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Do Infrastructures Talk Politics? Flyovers as Hybrid Agents of Political

Legitimation and Urban Change in South Indian Hyderabad

Conference Paper · October 2013

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.4239.5842

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Annual Meeting SHOT 2013, 10-13 October, Portland, Maine

Robin Kellermann - University of Technology Berlin

Session: Contested Social Infrastructures

Do Infrastructures Talk Politics? Flyovers as Hybrid Agents of Political

Legitimation and Urban Change in South Indian Hyderabad

Abstract:
Since twenty years the South Indian metropolis of Hyderabad has faced massive growth of
both population and urban transport problems. The promising remedies for the transport
collapse were considered extensive constructions of flyovers, elevated highways of Western
paradigm that were promised to immediately let the traffic flow at neuralgic crossroads.
But beyond their holistically very limited transport impact, this paper argues it were
motivations of political legitimation and urban branding that actually triggered their
emergence, rather than a serious will and ability to form an effective urban transport
system. Moreover, as connotative infrastructures of the city’s transition process they on the
one hand were lacking of actual physical improvements against omnipresent congestion,
but on the other hand they emerged as successful agents for representing and supporting
Hyderabad’s quick attempt to become a global IT destination. In the long run, the iconic
role as infrastructural agents of transformation seemed to have survived and outreached
its functional weaknesses. Despite its unsatisfying impacts and ever growing congestion,
flyovers still gained unbroken popularity, by that legitimizing an increasingly paradox
dynamic of urban transport policies which to that day prioritizes prestigious instead of
reasonable traffic solutions at the cost of disadvantages for the urban majority.

1. The semantics of urban infrastructures

Infrastructures are supposed to deal with the compensation of physical, social and economic
needs, especially in highly complex cities. The conceptual intentions are mostly rational and
functional in nature. Infrastructures, in that sense, shall solve existing and upcoming
problems in order to provide a better quality of life by, for instance, improved connectivity or
better traffic flow. But what might become often underestimated are the irrational and
symbolic purposes behind setting up infrastructures that can sometimes bear “utopian
quality” (van Laak 2001, 386). Thus, infrastructures incorporate a hybrid character (Latour

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2011), a pluralism of meanings as material and as symbolical order. Besides the visible and
physical existence which structures, occupies and dissipates space, there is also a
‘communicative agenda’ that represents the constructors' incorporated meaning or even a
broader ‘social compromise’. Historically, looking from Rome to Paris, from New York to
Dubai, those mechanisms in architectural artefacts seems to be nothing new, as the Eiffel
Tower or the Egyptian Pyramids are doubtlessly far more than rational buildings. While
iconic preferences in architecture seem to be rather well understood, the field of historical
mobility studies has not yet fully taken account of the role urban (transport) infrastructures
play beyond their functional purposes. Until recently, social sciences engaging in the
relationship of transport, mobility and technology, predominantly concentrated on analysing
vehicles and their technical functions, rather than investigating their underlying and framing
infrastructures (Dienel and Schiedt 2010, 7). But since a while and thanks to an influence of
paradigmatic shifts such as the cultural and spatial turn, the interest for streets, tracks,
canals or highways, for in general the physical spaces of flow (Castells 1996), has
continuously increased. This development is delectable, as infrastructures can be considered
lying prominently in the cutting point of society and technology. They might more distinctly
than other fields, be places of interference and crossover, representing a concentrated
hybridity of technical function and social activity. As technical and social artefacts, they also
represent local conditions of power and embody sense-making interests of various social
actors. Thus, analysing a certain infrastructure means to uncover the political, social and
cultural history of a place, as neither railroad tracks nor highways can be understood solely
by technical parameters. Not later than we understand infrastructures from a social
constructivist's perspective (Bijker, Hughes and Pinch 1987), historical studies became more
aware of analysing such structures as being “designed“ by relevant groups which aim for the
representation and production of meaning. In other words, infrastructures do produce
meaning and social memory in disguise of stone, steel and concrete. If those structures are
read and the underlying conditions of formation are reconstructed properly, this can become
a worthwhile mission for social, cultural and historical sciences. Moreover, a wider
dedication to infrastructures could advance as to provide a key approach for understanding
the way different societies function, develop and/or persist.
Against this background, this paper aims to demonstrate by the case of the construction
of elevated highways (“Flyovers”) in South-Indian Hyderabad, how transport policies can
presumably be more obsessed with symbolic purposes than with setting up an efficiently and
effectively working urban transport system. Since 1997 the continuous orientation on
building up connotational infrastructures in form of flyovers can be considered a politically-

