Two features of cities, both globally and across India, seem to be of great concern to both their administrations and the residents themselves. One is the headcount, both resident and floating numbers, and the other is the motorised vehicles of all descriptions, both personal transport and public fleet. Mysuru is said to have hosted about 12,000 residents a hundred years ago. The then small city, famed for its rulers of the Wadiyar dynasty, at the time, is said to have about 200 bicycles and 12 automobiles (most of them housed in the royalty’s garage). Although the city was not perceived as a fast-growing urban space, unlike Bengaluru, Mysuru’s headcount has expanded 100 times in these 100 years. The number of motorised vehicles has gone up in astronomical proportions, that having crossed five lakh. The fall-out of the enormous change in the two aforementioned features (residents and motorised vehicles) doesn’t require to be expressed explicitly, except saying that it has tended to be going out of hands.

While dwellings of more than one storey were a marvel to be seen in Mysuru not too long ago, to see single-storeyed houses is a marvel in our times, thanks to the rapidly rising number of high rise structures resulting in a concrete jungle, euphemistically described as vertical growth. The profile of Mysureans and their life’s pursuits make a fascinating study as one looks back 100 years.

An agency of the United Nations has proposed the Human Development Index (HDI) based on many parameters including inputs to education, mortality rate, unemployment among the youth (those in the age group of 15-24 years), child malnutrition and so on. The latest rating of 189 countries for the index, by the agency, has placed India at rank 130. If the index is calculated for Mysuru, its rank is likely to be higher than most number of cities across the country. The ranking for the United States of America at 27 and China at 44 reflects their relatively better performance in harnessing human capital, particularly in the matter of measuring government’s investment in improving the health and educational status of workforce.

India’s policy-markers are lately and rightly realising the association between human capital and investment on education and health for raising the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) both quantitatively and qualitatively. The only catch in this process of harnessing India’s human capital is for the society to be vigilant in preventing the country’s youth being led astray by you-know-who.