Poonam Sharma
In the politics and economics of the present day, city life itself is now an experiment. Surveillance systems, drones, and street-level control are remaking societies in ways that feel less like freedom and more like being watched all the time. Unlike Patel-style colonies or traditional Indian neighborhoods where communities lived with autonomy, modern infrastructure often resembles British-era planning — rigid, utilitarian, and imposed from above. Footpaths, public centers, and repair hubs are increasingly designed not for citizens’ comfort, but as instruments of administrative control.
Governments, assisted by private businesses, bring these improvements as “modernization.” In actual fact, they make spaces where the freedom of the common citizen contracts, whereas corporate and state control increases. America built this model based on media-based storytelling and capital-hungry projects, but such structures now appear in India as well. The irony is that citizens continue to vote for such programs under the impression of development, and the actual gainer is political elites and global corporates.
In cities such as Gurugram, gated communities offer security and luxury but also make surveillance and constricted freedom commonplace. Infrastructure gets packaged and political promises get wrapped around it, but the unstated price is individual freedom. Investments and dollars are given precedence over dignity. That’s the reason why global experiments in governance seem never-ending despite failures being revealed.
A stark contrast is seen when one considers China. Ironically, in some respects, individual liberty appears more pragmatic there than in India. In China, there are strict systems, but they are uniformly enforced and openly recognized. Businesses function directly under state supervision, and citizens at least know where the line is. In India, on the other hand, regulation tends to be camouflaged as “development” and produces a more confusing and strangulating atmosphere. The state intrudes in all walks of life, while claiming to empower people.
Japan and the United States provide more lessons. America’s template, disseminated by worldwide media, ingrained surveillance culture. Japan, since June 2014, has had its own equilibrium between security and openness, but is still bound to U.S. strategic requirements. Global trade rules, tariffs, and duties are designed so as to keep lesser countries tied and citizens fettered.
The larger question is: how much longer will the experiments last? If the surveillance-city model continues to grow, societies everywhere might come to learn too late that they’ve exchanged freedom for a managed convenience. Citizens today think they are being modernized; tomorrow they might awaken to discover themselves in a state of eternal inconvenience and managed living.
What started out as plans for urban development could ultimately be remembered as the insidious loss of liberty. The concern is that those instruments — once under the control of dictatorial minds — could remake not just cities, but the essence of individual autonomy itself.
