Sramana Mitra presents a logical, albeit frightening, twist on a solution for India’s struggling rural population.

The Atanu Dey-Vinod Khosla Marshall (should be available at the well-designed Khosla ventures website, although I couldn’t find it) plan goes a little something like this:

India’s economic growth depends critically on the development of its 700-million strong rural population living in 600,000 villages. The challenge is to manage their transition from a village-centric agricultural-based economy to a city-centric non-agricultural economy urgently.

The total rural population of India can be covered by about 6,000 RISCs each servicing the needs of approximately 100,000 people. By providing a full complement of services, RISC creates a ‘micro-city’ which seeds the formation of a city by drawing to it the population from the surrounding areas. RISC focuses on the development of the rural population, and not on the development of villages which are destined to be extinct anyway.

Sramana Mitra presents a twist, that given today’s outsourcing trend, seems perfectly logical:

I like the model. My suggestion, however, is to align each of these 6000 RISCs with a major employer, that can employ at least 5,000 people.

Arguments over economics aside, this scares me - probably because it seems like it could actually happen to a lot of cities, especially new “RISC” cities seeking to establish themselves.  Why not?  Their older brothers have spent the last 10 - 20 years clamoring for their piece of the outsourcing pie…within a government that is necessarily decentralized.

It could happen - a few years ago, companies like Dell became definitive in cities like Chandigarh - one of the factors that prevented Chandigarh from potentially being rebranded as DellWorld was its size.  A micro-city of 100,000 residents can essentially be owned by a corporation…mini-monopolies that can impose their will on cities.  Feels dangerous…besides, Orlando sucks.