vary but that of citizens must remain constant.
Registration of foreigners
A foreigner could come to Magnesia and settle for twenty years but he should register with the magistrates. When he leaves he was free to erase all entries regarding his stay from the register. Likewise all the details of any children born to foreigners should be registered and all their details could be erased upon their departure. However if a citizen were to bear a child his\her birth should be recorded in a family shrine under the heading ‘born’. And after their death such names should be expunged.
Land, wealth and public service
Furthermore the Athenian proposes that every possession and piece of land of every man be publicly registered with the magistrates whom the law appoints. The underlying idea being there should neither be extreme poverty nor extreme riches in Magnesia. The legislators must decide the limits to poverty. That state must have knowledge of wealth of its citizens. So if anyone is found with property that is not registered or have excess property it could be confiscated. All those who serve Magnesia must serve without receiving gifts. If anyone is convicted against a law ‘Do no service for a bribe’, he must simply die.
Trade
Athenian was of the view that commercial activities must be carried out either by foreigners or alien residents. A citizen should not engage either in retail trade or in money lending. No one was obliged to pay interest on money taken on loan. Plato ends The Laws with a scene where the Athenian suggests Cleinias to take a chance and establish Magnesia.
Political system
The Athenian did not prefer democracy. He believed God would watch over a council of guardians who will frame laws together with a benevolent dictator who will rule over Magnesia.
Tihar: And the rise of Kiran Bedi as a Platonic benevolent dictator
When Kiran Bedi first entered Tihar as Inspector General Prisons, she felt like ‘entering an organized township.’[i] For all we know, she may have been referring to an imaginary city state like Plato’s Magnesia. Kiran Bedi, the retired Indian Police Service officer, is universally credited for reforming the largest prison complex in Asia Pacific region- The Tihar prison. In 1999 Kiran Bedi wrote a book, It’s always possible: one woman’s transformation of Tihar Prison, about her experience of managing the Tihar prison complex as Inspector General Prisons between 1993-1995.
How Tihar came into existence
The prison complex is located in North-west Delhi on a plot of land at a village called Tihar. In 1951, the Government of India invited a UN specialist Dr. WC Reckless to make suggestions for improving prison administration inIndia. Dr. Reckless, a university of Chicagotrained criminologist, submitted his report a year later. As a response to that, in 1958, Tihar prison was built. Tihar started functioning under the government of Punjab. In 1966 the administrative control of Tihar was transferred to the Delhi Government.
Type of prisons in Tihar
In Magnesia Plato devises three types of prisons for the state. A general prison can be located near the marketplace, a ‘House of Reformation’ near the nocturnal council and the last one should be constructed in some desolate region of the state for grave offenders. The assumption appears to be that a prison must cater to only one type of offenders. Like in Tihar, which back then in 1993, was used to house inmates for a variety of reasons. The prison complex was divided into four sections. Each section had several wards. Inmates were lodged alphabetically except Women and foreign prisoners who were lodged in Prison 1. Convicted prisoners were lodged in Prison 2. Accused related to Terrorists Activities Disruption Act were lodged in Prison 3 and the inmates of Prison 4 were under-trials.
Tihar, says Kiran, ‘was going to be my destiny’.[ii]
State of Tihar before Kiran joined
Just a year before Kiran joined, Tihar was in chaos. Riots had erupted in the prison resulting in death of some prisoners. The food, water, housing, sanitation and general administration systems at Tihar were in chaos. Even mental and physical hygiene of prisoners were severely affected. All this was compounded by non-functioning prison bureaucracy. The conditions were so bad that between 1988 and 1992, 120 prisoners had reportedly committed suicide.[iii]
Tihar was heading towards a hyper chaotic state but Kiran Bedi was not deterred by such a sight, as she mentions, ‘I was there to make Tihar a respectable human dwelling’[iv]. How did Kiran Bedi transform Tihar from a dystopic society to a functioning utopia? What steps did she take, as the highest-ranking officer of that space, to make its system work?
The magic of a petition box
Kiran Bedi explains, ‘running a prison proved to be a massive exercise in housekeeping’[v]. Housekeeping involves replacement of chaos with order. Every morning at 09:00 hrs Kiran Bedi would walk around the prison complex and take notes. In these notes Kiran Bedi would enlist those aspects of the prison that were not functioning properly together with the title of the person under whose jurisdiction it could be corrected. She inquired about action taken by prison authorities, by casually chatting everyday to groups of inmates assembled in front of the prison to go to court. These informal conversations provided her with a subsequent follow-up list of actions. After each round she would upgrade her lists.
Slowly, according to her, the prisoners began to open up, but the fear of prison authorities was still there. In order to counter that fear Kiran Bedi introduced a mobile petition box system. The petition box was to be used by prisoners to lodge complaints against all aspects of this organized and unique town that were not functioning according to the laws.
The petition officer
A petition officer was made the guardian of the petition box. The petition officer did not belong to the prison staff. He was from the Delhi Administrative Secretariat Services. There was only one key to the petition box and it was with the petition officer. The role of the petition officer was to log petitions, categorize and prioritize them and bring it to Kiran Bedi who would take the final call. She writes, ‘These petitions, along with rounds, became the basis for reforming the prison’.
According to her the petition box became a magical object where prisoners could whisper their complaints. The petition box for her was an information box, an audit box and a response box all rolled into one. She writes, ‘nothing was hidden anymore’.
An information flow was established which enabled Kiran Bedi to know what was going on and take corrective action, gather feedback on action taken and take further action. A chain of command and action was established. All complainants were given a pink card as an acknowledgement and some were given a green card after action, on their complaint, was taken. Tihar began to change. A council of guardians comprising of Jail Warders, Superintendents and officers were collaborating with Inspector General to introduce new practices for the good of all. Time was indeed ripe to introduce elements of democracy.