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Robin Kellermann – Do Infrastructures Talk Politics?
intended sense-making strategy in order to brand Hyderabad as a new IT destination. As a
consequence, symbolic rather than rational preferences have outweighed systemic and more
efficient transport solutions, leading to marginalize busses or rail systems as well as the
major transport mode - walking. However, the elevated system, which is, as a whole,
inefficient or even unusable for most parts of the population, paradoxically remained
popular among the citizens. Despite the Flyovers turned out to be an anti-climax in terms of
traffic, they nevertheless might have functioned as linking up personal and urban
advancement with the physical presence of such infrastructures. Thus, beyond their lacking
functional purposes, they might have played a constructive key role in Hyderabad’s rise
towards a future Megacity beyond their transport purposes, as they acted personally as
agents of social development and politically as agents of improving a deficiently profiled
Hyderabad which intended to become a world IT destination.

2. Hyderabad's dream – the hub of South India

Throughout the last twenty years, India, soon the world’s most populous country,
experienced tremendous growth rates in the economic and urban sphere. Like many Indian
cities also Hyderabad has faced a crucial economical, social and spatial transition which
started in the early 1990s and continues to that day. The formerly dozy city, residence of the
conservative Nizam dynasty, a city of which it was said to have a very laid-back mentality, is
currently on the edge of becoming a Megacity with presently about 8 million inhabitants.
Located in the southern centre of India and being the
capital of Andhra Pradesh state, it aims for becoming a
“world-class-city” and continuously competes with other
metropolises like Bangalore, Chennai, Pune or Mumbai
for the trophy of the most important and influencing city
in South India. When in the early 1990s India was
starting to open the country for the world market by
massive deregulation and liberalisation, some of its
leading cities intended to become key locations for
innovations and services within the IT & ITeS industry
sector. Representing the peak of a new Indian economic self-confidence, such cities faced
new degrees of competition in order to host the leading enterprises of the world and in order
to attract the best engineers and education facilities. Compared to other metropolises
Hyderabad stepped relatively late into this competition for securing and locating a part of

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the IT-Boom in the city alongside the Musi River. Due to this delay Hyderabad had a clear
necessity to regain lost time and catch up quickly, while other competitors like Bangalore
and Chennai had stepped in the first row of IT-Cities already.

New and old icons of Hyderabad, Cyber-Tower (left), Charminar (right)

Consequently, from the middle of the 1990s Hyderabad suddenly had to come up with the
enforcement of the most liberal economic and administrative reforms in whole India. The
delayed development could only be regained by providing exclusive locational advantages to
attract domestic and foreign capital. By doing so, Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh were
suddenly considered to be the most attractive places for enterprises in the whole country,
which led to an IT-Boom in the city. As one element of many, the Flyovers were marking a
clear sign of the city’s general change and acceleration. Being built right after the reforms
and liberalisations had started, the Flyovers might have played a significant role in the
process of a city in transition. As places of self-ascertainment and as iconography of
economical departure, the Flyovers had in particular the function of stating and
communicating the change to inside and outside Hyderabad. Besides their believed rational
function of easing the namelessly growing traffic problems, illustrated by the promising term
to ‘fly over’ a crossroads, they functioned as an intended place-making and image-building
strategy.

Branding Hyderabad

Key personality of a developing Andhra Pradesh

and the uprising city of Hyderabad was the current
Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, who was
elected in September 1995. Being the longest
Chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, 1995-2004

