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The Stupidity of a Smart City
Sadhika Pant
 July 28 2025 at 11:25 am
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The veneer of civilization is thinner than we suppose. It takes little more than a pile of rotting waste to peel it away, and lately, the city of Gurugram where I live, has found this out the hard way. A city held up as a symbol of new India’s economic ascent is now realising no amount of glass, steel, or software can substitute for order, responsibility, and rule of law. Here, in open plots and roadsides, garbage now festers like an ulcer on the face of Indian modernity. The reason, superficially, is administrative: a police crackdown on illegal Bangladeshi immigrants has frightened away the city’s sanitation workforce. According to some sources, more than half of the Municipal Corporation’s cleaning staff are Bengali-speaking Muslims, many of them undocumented illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and they have vanished overnight — some detained by the police for further interrogation, others in hiding, and the rest fleeing legal scrutiny. The result is telling. For it exposes a system dependent on illegality, a society still entangled in caste taboos, and a population that collectively disdains the very conditions of its own survival. I am reminded here of a particularly grimly amusing observation in John Gall’s Systemantics, a work devoted to the study of systemic failure. Gall notes that a garbage collection system, once implemented and “perfected,” does not eliminate the presence of garbage but merely displaces it from the centre of one’s vision to the periphery, that is until the system fails. And when it does, the garbage returns, not metaphorically but physically, as a reminder that it was never really gone. It had only been spirited away by a process most preferred not to think about. One might think, in a rational society, that such a moment would lead to national self-examination. Why are Indian citizens unwilling to perform essential work? Why is there no durable incentive structure to dignify such labour? Why are illegal immigrants the backbone of municipal functioning, and why does the state simultaneously use and disown them? The deeper question, however, is not about trash. It is the failure of a society to instill in its people a sense of civic ownership. One of the worst things in which India felt content to mimic the British is the habit of officialdom, combining procedural piety with a sublime indifference to results. The modern Indian city, like its Western counterparts, thrives on delusion—delusions about class, about caste, and above all about cleanliness. In India, cleanliness is next to godliness, but only when someone else is doing it. The caste system, though allegedly dismantled, continues to shape the division of labour through subterranean channels. The average educated denizen of this metropolitan tech hub, one who speaks earnestly of “smart cities” while designing waste management apps from co-working spaces named after trees, would no sooner stoop to clean the garbage piled up in front of his house, let alone a whole street. The lower castes, once coerced into sanitation work, are understandably unwilling to be romanticised as “dignified workers” now that they have other options. But instead of confronting this transition with honest reform, society has turned to an expedient fix: the illegal immigrant. Poor, pliable, and undocumented, he is ideal for a city that wants the benefits of modernity without the burdens of self-reliance. Let us be clear: these workers were not hired because the jobs were unwanted, but because their desperation could be exploited. They didn’t demand rights or benefits. They worked invisibly and could be discarded without legal consequence or bureaucratic inconvenience. And now that they are gone, the city is confronted with the material by-product of its own convenience. And with it, the moral consequences of its evasions. But what happens when the machinery of a city, dependent upon an unacknowledged class of essential illegals, seizes up in the name of law enforcement? Refuse piles up, residents panic, mini-landfills mushroom in urban niches, and the sweet perfume of liberal progress is replaced by the odour of decomposition. The city, like any system built on contradiction, collapses under the weight of its own pretence. This is, of course, an old story, repeated in new cities with glass facades and English signboards. The situation bears resemblance to trends in the West, where unchecked immigration (often illegal) is allowed to paper over economic dysfunction and demographic decline, until cultural cohesion begins to fray and public services strain. But in India, the consequences are compounded by our own social contradictions. Rather than confronting the uncomfortable reality that dignified labour must come from within, we’ve outsourced our most basic civic duties to those with no stake in the nation’s future. Even now, despite calls for Swachh Bharat and civic pride, garbage collection is seen not as public service but as occupational pollution, suited only for the untraceable or the untouchable. We cannot indefinitely outsource national duties to undocumented workers while pretending we are solving deeper issues. What progress is this? Real progress begins when we restore pride in honest work, uphold the rule of law without apology, and teach our citizens that keeping a city clean is not beneath anyone. Gurugram’s trash crisis is more than just the breakdown of a municipal service; it is the exposure of a civilizational lie. And now that the lie has been uncovered, we are left to reckon with its stink.
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