Kaidi Panchayat
The Athenian wanted democracy to flourish in Magnesia under the watchful eyes of its benevolent dictator. Elections were order of the day. A dazzling variety of officials were elected. For instance elections were held for the post of magistrates, city and market wardens, examiners, superintendents and judges of the court. Even the army would elect its Generals. However only those who carry shields could elect a Brigadier.
Likewise in Tihar, by an order issued in June 1993, just three months after she took absolute control of the prison complex, Kiran Bedi introduced the concept of Prisoner Panchayat System. Two staff members – a lambardar and a munshi were part every ward panchayat. The first type of panchayat was at the ward level. From the ward panchayat various types of elected bodies grew like the teachers panchayat and literacy panchayat. Kiran wanted a school to be opened in her city state. Other panchayat evolved like the medical panchayat, mess panchayat, sports panchayat, cultural panchayat, nai punja, legal panchayat, PWD panchayat, patrolling panchayat and so on.
On 25th Septmeber 1993, Kiran Bedi summoned a mahapanchayat. 400 elected representatives from four prisons gathered around Inspector General of prisons at Tihar to discuss participatory self-governance. The question was, how to utilize the potential of masses. In Tihar was no shortage of people. If Plato’s Magnesia had 5040 citizens, by 1993 Tihar, which was originally built for 2500 inmates had close to 8000 inmates. Kiran Bedi saw overcrowding of prison population its greatest strength, as she suggests, ‘In fact, the jail itself housed the greatest strength—human resource. The human beings confined within the four walls had all the time, energy and the professional skills, which constitute the foundation of any vibrant society.’[vi] The idea was to train prisoners in vocations and allow them to work. The problem was authorities didn’t remember who was who. They had a general idea of the population but specifically the identity of a person was difficult to gauge beyond the immediate confines of a ward.
The 8,000 inmates
Documenting individual identity of all prisoners is crucial to establishment and smooth functioning of any prison system. Tihar was no different. Plato’s Magnesia identity was not articulated through numbers. In Plato’s view Identity flows from essence. And essence excludes sameness. Plato was deeply troubled by questions pertaining to sameness and difference. I’d imagine a person like Plato would have a lot trouble naming and defining a person in terms of a number.
In Tihar every prisoner was given a number. A number often defines a prisoner. The personal identity of 8,000 prisoners was mapped. Practices such as taking thumb impressions and identification of prisoners by body marks were used to allow prisoners to access various spaces within the complex. The problem was in keeping records. Tihar was suffering from memory ailments. The jail staff was not adequately educated and the record room was in a bad state. Earlier all security related book entries were done manually. Few educated life-termers used to work in record and administrative sections. The storehouse for records was infested with rats, snakes ‘acting as deterrents to human entry’. Kiran passed an order for immediate computerization of all convict records[vii]. It was important to know the prisoners before they could be harnessed as a resource.
The factory
During Kiran Bedi’s tenure, KC Shroff of Excel industries became the first entrepreneur to collaborate with Tihar[viii]. He started a waste disposal unit that gave employment to 40 prisoners. Earlier a factory was located at Prison number 2. Prison number 2 was used to house life convicts. Before Kiran took over, factory was just as scam ridden as other places at Tihar. Kiran Bedi started asking Non Governmental Groups to help train convicts in vocations. By the time Kiran Bedi completed her tenure 300 NGO’s were imparting various training programs to life convicts and inmates[ix]. These programs help turn undertrials and life convicts to skilled laborers who could produce paper products, bakery, furniture products, male and female apparels, handloom and textiles. I do not have any access to sales data covering 1993-95 period however data covering the period from 2003-04 to 2009-10 is publicly available. By 2003 the Tihar Jail factory had a turnover of around $ 0.5 Million which increased to $ 2.3 million by 2009-10[x]. The Tihar Jail Factory has been branded as TJ’s. As of now, according to information given at the Tihar webpage, 700 inmates work full time in the factory. We do not know how many inmates are causally employed or work on a contract basis. We also do not know whether an inmate continues his practice with the vocation learned at Tihar. One of the mission statements of TJ is to provide ‘opportunities of reformation to prison inmates by channelizing their energy towards productive work’. There were only four jails at Tihar during Kiran Bedi’s tenure however by 2008 five more jails were added housing over 11,000 inmates. Products from TJ’s are bought by member of general public, various institutions of Government of India and some private corporations.
Hijli: The story of a space from Jail to Campus
Not all jails provide opportunities of reformation to prison inmates by channelizing their energy towards productive work. Some jails of pre-independent India, for instance, were used for detention purposes only. A case in point is the Hijli prison. In an impromptu literature survey regarding Hijli prison I found, it is variously described as a cellular prison, a detention center, a jail, a concentration camp and a penitentiary.
The Hijli jail was located in the district of Midnapore. It was active between 1921 and the end of WWII. M.M. Das, the parliamentary Secretary to the first Minister of Education of India, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, describes the jail as ‘a vast concentration camp of the political prisoners in Bengal’[xi]. After independence the jail was shut down. Nehruvian technocrats reopened the jail as an academic campus. Hijli was where the first Indian Institute of Technology came into being. A jail where authorities opened fire and killed two inmates to quell a prison riot in 1931 was reopened as an academic campus in 1951.
The word campus has an interesting origin. It was first used to denote the landscape and buildings of the College of New Jersey that later became the Princeton University. Nassau Hall, a three story stone structure with a basement was the first built structure at Princeton University. Robert Smith, an architect, designed this building between 1753-56. Twenty years later he went on to build the first prison of America called the Walnut Street prison. Robert Smith used many features of Nassau Hall like the façade, the –U- shape halls, community residential areas to construct the Walnut street prison. The Walnut Street prison was designed to reflect a fundamental quaker belief that the purpose of imprisonment was ‘labor, silence and penitence’[xii]. Anyways, in post 1951 India, four more IIT’s were opened at Bombay, Madras, Delhi and Kanpur. New kind of academic campuses were being planned to channel out ‘old pattern of engineering education which laid exclusive emphasis on technology’ and introduce a broad based education. The idea was to plan a campus that could generate ‘engineers equipped with a sense of national purpose’[xiii].
