Atanu Dey-Vinod Khosla Marshall Plan - Addendum
Saturday, March 3, 2007
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5 comments
In Atanu Dey’s RISC model, he suggests a move to a micro-city model, as follows:
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India’s economic growth depends critically on the development of its 700-million strong rural population living in 600,000 villages. The challenge is to manage their transition from a village-centric agricultural-based economy to a city-centric non-agricultural economy urgently.
The total rural population of India can be covered by about 6,000 RISCs each servicing the needs of approximately 100,000 people. By providing a full complement of services, RISC creates a ‘micro-city’ which seeds the formation of a city by drawing to it the population from the surrounding areas. RISC focuses on the development of the rural population, and not on the development of villages which are destined to be extinct anyway.
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I like the model. My suggestion, however, is to align each of these 6000 RISCs with a major employer, that can employ at least 5,000 people. There is a good trend of manufacturing coming back to India, with car companies, auto parts makers, even semiconductor companies starting to think about setting up factories. The steel sector is booming. Power, Textile, many others are poised for strong growth.
It’s an ideal time, dear Atanu, to set up RISCs in collaboration with large companies.
[...] Mitra presents a logical, albeit frightening, twist on a solution for India’s struggling rural [...]
Arguments over economics aside, this scares me - probably because it seems like it could actually happen to a lot of cities, especially new “RISC†cities seeking to establish themselves. Why not? Their older brothers have spent the last 10 - 20 years clamoring for their piece of the outsourcing pie…within a government that is necessarily decentralized.
It could happen - a few years ago, companies like Dell became definitive in cities like Chandigarh - one of the factors that prevented Chandigarh from potentially being rebranded as DellWorld was its size. A micro-city of 100,000 residents can essentially be owned by a corporation…mini-monopolies that can impose their will on cities. Feels dangerous…besides, Orlando sucks.
Well, Jamshedpur was virtually owned by Tata. It’s a good example of a very successful RISC model.
Cool…
Cool.