A Clean City In The North East: Only Agartala and not others

Amar Yumnam *

Agartala, Tripura :: May 15 2009 :: Pix - Nongamba Ningthemcha

The capital of Tripura, Agartala, is the only clean city in the entire North East. While all the other cities in the region – Imphal, Guwahati, Kohima and others - are all dirty and stink, Agartala is clean and no stink follows you. While this is something to be proud of by all the people in the North East that we also have in Agartala a clean city in our region, the question as to why others are dirty need to be examined.

But in trying to account for this differential performance in maintaining city quality around the region, we need to be clear as to why the study of cities has drawn such an interest across cross-sections of the population; the greatest novelist Charles Dickens gave us A Tale of Two Cities, sociologists have continuously probed into the different dimensions of city life, economists emphasise the understanding of urban aspects of life, political scientists look into the political implications and who not.

This is why urban architecture is considered to consist of social, political and economic dimensions. As Michel Foucault has said, it "is impossible to erect any building or establish any method without understanding its principles. It is not enough to have a fondness for architecture. One must also know stonecutting.' There is a whole history to be written about such 'stone-cutting' – a history of the utilitarian rationalization of detail in moral accountability and political control."

The city of any region is considered to represent the civic and moral virtues of the society, the technological and knowledge levels of the society, the potential for ensuring the foundation for wider developmental transformation and the scale to which the participation in development has been established.

A city displays in full public view the quality of life the people of a region enjoys, the quality of governance of the region and the future prospects of the region in the foreseeable future. This is the reason why studies of the cities of Paris, London, New York and Toronto are of perennial interest to the social scientists and policy analysts around the world.

Given all these characteristics of any urban centre, we can say for sure that Agartala must have been subject to certain differential experiences as compared to other cities in the region to account for being the only clean city in the region. It has not been that Tripura has been a favoured province in so far as the funding from the federal authority is concerned.

It has not been that Tripura has been a favourite of investment from outside the region and from outside the country. It has also not been that Tripura has a much richer base of natural resources as compared to her sisters in the region.

Well, if these are the realities, how can we explain the uniqueness of Agartala? Why is it that we observe character in the positive social sense in Agartala while not so in the others? Why is it that we see respecting heritage values in Agartala while not so in the others?

There can be many explanations for this. But on my part, I can only emphasise the institutional qualities of governance in Tripura instead of anything else. The north eastern provinces are "famous" for one governance quality. The region has been characterised by the conversion of development money into dirty money; efficiency and effectiveness of development interventions are rather the exception instead of the rule with excessive rent seeking in all these.

But this has not been so in the case of Tripura. The relative performance of more or less similar development interventions have been more successful in Tripura than elsewhere; more successful implying less or absence of rent-seeking features in the administration of the intervention.

In short, it is the positive quality of governance and the accompanying character of commitment to the core objectives of governance that explain the cleanliness of Agartala, and the absence of these in the other cities in the region being dirty.

The governance quality and commitment relating to the Agartala city have touched the psyche of the general population; the convergence between governance regulations and the social behaviour is clearly visible in this city. In fine, the rest of the region needs to absorb lessons from the Agartala scenario.

While it is not the ultimate, the lessons learnt from the Agartala city as of today would go a long way in thinking about and evolving policies for the cities to play their roles in social, knowledge, political and economic transformations. This is not going to be an easy task given the inherited paths of governance.

But if Tripura can do it, why not the others?