One such institute was established in Powai, a suburb of Bombay. Nandan Nilekani, the Chairman of UIDAI passed out of IIT Bombay in 1978. He joined Narayan Murthy’s company Infosys in 1981. In early 1990’s the Infosys company established the first Information Technology campus of India in Bangalore.
Campus: Some views about an organized township
John C Stallmeyer, a professor of architecture, explains how Infosys campus evolves to project the idea of a corporate identity. The realization of corporate identity in terms of campus depends on variables like time and cost. A Silicon Valley imaginary is influencing the architecture at Infosys. An underlying transnational image is at the work here. Infosys Campus was designed to look like any other technology-park anywhere in the world. It could be any office. The building was designed to appear ‘as spectacular objects in the landscape, while their interiors remain essentially warehouses for software workers in their cubicles’[xiv].
There was something else. May be a deeper desire to move away from chaos. Stallmeyer wrote a letter to Mohandas Pai, the CFO at Infosys to inquire about the mindset of the management team and know why the campus is built in a particular manner. Mohandas Pai’s reply was as follows:
‘Whenever the clients come, they walk in, they walk through this chaos, [and] they are confused because they see…coming straight at them, they see the cattle on the road. You see people crossing the road; you see the buses going helter-skelter, you see the road is crowded, you see the dirt on the road and you are confused. You don’t know where you have landed, and they come here, and suddenly, they see order, they see beauty, they see aesthetics, they see a lot of well-dressed people moving about. There is order here. And then they believe that there can be quality and software here. But, you know, we are dealing with someone who lives 8,000 kilometers away in a different culture where there is order, where there is high quality, as they perceive it, and less disorder and chaos.’[xv]
Mohandas Pai’s words to Stallmeyer seem to reflect what The Athenian tells Cleinias during their walk to the cave of Zeus. The Athenian says, ‘if you order rightly the city of the Magnetes, or whatever name God may give it, you will obtain the greatest glory; or at any rate you will be thought the most courageous of men in estimation of posterity.’ The Athenian imagines Magneisa as an ordered space away from the chaos of Hellenes.
India: A land of chaos
In 2008 Nandan Nilekani wrote a book, Imagining India: Ideas for the new century. In Nandan Nilekani’s imagination India sometimes appears as a land where chaos reigns unfettered.
Dehli, for instance, comes across as follows, ‘In Delhi…. it is chaos.’[xvi] ‘Political chaos soon returned to Delhi’[xvii]. ‘Delhi’s riot for water and of course the inescapable chaos of traffic snarls’[xviii].
Nilekani remembers Bombay of 1979 as, ‘the decline of the city was already well under way, and the urban chaos was clearly visible’.[xix] He summarizes his disappointment about land market in Bombay as follows, ‘The chaos in our land markets has fed on itself’[xx]. Later in the book Bombay also appears in Nandan’s imagery as a ‘fertile chaos’.[xxi]
Chaos seems to be so much present in Nilekani’s imagination that even other people speak to him in the language of Choas. When Nandan Nilekani met Jaffery Sachs to talk about the state of Indian cities, Jeffery reportedly said following, ‘The broken pavements, the chaos of the roads endanger the causal pedestrian’[xxii].
Contemporary India, in Nilekani’s view, is suffering from a crisis. Where the states are forced into action by market pressure building up. This response led strategy has made ‘chaos the rule in our crumbling cities’[xxiii].
When Nilekani offers a sweeping history of railways in India, he does it through chaos. Nilekani carefully takes out 9 words from a book by Rajan Balachandran to explain how the British officers viewed the newly constructed fortified railway stations in India around 1870’s. In one sweeping sentence, Nilekani describes the railway stations as ‘protective Edens, against which,’ and then comes words form Rajan’s book, ‘the chaos of India beats, outrageous as a sea’[xxiv].
Nandan Nilekani considers the constant churning of electoral democracy in India, where some type of elections is taking place almost every year, as ‘chaos’. Infrastructure projects and investment in public goods, in his view, is therefore unsuited for this ‘chaos’[xxv].
When Mahesh Rangarajan speaks with Nilekani about the challenges to single market even Mahesh apparently uses the word chaos. Mahesh, as quoted in Nilekani’s book, says, ‘we are going through a period of some political chaos. And the impact it will have on single market reforms is pretty difficult to predict’[xxvi].
He urges policy makers of India to not to define policies by ‘the context of colonialism or capitalism. Instead we should focus on results and rational outcomes’ and then Nilekani adds a fragment from the famous speech delivered by a US Army General and later Secretary of State, Geroge C Marshal, at Harvard, when he was outlining a plan to rebuild Europe after WWII. In Marshal’s view policies must not focus on ‘any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos’[xxvii]. The Marshal plan called for removal of trade barriers and massive modernization of industry for reconstruction of Europe. This flight of capital, from America to Europe in the eyes of commentators like Chomsky, was key to the establishment of large transnational corporations and therefore it laid the foundation for an umbrella of US power[xxviii]. I wonder whether Nandan Nilekani wants Indian companies to play the same role in years to come. Is he suggesting that a small cluster of big corporations together with thousands of big, medium and small NGO’s may carry out the painful task of governance inIndia.
Imagining India: Nilekani’s Utopia
So how would India figure out in the mind of a man who says ‘I spend a good amount of time in planes, and the view of our largest cities from a height of 3000 meters is an exhilarating experience’[xxix]? To answer this question we have to dream the dream, which Nandan Nilekani dreams.