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Robin Kellermann – Do Infrastructures Talk Politics?
serving Chief Minister in the history of Andhra Pradesh (until May 2004), he can be
considered as one main element and impulse of Hyderabad’s early transitional years,
because he exhibited a new political style that analogously followed a new physical
constitution of the Hyderabad city. Naidu had a notably economical background, accordingly
a western world orientation and seemed to have the awareness of what was mostly needed to
connect the state to international markets: “Considered the subcontinent’s most visionary
politician, in just five years, he has turned an impoverished, rural backwater into India’s new
information-technology hub. More importantly, he shook up the state’s comatose
administration into the most efficient civil service in South Asia.“ 1 In his practical work of
“functioning more akin to that of a CEO rather than a traditional politician” 2, he knew about
what it meant to convert Hyderabad as a brand and to develop attractiveness for foreign
enterprises. But with its traditional image as a laid-back city and with an absence of
prominent history, it would have needed much effort to brand this place. So, although
several other states also started drastic reform processes, the political leadership in Andhra
Pradesh draw its distinction by better promoting and advertising the reform policies: “What
did change with Chandrababu Naidu, however, was the explicitness of the reforms and the
extent to which the Chief Minister himself publicly identifies with and advocates the reform
process” (Mooij 2003, 10) This explicitness was followed by the aim of making the reform
process physically visible and comprehensible. As a consequence, the first amount of
Flyovers that were built from 1997 - 2000 at central places in the inner city and right in the
time of the initiated reform process, must be considered in the context of a need for visible
outcomes, quick populist successes as well as the need for symbolic infrastructures of
change. Thus, symbolic rather than rational purposes can be assumed evident for the
emergence of the first Flyovers. This assumption shall in the following be illuminated by the
political conditions surrounding the construction of the first Flyovers.
Chief Minister Naidu had a liberal and market-orientated view of the world which
based on individualism and one's own initiative. Building Flyovers as an exclusively
automobile infrastructure (hence neglecting the development of other transport modes)
could incorporate his values of free markets, individual mobility and Western world
orientation more appropriate than public transport services would do. For the creation of an
enterprise-friendly environment, and in order to set the stage for attracting investments, it
was necessary to build more than infrastructures of law and order. In order to achieve
Naidu’s vision for making Hyderabad an IT city (prominently underlined in the popular
slogan of Hyderabad as “Cyberabad” and by the visitation of Bill Clinton in 2000 and

1 http://profiles.incredible-people.com/chandrababu-naidu/ (Retrieved: 15th May 2012).

2 http://www.narafans.com/biography.asp?subpro=pro (Retrieved: 17th May 2012).

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Robin Kellermann – Do Infrastructures Talk Politics?
Microsoft's Bill Gates in 2002) there was also a need for infrastructures of modernistic
(Western) iconography.

Flyover at Punjagutta,
Commercial District

Citing the government advertisements as an evidence, the new Flyover-surrounded Cyber

Tower in Hi-tec City, an IT area located south-west of Hyderabad, became a more important
icon of the city than the historic Charminar, the giant mosque in the oldest part of town.
Flyovers as centrally situated infrastructures would invent a traditional representation
of a car-driven, future-orientated city, a symbolic concept dispersed from the USA to Europe,
from Australia to South East Asia and Japan. The latter were locations of many of Naidu's
visits which let him come back impressed by the highways and Flyovers in Hongkong or
Bangkok. He also for Hyderabad wanted to implement those infrastructures which seemed
to signalise the physical proofs of a quickly developing country: “Chandrababu Naidu said he
wanted to make Hyderabad a model city with the best flyovers and greenery under them. The
main objective of the Flyovers was to ease traffic flow and lower pollution, he said” (Times of
India, Nov 29th 2001).
The optimum for the new built Flyovers would have meant to combine their irrational
symbolical power as objects of distinction and modernity with the rational reduction of
traffic problems, but this envisioned double-effect failed to appear. Instead of improving the
traffic flow they often emerged as being expensive agents of new congestion due to poor
planning, narrowness and a bottleneck situation at the end of the Flyovers. Tracing Arthur
Pigou’s early 20th century assumptions (Pigou 1920), they might have been also acting as a
pull-effect and, literally, as a driving force to convince more people to buy cars and to crowd
the streets with even more congestion. Because the punctual intervention of those Flyovers

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at neuralgic crossroads was thwarted by a lacking systemic and holistic transport
management, the supposed travel time improvements did not occur. Euphoria for the first
Flyovers was, to the point of its rational purposes, soon followed by disillusion.

Perception

Although most of the Flyovers

are rarely efficient for traffic
flow, the people of Hyderabad
still seemed to believe in their
unbroken promise of easing
tomorrow’s congestion. A small
2011 survey, made by the
author on people's perception
and evaluation of the Flyovers,
Congested Flyover in Hyderabad illustrates in how far the citizens were not yet
deflated as a result of having seen an increasing number of Flyovers but at the same time
having experienced even more severe traffic problems. Most interestingly, 66% of the
respondents claimed to build more Flyovers, while only 22% declared to be satisfied with
their amount. This leads to the assumption, that although the Flyovers did not fulfil their
predicted aims as ‘congestion saviours’, but instead often become locations of accidents,
frustrations or even collapses, the people did not challenge the actual concept of the Flyover.
Instead they criticised the way they were implemented. The reason why people still believed
in the promise of an expensive and inefficient infrastructure could serve as modest evidence
for the power of infrastructural irrationality which in Hyderabad has been accustomed over
the years and right from the beginning. A strong symbolism as icons of modernity and
euphoric change, as agents of approved motorisation and as places of urban self-assurance
and social mobility, survived the infrastructure's rational failure.

