Megapolis Chennai: Can Chennai become another Singapore?

SINGAPORE: When government school students from Tamil Nadu, on an educational visit to Singapore last year, were interviewed by Singapore’s local media, they expressed awe at how clean the country was. Students didn’t use the word civic sense, but alluded to it by appreciating the city-state’s ‘discipline’.

Singapore’s achievements – ranging from making nearly all its citizens owners of safe homes resistant to the vagaries of nature, to facilitating hygienic, inexpensive food at its iconic ‘hawker centres’ and shielding women from being chained to kitchens, and practising an almost militant, anti-racial secularism that allows faith to flourish without letting it overflow into political discourse – are often diluted by naysayers who say it’s a small country.

But, when Deng Xiaoping (regarded as the architect of modern China) visited Singapore in the late 1970s, the small city-state became his blueprint to transform a populace familiar with only hunger and poverty into a country that defines modernity today.

Forget transforming India into Singapore. Is any ruling class here potent enough to convert just one neighbourhood into a rules-based order? Tamil ministers across parties have made multiple visits to Singapore and promised to similarly transform our State.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has demonstrated an obsession with transforming his state like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. So what is stopping us from becoming Singapore? The lack of empathy. Singapore had buses in which unsafe footboard travel was ubiquitous in the 1960s. Its citizens were not born with civic sense.

They were indoctrinated. In Lee Kuan Yew’s own words, “The difficult part was to get the population that was behaving like a Third World to start behaving like a first world. People (foreign correspondents) used to make fun of us when they watched our Ministers going on TV channels and telling the public, “Stop Spitting, Stop Littering”. You can’t go around peeing everywhere like in the old squatter villages. It took some doing.”

Hawkers selling unhygienic (but tasty) food ruled the streets of Singapore and the hearts of its citizens. Today, they are all housed in well regulated ‘hawker centres’ – a win-win for the business establishments and the public.

From time-to-time, self-proclaimed political analysts and ‘concerned’ lordships in India blame the lack of progress on financially vulnerable groups such as street hawkers and fishermen for the lack of hygiene and call for uprooting livelihoods overnight in pursuit of a safe and clean city.

But what did Singapore do? It relocated its hawkers into sturdy food courts and introduced strict food safety codes. That secured the livelihoods of its citizens selling food and cleaned up the streets, while ensuring Singaporeans were not deprived of the tasty, diverse and pocket friendly cuisine on offer.

Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit is the world’s envy and the country’s pride. When a rare failure occurs, it becomes a national headline, the agencies responsible apologise, and buses are temporarily made free.

There’s a cap on the number of cars that can operate on the road, and people do not honk. At pedestrian crossings, cars wait and let people cross, while drunk millionaires and their scions running over sleeping, homeless people and pedestrians has become a common occurrence in India.

Maybe, what Chennai and Indian cities, by and large, need are leaders who are nation builders, who genuinely care for the people. “Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him. Or give it up. This is not a game of cards. It is your life and mine,” said Yew.

(The writer is a Chennaiite who lives and works in Singapore)

Who is LEE KUAN

LEE KUAN YEW is the first Prime Minister of Singapore (1959-1990). Transforming the country from a small British colony into a global financial hub he made it an efficient, prosperous, and a stable nation.

When LKY, as he is popularly known, declared Singapore’s independence in 1965, it was a bold gamble. Yet by 1990, the impoverished island became one of the world’s wealthiest nations per capita