My favorite line of the book comes at the very end. During the course of researching the book Nandan Nilekani met a large number of people. One of them was Jaideep Shani, whom Nilekani describes a ‘boyish script writer of films like Bunty aur Bubbly and Chak De India.’[xxx] These films project a narrative of aspiration. The lead characters of these films move from the village to the city in the hope of realizing their dreams. In one film they end up working with the state to root out unlawful people, in the other film they end up harvesting glory for the state by winning at the games.
Had Plato seen Chak De, I’d assume he would be amused not because of the narrative of aspiration or because of the redemption narrative but because he suggests citizens should practice war- not in time of war but during peace. And any city magistrate, who has any sense, must provide provisions in order to summon all the youth of the city for games and competitions. City Magistrates must distribute prizes and confer honor to victors and must blame those who lost. Sports for Plato was a tool to make the citizens remember the city-state and identify with it.
Anyways, perhaps based on his interactions with a Bollywood dream-merchant Jaideep Sahni and by his own psychedelic experience of viewing Indian cities from a height of 3000 meters and getting exhilarated over and over again, Nilekani concludes ‘a majority of Indians now believe they can leave their village behind, and there will be something better waiting for them, round the corner, in the next town, in the big city’[xxxi] and with an afterthought he adds—‘perhaps even in their village should they return’.
A comparison of Utopias as Nandan Nilekani, Kiran Bedi and Plato projects in their book
While reading Plato I often wonder why did he dream of an ideal space in a city setting. What is it about a city that is luring policy makers in India to make a case for urbanization? Why is urbanization the preferred goal of people like Nandan Nilkekani? Surely there is nothing modern about cities. Society in Plato’s time was highly urbanized. What is Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian war if not a tale of tens of cities fighting with each other over a fear that Athens could dominate over Hellenes.
Nandan Nilekani’s utopia seems to be located in the next town or the big city where Indians can find something ‘better’. He visualizes towns and cities to be a site for entrepreneurship and growth. The state will give every citizen a number and therefore will possibly exercise control over knowledge of personhood in society. NGO’s and corporations will provide solutions to day to problems of governance. Politicians will take care of ‘chaos’ of democracy. In this respect his view does not seem to differ from Kiran Bedi’s experience at Tihar where NGO’s were called in to help run a system, private entrepreneurs chipped in and life convicts were happily working at the factory. Nilekani’s version differs from Kiran Bedi’s version in the distribution of power. For Kiran Bedi’s utopia seems to be functioning electoral democracy under the watchful eyes of a benevolent dictator holding the keys to a petition box. A vibrant society that is perhaps based on what she terms as a 3C system of governance (a collective-corrective-community). I wonder how does an upright former Inspector General of Prison feel whenever she looks at the Indian Parliament, where roughly one fifth of the elected members are accused under various sections of Indian Penal Code?
And Plato thought a city-state like Magnesia should be a site for reason and virtue. But who gives a fiddler’s fuck about a bone dead, boy-lover and a buck chowd- right??
Endnotes
[i] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-8, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[ii] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-11 Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[iii] U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, 1994, INDIA HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICES, 1993, url- http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/democracy/1993_hrp_report/93hrp_report_sasia/India.html
[iv] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-4, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[v] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-144, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[vi] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-217, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[vii] The order to computerize all convict record was passed as an effect of observation made during her daily rounds. Her Note- Computerization of Convict Record should be introduced (Action, Superintendent Jail No 1 and DIG (PJ). She notes the jail staff at Tihar were not happy with this order.
Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-139, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[viii] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-211, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[ix] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-xvi, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[x] The Factory at Tihar- http://tihartj.nic.in/the_factory.asp
[xi] Āzād, Abūlkalām & Kumar, Ravindra. 1992, The selected works of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Volume 9 Kumar, p-250, Atlantic Publishers & Dist
[xii] McShane, M.D & Williams, F.P., 1996, Encyclopedia of American prisons, p-407, Taylor & Francis
[xiii] Āzād, Abūlkalām & Kumar, Ravindra. 1992, The selected works of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Volume 9 Kumar, p-251, Atlantic Publishers & Dist
[xiv] Stallmeyer, J.C, 2010, Building Bangalore: architecture and urban transformation inIndia’sSilicon Valley, p-60, Taylor & Francis
[xv] Stallmeyer, J.C, 2010, Building Bangalore: architecture and urban transformation inIndia’sSilicon Valley, p-60, Taylor & Francis
[xvi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-34, Penguin Press HC
[xvii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-185, Penguin Press HC
[xviii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-195, Penguin Press HC
[xix] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-205, Penguin Press HC
[xx] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-206, Penguin Press HC
[xxi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-239, Penguin Press HC
[xxii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-208, Penguin Press HC
[xxiii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-267, Penguin Press HC
[xxiv] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-220, Penguin Press HC
[xxv] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-223, Penguin Press HC
[xxvi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-261, Penguin Press HC
[xxvii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-26, Penguin Press HC
[xxviii] Chomsky N, 2003, The Umbrella ofU.S. Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions ofU.S. Policy, p-9,10 Seven Stories Press,
[xxix] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-195, Penguin Press HC
[xxx] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-159, Penguin Press HC
[xxxi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-462, Penguin Press HC
A pilgrimage to the cave
One day Cleinias, a Cretan invites Athenian and Megillos, a Spartan for a religious pilgrimage. Cleinias proposes to visit the cave of Zeus, just as Minos used to do. Minos was the legendary Cretan king. Every nine years Minos would walk along a path to the cave where he will hear revelations on the laws from Zeus. Perhaps the act of a man going to the cave to seek revelations from God was part of an ancient Cretian tradition. In the island of Crete Minos played the role of a Lawgiver, in Athens– Zeus, while in Megillos’s state Sparta this role was played by Apollo.
