Hari Batti's Musings on Malls – A holistic picture

One of the blogs I’ve been following lately is Hari Batti’s Green Light Dhaba which is very close to my heart. It seems that Hari talks about all things that I myself think about and I participate avidly in the discussions on his posts. And so I thought to myself, why not have a guest post from this great guy on my own blog? His is highly popular and my own poor creation gets some new readers as well pointing all my own subscribers and trespassers to a resource which is really going places. So I floated the idea to him, and he has kindly consented to spend his time and energy on a guest post for “Expressions”. Without further ado, here it is!

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It is a real pleasure to be guest posting here; I’ve enjoyed this blog a great deal since I found it a month or so back. I spend most of my time writing in Delhi at the Green Light Dhaba; I’d love to have you stop by there as well, some time.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made fun of Delhi’s mega malls several times. That is because I think they are symbolic of much of what is wrong with India’s model of urban development. No matter how many basil plants Arjun Sharma, the director of Delhi’s Select City Mall, may have given away this Diwali, there is no escaping the fact that his mall is a disaster from an ecological and economic point of view.

I took my kids to the pair of monstrosities known as the Select City/MGF Metropolitan Malls and we did a little research a few weeks back. (And yes, I did have to compensate them with a round of over-priced iced teas. But I have never pretended to be perfect in matters of personal consumption.)

Here are some of the things we found. First of all, the positive side: malls are designed to make people giddy with excitement! It happened to my kids; it even happened to me, just a little bit.

Where does this feeling come from? Some of it is a result of the fact that suddenly we are in a “market” where we don’t have to jump out of the way of speeding two wheelers. But there are other things malls do to make you feel that way. Look at all the lights; feel the AC; ah, the spray of the water from the fountains. Scarcity has no place in a Delhi mall; neither do really poor people.

It is an intoxicating illusion–if you don’t think too much about what it costs to create and maintain it. (On the way out, I had to wonder whether the bright blue “Riot Control” van permanently parked on the road in front of the mall was part of how that illusion is enforced.)

Of course, the good feeling does not feel so good once you see the price tags of the goods being sold.

You see, high end malls are…expensive! The week before Diwali, Mint ran a big spread on holiday gift ideas. It included things like a Boombox for Rs. 4,199, an iPod for Rs. 11,200, and playing cards in a crocodile skin holder for only Rs. 36,000. This is the kind of stuff you will find in a high-end Delhi mall, and it is terrible for a number of reasons. Aside from the obvious issues of bad taste and dead crocodiles, there is the fact that much of what you find in a mall is imported. From an environmental point of view, that means that a whole lot of stuff had to be shipped a very long way–and shipping is a major source of global CO2 emissions. From the point of view of old fashioned economics, there is another problem caused by all those imported goods: a large part of the money spent at the mall goes straight out of the country. Which means it does very little in terms of creating jobs here. By contrast, when you buy locally grown food or locally made products in your local market, nearly all of the money you spend stays right here in the local economy.

But what about all those workers the mall employs, you ask? In fact, a mall is a very inefficient employment generator, because very little of the money spent in the mall goes to the workers who work there. Of course Arjun Sharma is not going to let me go over his books, but we did speak to one worker who sells brand name handbags ranging from Rs. 1000 all the way up to Rs. 4,200. She earns Rs. 4,500 a month. In other words, one hand bag sells for nearly as much as she earns in a month. If there is a sale on, this woman may sell as much as Rs. 35,000 worth of product over the course of one day.  Malls promote the growth of overseas factories along with a few low wage local jobs.  We can do better than that.

Speaking of employment, it’s not as if the people who do the work of building these malls will ever be able to shop in them; in fact, they live in horrible slums. One of these tent cities occupied the land right outside Select City for years while it was being built. Now it has moved down the road closer to where some other projects are being developed. So as not to offend shoppers, it is hidden behind a tall fence.

After seeing this, my 9 year old asked me this: “Instead of building another mall, why don’t the workers build homes for themselves?”

I tried to explain about how people who invest money to build things want to make more money, and they think building a mall will give them more profits than building homes for poor people. “It’s how the game works, son,” I said.

“But it’s not a game. It’s life,” was his answer.

There wasn’t much I could say to that, of course, because he was right; life is not a game and to use such metaphors runs the risk of trivializing things that are not trivial: poverty, environmental degradation, enormous unfairness.

A new mall, like over-consumption in general, is possible and profitable because we don’t pay the full cost of products from the mine to the dump. It is profitable because the monthly wages of the woman who sells you a handbag may not be equal to the price of the handbag itself. It is profitable because we allow the men, women and children who build our malls and our roads and our homes to live outside under tarps.

It will not be easy to encourage investment in sustainable development. Investors won’t change their behavior out of the goodness of their hearts. Somehow, we need to change what is profitable.  We can start by strengthening and enforcing minimum wage laws.  Then we can see to it that companies are not allowed to pollute for free; the full cost (including the cost of pollution and disposal) of all products should be reflected in their price tags. That will make a lot of stuff, especially stuff  that is designed for the dump, more expensive. If we do this, we will have to consume fewer material goods; if we do it right, we can compensate by consuming more things that are sustainable: art, leisure time, good food, clean water etc.

Figuring out how to make all this happen will be a complicated business, but it’s not impossible, and it’s terribly important that we start soon. We need to change the way we do business; to do this we’ll to change the rules of the game. The rules of life.

HB