Consequences

The public's habituation of the Flyover’s promising symbolic power as well as the adherence
on car-driven transport policies caused a continuing marginalisation of public transport
systems, a typical development we know well from other places. The more Flyovers were
built, the less willingness was shown for alternative transport solutions that could have been

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more efficient and less expensive. Though previous transport studies suggested an extension
of e.g. the existing MMTS railroad system, the construction of Flyovers became the favoured
project of the transitional years in Hyderabad’s 1990s. Together with a massive road-
widening program, the Flyovers evolved as punctual and short-termed “tec-fixes”, leaving
the need for an efficient traffic master plan unfulfilled. The Flyover’s highly symbolic
iconography of prosperity, freedom and affiliation to Western lifestyles, as well as the
Flyover’s promising character to achieve quick solutions, secured their outstanding
legitimation.

PVNR Expressway, longest Flyover of Asia

The peak of a car-driven transport philosophy probably was the construction of Asia's
longest Flyover, the PVNR Expressway which connects the brand new International Airport
Shamshabad with the inner city on a fully elevated highway with a length of more than 11
km. This structure might have been a reflex on the overall disaffected experiences made with
older Flyovers that could not ease the traffic situation. By opening the PVNR Expressway,
both, the symbolic and the rational criteria, should finally be rebalanced. By strongly
promoting it to be the longest Flyover in Asia and by providing a non-interrupted connection
to the airport, the officials probably were achieving that objective, but they achieved it at the
cost of active exclusion, as access to this road is only permitted for 4-wheelers (cars). Against
the background of only 7% of the citizens holding a 4-wheeler, this highly expensive, and
again, highly iconic infrastructure excludes most of its potential users and illustrates a clear
priority for the emerging motorized middle-class in Hyderabad’s transport policy.

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Conclusion

This paper aimed to deliver a brief insight into the late 1990s political planning process for
setting up Flyovers in Hyderabad, its consequences and the citizens’ perception. As a new
infrastructure those elevated crossroads were considered promising traffic solutions, but can
be assumed more motivated by political self-legitimation and urban branding strategies,
rather than by serious will and ability to form an effective urban transport system. While the
infrastructure failed to ease the city’s growing congestion problem, the citizens paradoxically
stuck to the concept, as the symbolic power of Flyovers might be linked to personal and
collective promises of social advancement and individualized mobility. Thus, Flyovers in
Hyderabad, beyond their suspected rational purpose as ‘congestion saviors’, more
successfully functioned as connotative infrastructures of urban change and therefore
fulfilled and continued the actual political intention of their emergence. The Hyderabad case
study demonstrates how robust can be the promise of social advancement and mobility of an
infrastructure despite its experienced inefficiency. The Flyover’s strong symbolism as icons
of modernity and euphoric change, as agents of approved motorisation and as places of
urban self-assurance, survived the infrastructure's rational failure. More drastically, setting
up the first bunch of Flyovers in the late 1990s can even be assumed to not have had any
clear intention to solve the transportation problem, as the chief minister Chandrababu Naidu
might have rather aimed for setting up an urban iconography of change that should
physically express his radical reform process as well as the city's transition towards an IT
destination of international scale. Following this argument, Hyderabad’s Flyovers can be
considered a didactical play of how technical infrastructures can ‘talk’ politics. As India is a
country that wants quickly to be connected to the Western world and with a political culture
is traditionally dependent on visible successes, the emergence and evolution of Flyovers in
Hyderabad can be considered as paradigmatic.
Hyderabad, in a diachronic perspective, demonstrates how strong and structuring the
promise and how much accepted a not efficiently working urban infrastructure can become,
though it should rationally be reconsidered. Though marginalising other forms of public
transport and excluding the majority of the urban population from the use of Flyovers due to
non-motorization, a once learned symbolic attitude survives its rational failures. In a broader
perspective this might open up the need to better understand the relevance and impacts of
infrastructural symbolism within the sphere of social sciences. The Indian case study entails
the chance to uncover the powerful representational and implicit side of the coin of
infrastructures that is often underestimated or simply not believed evident.

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http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2001-11-29/hyderabad/27239524_1_telugu-
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