Magnesia: The last idolum of Plato
This was the setting of the last dialog of Plato. He called it The Laws. In this dialog Plato tries to define the legal framework of an imaginary state named Magnesia. Throughout his life Plato was preoccupied with the question of how to name and define things. He believed one could even name abstract entities like numbers and define it as even or odd. In this dialog Plato makes an attempt to name various types of laws and define it.
The space
During the journey Cleinias tells the Athenian how Crete has given him responsibility to found a city-state called Magnesia and asks Athenian to help frame its laws. Magnesia was a land locked country. Athenian proposes Magnesia to be divided into twelve sections. Each citizen must have two dwellings one near the center and one at the country side.
People
The Athenian suggests Magnesia should not have more than 5,040 citizens. The population of slaves and foreigners could vary but that of citizens must remain constant.
Registration of foreigners
A foreigner could come to Magnesia and settle for twenty years but he should register with the magistrates. When he leaves he was free to erase all entries regarding his stay from the register. Likewise all the details of any children born to foreigners should be registered and all their details could be erased upon their departure. However if a citizen were to bear a child his\her birth should be recorded in a family shrine under the heading ‘born’. And after their death such names should be expunged.
Land, wealth and public service
Furthermore the Athenian proposes that every possession and piece of land of every man be publicly registered with the magistrates whom the law appoints. The underlying idea being there should neither be extreme poverty nor extreme riches in Magnesia. The legislators must decide the limits to poverty. That state must have knowledge of wealth of its citizens. So if anyone is found with property that is not registered or have excess property it could be confiscated. All those who serve Magnesia must serve without receiving gifts. If anyone is convicted against a law ‘Do no service for a bribe’, he must simply die.
Trade
Athenian was of the view that commercial activities must be carried out either by foreigners or alien residents. A citizen should not engage either in retail trade or in money lending. No one was obliged to pay interest on money taken on loan. Plato ends The Laws with a scene where the Athenian suggests Cleinias to take a chance and establish Magnesia.
Political system
The Athenian did not prefer democracy. He believed God would watch over a council of guardians who will frame laws together with a benevolent dictator who will rule over Magnesia.
Tihar: And the rise of Kiran Bedi as a Platonic benevolent dictator
When Kiran Bedi first entered Tihar as Inspector General Prisons, she felt like ‘entering an organized township.’[i] For all we know, she may have been referring to an imaginary city state like Plato’s Magnesia. Kiran Bedi, the retired Indian Police Service officer, is universally credited for reforming the largest prison complex in Asia Pacific region- The Tihar prison. In 1999 Kiran Bedi wrote a book, It’s always possible: one woman’s transformation of Tihar Prison, about her experience of managing the Tihar prison complex as Inspector General Prisons between 1993-1995.
How Tihar came into existence
The prison complex is located in North-west Delhi on a plot of land at a village called Tihar. In 1951, the Government of India invited a UN specialist Dr. WC Reckless to make suggestions for improving prison administration inIndia. Dr. Reckless, a university of Chicagotrained criminologist, submitted his report a year later. As a response to that, in 1958, Tihar prison was built. Tihar started functioning under the government of Punjab. In 1966 the administrative control of Tihar was transferred to the Delhi Government.
Type of prisons in Tihar
In Magnesia Plato devises three types of prisons for the state. A general prison can be located near the marketplace, a ‘House of Reformation’ near the nocturnal council and the last one should be constructed in some desolate region of the state for grave offenders. The assumption appears to be that a prison must cater to only one type of offenders. Like in Tihar, which back then in 1993, was used to house inmates for a variety of reasons. The prison complex was divided into four sections. Each section had several wards. Inmates were lodged alphabetically except Women and foreign prisoners who were lodged in Prison 1. Convicted prisoners were lodged in Prison 2. Accused related to Terrorists Activities Disruption Act were lodged in Prison 3 and the inmates of Prison 4 were under-trials.
Tihar, says Kiran, ‘was going to be my destiny’.[ii]
State of Tihar before Kiran joined
Just a year before Kiran joined, Tihar was in chaos. Riots had erupted in the prison resulting in death of some prisoners. The food, water, housing, sanitation and general administration systems at Tihar were in chaos. Even mental and physical hygiene of prisoners were severely affected. All this was compounded by non-functioning prison bureaucracy. The conditions were so bad that between 1988 and 1992, 120 prisoners had reportedly committed suicide.[iii]
Tihar was heading towards a hyper chaotic state but Kiran Bedi was not deterred by such a sight, as she mentions, ‘I was there to make Tihar a respectable human dwelling’[iv]. How did Kiran Bedi transform Tihar from a dystopic society to a functioning utopia? What steps did she take, as the highest-ranking officer of that space, to make its system work?
The magic of a petition box
Kiran Bedi explains, ‘running a prison proved to be a massive exercise in housekeeping’[v]. Housekeeping involves replacement of chaos with order. Every morning at 09:00 hrs Kiran Bedi would walk around the prison complex and take notes. In these notes Kiran Bedi would enlist those aspects of the prison that were not functioning properly together with the title of the person under whose jurisdiction it could be corrected. She inquired about action taken by prison authorities, by casually chatting everyday to groups of inmates assembled in front of the prison to go to court. These informal conversations provided her with a subsequent follow-up list of actions. After each round she would upgrade her lists.
Slowly, according to her, the prisoners began to open up, but the fear of prison authorities was still there. In order to counter that fear Kiran Bedi introduced a mobile petition box system. The petition box was to be used by prisoners to lodge complaints against all aspects of this organized and unique town that were not functioning according to the laws.
The petition officer
A petition officer was made the guardian of the petition box. The petition officer did not belong to the prison staff. He was from the Delhi Administrative Secretariat Services. There was only one key to the petition box and it was with the petition officer. The role of the petition officer was to log petitions, categorize and prioritize them and bring it to Kiran Bedi who would take the final call. She writes, ‘These petitions, along with rounds, became the basis for reforming the prison’.
