Homoeopathy, a relatively modern therapy, was invented, or imagined in Germany by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. It’s been hailed, questioned, researched and rejected in many countries since. As no scientific basis has been established, it is now dismissed as a pseudoscience. If it is sometimes effective, it is because of the placebo effect. The patient feels better psychosomatically, or a disease naturally goes into remission. Despite being proven mumbo jumbo, faithful hypochondriacs buy billions of dollars of homeopathic formulations.

Only in one country, though, it is still a popular mainstream therapy: India. Every city, big or small, has its homoeopaths. The fad has nearly died in its homeland, but not only thrives in faraway India, but also gets sizeable government funding. The ‘H’ in the ministry of AYUSH stands for homoeopathy (Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy: AYUSH).

Homoeopathy now has a home in India, even officially declared an indigenous medical system. It is dangerous in our country to make fun of it. Chances are that many protests and much abusive outrage is on my way already. There has to be a reason why Indians not only adore and trust homoeopathy but are also so protective and possessive about it. It was possibly designed for the hypochondriac. At the slightest of a health challenge or doubt, start chewing those sugary, spirit-flavoured pills. It will take a very long time, often months, you feel no effect of the drug, but in the course of time, you’d believe you are better, even cured. Most importantly, it will give no side effects.

Aren’t we told by our true believing uncles and aunties dispensing their favourite pills with the reassuring ‘but in any case there won’t be any side effect’. Modern medicine we fear for its side effects and the damage it must cause our system. And surgery brings an utter sense of dread. Are we then a country with a homoeopathic state of mind which pervades our thinking in other areas? Especially governance, and more specifically infrastructure-building.

Homoeopathy as a state of mind
You have to mention a project of any size and a million jump at your throats painting a picture of apocalypse, physical or financial. The foundation stone laying ceremony of the Ahmedabad-Mumbai bullet train by PMs Modi and Abe last week evoked many such responses. Most emphatic was from Congress party’s topmost lawyer and a very erudite man, Abhishek Manu Singhvi. Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal, he said, left India in economic ruin, famines and starvation. The bullet train will run, he added, the rest you can imagine.

More such came from elsewhere although the theme was common: can India afford this, is it sustainable, will it make economic sense and, the criticism made with the greatest passion that a country could not afford such a toy when it had about 17,000 unmanned crossings and trains routinely derailing. Never mind that the same people would then complain that the top speed of our trains hadn’t changed since 1971. Never mind also that most critics no longer travel by train, preferring airplanes instead.

This criticism presumes airfares will remain the same, bullet train fares won’t go down with economies of scale and lead to a boom in land values and urbanisation along its routes, and the real switch may be from carbon spewing cars on the highways. The alternatives were predictable: strengthen existing network, modernise rolling stock, invest in safety and improve speeds minimally to stay safe and add to comfort incrementally while staying within means. Even if a Rs 1 lakh crore debt is more or less interest-free, and serviceable over 50 years, it could ruin our future. And in any case, it means nothing to the crores of poor commuters and therefore, a moral hazard.

This movie plays out whenever a project of some scale is planned. We are leaving out ideas like big dams or river-interlinking as these bring their own paranoia. But the outrage, when Nitin Gadkari as a young State transport minister (1995-99, when he was 38) planned the Mumbai-Pune Expressway was similar. It will devastate the environment, be a technological impossibility and economically unviable. Now you can’t imagine a world without it, and India’s first, albeit short BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer) expressway, is the inspiration for a massive highway-building campaign nationwide. Complaints now pertain to the contractors profiteering, not going  bankrupt. But the real benefit has come elsewhere. The expressway has pretty much made Pune, saturated and tired Mumbai’s metro-sized sibling, a magnet for IT/innovation/economy businesses, a counter to Bengaluru. It has generated billions.

Quash culture
In the past, the Planning Commission ensured any notion of scale and ambition was squashed before it could get off the file stage. There’s a real (not apocryphal) story of Yojana Bhawan dissing the Maruti project as a pipedream as the ‘projections’ showed Indians buying no more than 50,000 cars per year for many years. And Hindustan Motors and Premier were providing these. Thank god, he was overruled. Today, India is a global automobile power. It consumed more than 30 lakh passenger vehicles and exported more than 7.5 lakh passenger vehicles in fiscal 2016-17.

Check out the debate over the privatisation of big metro airports. Besides the usual Left breast-beating over privatisation of state assets and thereby disembowelling their unions, there was talk of feasibility and over-building. Today, Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru are overcrowded and struggling for expansion. Even the Aerocity, the new hospitality district near Delhi airport, dismissed as a white elephant, is buzzing now.

There are also instances where the minimalists, or the homeopaths won. Mumbai’s sea-link was abandoned one-third built, just from Bandra to Worli, dumping Versova-Bandra and then Worli-Chowpatty that would have become a north-south jugular. New options have been in analysis-paralysis for a decade. In Delhi, the elevated east-west Barapulla corridor stopped abruptly halfway as the government lost nerve because of criticism. It is being taken onwards again now, seven years later, to realise its full potential. And then that real disaster, the Rao Tula Ram corridor which was built as a two-lane bottleneck connecting two ends of an eight-lane highway to the Delhi airport and becoming a permanent choke-point. Within a couple of years, it’s being rebuilt and expanded.
This is evidence, therefore, that planning by homoeopathy isn’t exactly harmless. This medicine definitely makes the disease worse. The best thing about the bullet train is that the Japanese will control the project and the money. And whatever your quibbles with the Modi government, even its obsession with gigantism, you can’t complain that it has the chronic Indian fear of scale and speed. It’s a different matter that it has increased its commitment to alternative systems of medicine. Including homoeopathy.