You Like Living in Your City? BRICS May Say Why You Do or Don’t
© Photo : Sergey Bobylev/Photo host agency brics-russia2024.ru
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It’s always the small things that stay unnoticed about the big international events. But it’s these small things that are all-important for your daily living.
As an example, you could hardly have missed the news about Prime Minister Narendra Modi going to the city of Kazan, Russia, to talk with the Russian President Vladimir Putin and about 30 other heads of state and government, congregating there for a truly historic BRICS summit. But I can bet anything imaginable that you missed a lot of small things about BRICS that, together, make the summit historic.
These small things tell us exactly what BRICS want to do and already does for making our lives better. How about a humble idea of a Russian VEB.RF corporation to link all the studies of quality of city life into one mutually understandable index?
You almost sure live in a big city, and you almost sure are wishing your city to be a paradise. But how to make that dream come true, if there are no clear ideas about all these things, from A to Z, that list all the things that could and should be improved?
In fact, the indexes mentioned are very much around, but the problem is, there are too many of them, and they differ from nation to nation. And how about unifying them in one BRICS index, so as to share experiences of managing the big cities?
We are talking about the Indian EoL, that is Ease of Living, State of South African Cities, China Integrated City Index, the Brazilian Index of Social Progress, and the rest, all in all – 24 different ways of trying to see what the citizens want and what they get. To remind, BRICS membership is nine nations today, as I write these lines, and it may become larger by the moment you start reading them.
The index idea, while looking misleadingly academic, is rather typical of current activities of VEB, a Russian state development corporation and investment company. It was the Russian successor of the Foreign Trade Bank of the USSR, later renamed Vnesheconombank and rebranded as VEB.RF in 2018. VEB is making studies, but also finances projects all over the world. It does it in Russia, too, and the Russian quality of city life index is the base for very concrete activities of making this life visibly better.
There is no big problem in the fact that Indian and South African similar indexes lay stress on efficiency of communications between the public and municipal authorities, while the Brazilians and the Chinese are more worried about the quality of air.
The problem begins, when different nations are starting to compare their various programs to use the good experiences and chuck away the bad ones. Not to mention the fact that bankers love digitalizing human feelings to evaluate the results of money allocation to such projects.
You may not know it, but BRICS is not only about summits and loud political statements. A feature in the Firstpost.com tells us that the New Development Bank (NDB), established by BRICS nations, has approved 53 projects worth about $15 billion, with India being a major beneficiary. This investment focuses on infrastructure development, renewable energy, and urban development, driving economic growth and job creation. The NDB has approved 17 projects in India, totalling over $4.7 billion, focusing on solar and wind power, transportation (road and rail), water and sanitation, and urban development. India played a key role in establishing the NDB and has benefitted considerably.
While the Russian radio I was listening to, only an hour ago, says that in fact we should be talking about 30 billion of allocations at least.
Regular interaction of top leaders, discussing the general shape of the world they would like to see, always creates that spin-off effect of other meetings, on much lower levels. These more humble meetings invariably lead to projects and programs of all kinds, not necessarily ordered from the political top. And that’s exactly what has been happening to BRICS from the year 2006, when it began to take shape.
The current Russian chairmanship of BRICS is telling us, today, of more than 200 events that happened in these 12 months. These were in finance, agriculture, education and others. We are essentially talking about an emerging community of like-minded people, who’s goal is not to challenge America or Europe, but to find something they may do together to make things better.
And, frankly speaking, the Russian idea about unifying all kinds of indexes of quality of city life is an absolutely random example of that multitude of ideas. It could be anything else, currently under discussion or already in the works.
One may want to ask, what was wrong with an absolutely similar processes that have been going on in the world for decades. How about that intricate web of the United Nations specialized agencies, covering all thinkable spheres of life, how about the global finance system, or – since we were talking about city life – how about rather similar ideas of OECD?
Or, to put it simply, why was there a need for replicating all kinds of ideas about one world for all? Why, at first, some regional organisations started doing it on their own, and, finally, why there appeared to be the need for that very strange grouping called BRICS, with 3 dozen of nations from all over the world displaying interest of becoming its new full or associate members. Why build up an alternative global world, when the old world is still around.
One of the answers is cucumber, as a typical case of Westernism. A cucumber sold on the European markets has to be either 3 or 10 centimeters long, if that’s not a typically Russian joke on our Western neighbors. In any case, a cucumber suitable for sale in the EU cannot be crooked, meaning it cannot digress from the straight line by more than 10 millimeters per 10 centimeters of length.
And that’s just one of the rules. How about myriads of other norms and rules, including that hazy reality called human rights, and if you break any of these rules even at home, in your own land, you have to be punished. A Westerner is someone with absolute conviction that Western rules and norms are the best and, ideally, have to be forced on everyone in the world.
All these global government structures of the UN and the rest were and are perfectly logical and needed, save for that Western habit of taking them over and then imposing their rules-based order on every living creature on the globe. So, we are witnessing a process of building a paralleled world order, devoid of obligatory norms for cucumbers and people.
And, going back to our quality of city life index, neither the Russian VEB nor anybody else even dreamed of imposing one index on all the BRICS members. After all, there is no obligatory all-BRICS participation in anything, several or even two nations can do it if they want. It’s good to have a common instrument to compare our norms and activities, but no Indian, or Chinese, or Brazilian will ever tell me how to walk along the boulevard leading to my Moscow home.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