According to her the petition box became a magical object where prisoners could whisper their complaints. The petition box for her was an information box, an audit box and a response box all rolled into one. She writes, ‘nothing was hidden anymore’.
An information flow was established which enabled Kiran Bedi to know what was going on and take corrective action, gather feedback on action taken and take further action. A chain of command and action was established. All complainants were given a pink card as an acknowledgement and some were given a green card after action, on their complaint, was taken. Tihar began to change. A council of guardians comprising of Jail Warders, Superintendents and officers were collaborating with Inspector General to introduce new practices for the good of all. Time was indeed ripe to introduce elements of democracy.
Kaidi Panchayat
The Athenian wanted democracy to flourish in Magnesia under the watchful eyes of its benevolent dictator. Elections were order of the day. A dazzling variety of officials were elected. For instance elections were held for the post of magistrates, city and market wardens, examiners, superintendents and judges of the court. Even the army would elect its Generals. However only those who carry shields could elect a Brigadier.
Likewise in Tihar, by an order issued in June 1993, just three months after she took absolute control of the prison complex, Kiran Bedi introduced the concept of Prisoner Panchayat System. Two staff members – a lambardar and a munshi were part every ward panchayat. The first type of panchayat was at the ward level. From the ward panchayat various types of elected bodies grew like the teachers panchayat and literacy panchayat. Kiran wanted a school to be opened in her city state. Other panchayat evolved like the medical panchayat, mess panchayat, sports panchayat, cultural panchayat, nai punja, legal panchayat, PWD panchayat, patrolling panchayat and so on.
On 25th Septmeber 1993, Kiran Bedi summoned a mahapanchayat. 400 elected representatives from four prisons gathered around Inspector General of prisons at Tihar to discuss participatory self-governance. The question was, how to utilize the potential of masses. In Tihar was no shortage of people. If Plato’s Magnesia had 5040 citizens, by 1993 Tihar, which was originally built for 2500 inmates had close to 8000 inmates. Kiran Bedi saw overcrowding of prison population its greatest strength, as she suggests, ‘In fact, the jail itself housed the greatest strength—human resource. The human beings confined within the four walls had all the time, energy and the professional skills, which constitute the foundation of any vibrant society.’[vi] The idea was to train prisoners in vocations and allow them to work. The problem was authorities didn’t remember who was who. They had a general idea of the population but specifically the identity of a person was difficult to gauge beyond the immediate confines of a ward.
The 8,000 inmates
Documenting individual identity of all prisoners is crucial to establishment and smooth functioning of any prison system. Tihar was no different. Plato’s Magnesia identity was not articulated through numbers. In Plato’s view Identity flows from essence. And essence excludes sameness. Plato was deeply troubled by questions pertaining to sameness and difference. I’d imagine a person like Plato would have a lot trouble naming and defining a person in terms of a number.
In Tihar every prisoner was given a number. A number often defines a prisoner. The personal identity of 8,000 prisoners was mapped. Practices such as taking thumb impressions and identification of prisoners by body marks were used to allow prisoners to access various spaces within the complex. The problem was in keeping records. Tihar was suffering from memory ailments. The jail staff was not adequately educated and the record room was in a bad state. Earlier all security related book entries were done manually. Few educated life-termers used to work in record and administrative sections. The storehouse for records was infested with rats, snakes ‘acting as deterrents to human entry’. Kiran passed an order for immediate computerization of all convict records[vii]. It was important to know the prisoners before they could be harnessed as a resource.
The factory
During Kiran Bedi’s tenure, KC Shroff of Excel industries became the first entrepreneur to collaborate with Tihar[viii]. He started a waste disposal unit that gave employment to 40 prisoners. Earlier a factory was located at Prison number 2. Prison number 2 was used to house life convicts. Before Kiran took over, factory was just as scam ridden as other places at Tihar. Kiran Bedi started asking Non Governmental Groups to help train convicts in vocations. By the time Kiran Bedi completed her tenure 300 NGO’s were imparting various training programs to life convicts and inmates[ix]. These programs help turn undertrials and life convicts to skilled laborers who could produce paper products, bakery, furniture products, male and female apparels, handloom and textiles. I do not have any access to sales data covering 1993-95 period however data covering the period from 2003-04 to 2009-10 is publicly available. By 2003 the Tihar Jail factory had a turnover of around $ 0.5 Million which increased to $ 2.3 million by 2009-10[x]. The Tihar Jail Factory has been branded as TJ’s. As of now, according to information given at the Tihar webpage, 700 inmates work full time in the factory. We do not know how many inmates are causally employed or work on a contract basis. We also do not know whether an inmate continues his practice with the vocation learned at Tihar. One of the mission statements of TJ is to provide ‘opportunities of reformation to prison inmates by channelizing their energy towards productive work’. There were only four jails at Tihar during Kiran Bedi’s tenure however by 2008 five more jails were added housing over 11,000 inmates. Products from TJ’s are bought by member of general public, various institutions of Government of India and some private corporations.
Hijli: The story of a space from Jail to Campus
Not all jails provide opportunities of reformation to prison inmates by channelizing their energy towards productive work. Some jails of pre-independent India, for instance, were used for detention purposes only. A case in point is the Hijli prison. In an impromptu literature survey regarding Hijli prison I found, it is variously described as a cellular prison, a detention center, a jail, a concentration camp and a penitentiary.
The Hijli jail was located in the district of Midnapore. It was active between 1921 and the end of WWII. M.M. Das, the parliamentary Secretary to the first Minister of Education of India, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, describes the jail as ‘a vast concentration camp of the political prisoners in Bengal’[xi]. After independence the jail was shut down. Nehruvian technocrats reopened the jail as an academic campus. Hijli was where the first Indian Institute of Technology came into being. A jail where authorities opened fire and killed two inmates to quell a prison riot in 1931 was reopened as an academic campus in 1951.
