Historical Echo: When Cities Grow Rich but Remain Unlivable
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When municipal authority remains appointed rather than elected, urban infrastructure decays regardless of national wealth—Indore’s sewage crisis mirrors Calcutta’s cholera not by accident, but by design. The pattern endures: centers extract, peripheries endure.
It was not poverty that turned 19th-century Calcutta into a city of death, but power—specifically, the East India Company’s refusal to let locals govern themselves. Despite being India’s richest city at the time, Calcutta suffered repeated cholera and plague outbreaks because its municipal authority answered to London, not residents. Fast forward to 2026, and Indore—hailed as India’s cleanest city—sees its people sickened by sewage-contaminated water, not for lack of funds, but because no elected leader is accountable for fixing pipelines. The pattern is ancient: empires build monuments and balance sheets, but ignore sewers and elections. Mumbai loses half a billion dollars in grants not because the money doesn’t exist, but because no one is democratically mandated to claim it—just as Mughal subedars once siphoned city revenues to Delhi while ghettos burned. The British later called this 'benevolent despotism'; today, it’s rebranded as 'efficient administration.' But the result is the same: cities that glitter on maps but suffocate their people. Until India treats its cities as republics, not provinces, this cycle will repeat—with each typhoid outbreak a whisper from history we refuse to hear[^1^].
—Marcus Ashworth
Published February 22, 2026