The word campus has an interesting origin. It was first used to denote the landscape and buildings of the College of New Jersey that later became the Princeton University. Nassau Hall, a three story stone structure with a basement was the first built structure at Princeton University. Robert Smith, an architect, designed this building between 1753-56. Twenty years later he went on to build the first prison of America called the Walnut Street prison. Robert Smith used many features of Nassau Hall like the façade, the –U- shape halls, community residential areas to construct the Walnut street prison. The Walnut Street prison was designed to reflect a fundamental quaker belief that the purpose of imprisonment was ‘labor, silence and penitence’[xii]. Anyways, in post 1951 India, four more IIT’s were opened at Bombay, Madras, Delhi and Kanpur. New kind of academic campuses were being planned to channel out ‘old pattern of engineering education which laid exclusive emphasis on technology’ and introduce a broad based education. The idea was to plan a campus that could generate ‘engineers equipped with a sense of national purpose’[xiii].
One such institute was established in Powai, a suburb of Bombay. Nandan Nilekani, the Chairman of UIDAI passed out of IIT Bombay in 1978. He joined Narayan Murthy’s company Infosys in 1981. In early 1990’s the Infosys company established the first Information Technology campus of India in Bangalore.
Campus: Some views about an organized township
John C Stallmeyer, a professor of architecture, explains how Infosys campus evolves to project the idea of a corporate identity. The realization of corporate identity in terms of campus depends on variables like time and cost. A Silicon Valley imaginary is influencing the architecture at Infosys. An underlying transnational image is at the work here. Infosys Campus was designed to look like any other technology-park anywhere in the world. It could be any office. The building was designed to appear ‘as spectacular objects in the landscape, while their interiors remain essentially warehouses for software workers in their cubicles’[xiv].
There was something else. May be a deeper desire to move away from chaos. Stallmeyer wrote a letter to Mohandas Pai, the CFO at Infosys to inquire about the mindset of the management team and know why the campus is built in a particular manner. Mohandas Pai’s reply was as follows:
‘Whenever the clients come, they walk in, they walk through this chaos, [and] they are confused because they see…coming straight at them, they see the cattle on the road. You see people crossing the road; you see the buses going helter-skelter, you see the road is crowded, you see the dirt on the road and you are confused. You don’t know where you have landed, and they come here, and suddenly, they see order, they see beauty, they see aesthetics, they see a lot of well-dressed people moving about. There is order here. And then they believe that there can be quality and software here. But, you know, we are dealing with someone who lives 8,000 kilometers away in a different culture where there is order, where there is high quality, as they perceive it, and less disorder and chaos.’[xv]
Mohandas Pai’s words to Stallmeyer seem to reflect what The Athenian tells Cleinias during their walk to the cave of Zeus. The Athenian says, ‘if you order rightly the city of the Magnetes, or whatever name God may give it, you will obtain the greatest glory; or at any rate you will be thought the most courageous of men in estimation of posterity.’ The Athenian imagines Magneisa as an ordered space away from the chaos of Hellenes.
India: A land of chaos
In 2008 Nandan Nilekani wrote a book, Imagining India: Ideas for the new century. In Nandan Nilekani’s imagination India sometimes appears as a land where chaos reigns unfettered.
Dehli, for instance, comes across as follows, ‘In Delhi…. it is chaos.’[xvi] ‘Political chaos soon returned to Delhi’[xvii]. ‘Delhi’s riot for water and of course the inescapable chaos of traffic snarls’[xviii].
Nilekani remembers Bombay of 1979 as, ‘the decline of the city was already well under way, and the urban chaos was clearly visible’.[xix] He summarizes his disappointment about land market in Bombay as follows, ‘The chaos in our land markets has fed on itself’[xx]. Later in the book Bombay also appears in Nandan’s imagery as a ‘fertile chaos’.[xxi]
Chaos seems to be so much present in Nilekani’s imagination that even other people speak to him in the language of Choas. When Nandan Nilekani met Jaffery Sachs to talk about the state of Indian cities, Jeffery reportedly said following, ‘The broken pavements, the chaos of the roads endanger the causal pedestrian’[xxii].
Contemporary India, in Nilekani’s view, is suffering from a crisis. Where the states are forced into action by market pressure building up. This response led strategy has made ‘chaos the rule in our crumbling cities’[xxiii].
When Nilekani offers a sweeping history of railways in India, he does it through chaos. Nilekani carefully takes out 9 words from a book by Rajan Balachandran to explain how the British officers viewed the newly constructed fortified railway stations in India around 1870’s. In one sweeping sentence, Nilekani describes the railway stations as ‘protective Edens, against which,’ and then comes words form Rajan’s book, ‘the chaos of India beats, outrageous as a sea’[xxiv].
Nandan Nilekani considers the constant churning of electoral democracy in India, where some type of elections is taking place almost every year, as ‘chaos’. Infrastructure projects and investment in public goods, in his view, is therefore unsuited for this ‘chaos’[xxv].
When Mahesh Rangarajan speaks with Nilekani about the challenges to single market even Mahesh apparently uses the word chaos. Mahesh, as quoted in Nilekani’s book, says, ‘we are going through a period of some political chaos. And the impact it will have on single market reforms is pretty difficult to predict’[xxvi].
He urges policy makers of India to not to define policies by ‘the context of colonialism or capitalism. Instead we should focus on results and rational outcomes’ and then Nilekani adds a fragment from the famous speech delivered by a US Army General and later Secretary of State, Geroge C Marshal, at Harvard, when he was outlining a plan to rebuild Europe after WWII. In Marshal’s view policies must not focus on ‘any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos’[xxvii]. The Marshal plan called for removal of trade barriers and massive modernization of industry for reconstruction of Europe. This flight of capital, from America to Europe in the eyes of commentators like Chomsky, was key to the establishment of large transnational corporations and therefore it laid the foundation for an umbrella of US power[xxviii]. I wonder whether Nandan Nilekani wants Indian companies to play the same role in years to come. Is he suggesting that a small cluster of big corporations together with thousands of big, medium and small NGO’s may carry out the painful task of governance inIndia.
Imagining India: Nilekani’s Utopia
So how would India figure out in the mind of a man who says ‘I spend a good amount of time in planes, and the view of our largest cities from a height of 3000 meters is an exhilarating experience’[xxix]? To answer this question we have to dream the dream, which Nandan Nilekani dreams.
My favorite line of the book comes at the very end. During the course of researching the book Nandan Nilekani met a large number of people. One of them was Jaideep Shani, whom Nilekani describes a ‘boyish script writer of films like Bunty aur Bubbly and Chak De India.’[xxx] These films project a narrative of aspiration. The lead characters of these films move from the village to the city in the hope of realizing their dreams. In one film they end up working with the state to root out unlawful people, in the other film they end up harvesting glory for the state by winning at the games.
Had Plato seen Chak De, I’d assume he would be amused not because of the narrative of aspiration or because of the redemption narrative but because he suggests citizens should practice war- not in time of war but during peace. And any city magistrate, who has any sense, must provide provisions in order to summon all the youth of the city for games and competitions. City Magistrates must distribute prizes and confer honor to victors and must blame those who lost. Sports for Plato was a tool to make the citizens remember the city-state and identify with it.
Anyways, perhaps based on his interactions with a Bollywood dream-merchant Jaideep Sahni and by his own psychedelic experience of viewing Indian cities from a height of 3000 meters and getting exhilarated over and over again, Nilekani concludes ‘a majority of Indians now believe they can leave their village behind, and there will be something better waiting for them, round the corner, in the next town, in the big city’[xxxi] and with an afterthought he adds—‘perhaps even in their village should they return’.
A comparison of Utopias as Nandan Nilekani, Kiran Bedi and Plato projects in their book
While reading Plato I often wonder why did he dream of an ideal space in a city setting. What is it about a city that is luring policy makers in India to make a case for urbanization? Why is urbanization the preferred goal of people like Nandan Nilkekani? Surely there is nothing modern about cities. Society in Plato’s time was highly urbanized. What is Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian war if not a tale of tens of cities fighting with each other over a fear that Athens could dominate over Hellenes.
Nandan Nilekani’s utopia seems to be located in the next town or the big city where Indians can find something ‘better’. He visualizes towns and cities to be a site for entrepreneurship and growth. The state will give every citizen a number and therefore will possibly exercise control over knowledge of personhood in society. NGO’s and corporations will provide solutions to day to problems of governance. Politicians will take care of ‘chaos’ of democracy. In this respect his view does not seem to differ from Kiran Bedi’s experience at Tihar where NGO’s were called in to help run a system, private entrepreneurs chipped in and life convicts were happily working at the factory. Nilekani’s version differs from Kiran Bedi’s version in the distribution of power. For Kiran Bedi’s utopia seems to be functioning electoral democracy under the watchful eyes of a benevolent dictator holding the keys to a petition box. A vibrant society that is perhaps based on what she terms as a 3C system of governance (a collective-corrective-community). I wonder how does an upright former Inspector General of Prison feel whenever she looks at the Indian Parliament, where roughly one fifth of the elected members are accused under various sections of Indian Penal Code?
And Plato thought a city-state like Magnesia should be a site for reason and virtue. But who gives a fiddler’s fuck about a bone dead, boy-lover and a buck chowd- right??
Endnotes
[i] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-8, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[ii] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-11 Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[iii] U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, 1994, INDIA HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICES, 1993, url- http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/democracy/1993_hrp_report/93hrp_report_sasia/India.html
[iv] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-4, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[v] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-144, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[vi] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-217, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[vii] The order to computerize all convict record was passed as an effect of observation made during her daily rounds. Her Note- Computerization of Convict Record should be introduced (Action, Superintendent Jail No 1 and DIG (PJ). She notes the jail staff at Tihar were not happy with this order.
Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-139, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[viii] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-211, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[ix] Bedi, Kiran. 2005, Its Always Possible: Transforming One of the Largest Prisons in the World, p-xvi, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
[x] The Factory at Tihar- http://tihartj.nic.in/the_factory.asp
[xi] Āzād, Abūlkalām & Kumar, Ravindra. 1992, The selected works of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Volume 9 Kumar, p-250, Atlantic Publishers & Dist
[xii] McShane, M.D & Williams, F.P., 1996, Encyclopedia of American prisons, p-407, Taylor & Francis
[xiii] Āzād, Abūlkalām & Kumar, Ravindra. 1992, The selected works of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Volume 9 Kumar, p-251, Atlantic Publishers & Dist
[xiv] Stallmeyer, J.C, 2010, Building Bangalore: architecture and urban transformation inIndia’sSilicon Valley, p-60, Taylor & Francis
[xv] Stallmeyer, J.C, 2010, Building Bangalore: architecture and urban transformation inIndia’sSilicon Valley, p-60, Taylor & Francis
[xvi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-34, Penguin Press HC
[xvii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-185, Penguin Press HC
[xviii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-195, Penguin Press HC
[xix] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-205, Penguin Press HC
[xx] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-206, Penguin Press HC
[xxi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-239, Penguin Press HC
[xxii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-208, Penguin Press HC
[xxiii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-267, Penguin Press HC
[xxiv] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-220, Penguin Press HC
[xxv] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-223, Penguin Press HC
[xxvi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-261, Penguin Press HC
[xxvii] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-26, Penguin Press HC
[xxviii] Chomsky N, 2003, The Umbrella ofU.S. Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions ofU.S. Policy, p-9,10 Seven Stories Press,
[xxix] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-195, Penguin Press HC
[xxx] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-159, Penguin Press HC
[xxxi] Nilekani, N. 2009, ImaginingIndia: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, p-462, Penguin Press HC
