BENGALURU: The issues that Bengaluru and every city in India are staring at today, are gargantuan in nature- be it scarcity of resources like water and clean air or inadequate infrastructure to service this huge mass of people.
Is there a panacea for all the ills that plague us? Not really. There’s an interesting anecdote to put this in perspective.
While in Africa, a few years ago, a naturalist friend, an expert on Africa, asked us to take a guess as to what the population of Africa was as compared to India’s. Considering that Africa is the second-largest continent, the presumption is that it would be several times the population of our country.
Having never given it a thought before, we were horrified to learn that the population of the whole African continent is half that of ours. Looking at population from that perspective, it was mind-boggling.
Is it a wonder then that most people lack the most basic needs? There’s obviously no quick fix solution and all we can do moving forward is lay the onus on the future generations of citizens to solve the population conundrum.
However, the immediate need of the hour, is to alleviate the glaring issues that affect the quality of our lives every day, be it access to clean water, waste management or adequate and superior public transport. These are monumental tasks but ones that we can take small steps towards.
And it requires a collaboration between citizens and government. Water conservation, rain-water harvesting and waste segregation, for example, are measures that we citizens can actively contribute to. Planting trees around where we live is another.
I see the role that resident associations of the city are playing in providing the impetus towards achieving these small milestones.
A great public transport network can up the livability factor of our city by several notches. I hope that the expanding metro will play a huge role in connecting every corner of the city to an extent that time on the road is no longer in our conversations.
The fact that we are an amalgamation of states with different governments having varied economic and social policies, has resulted in growth that’s skewed in favour of some cities over others and hence we increasingly see skewed mass migration towards cities that are economically better off, resulting in these cities wobbling under the weight of this influx.
Some of the densest cities of the world are in India for this reason.
But density need not mean incompatibility with high quality of life. Singapore, amongst the world’s densest cities, is an ideal example of superior management.
SOLUTION: Smart cities that are self-sustaining in every aspect may be the need of the hour. Building smart cities may help in decongesting our existing ones and our present cities need to emulate these future cities. Smart cities with a smarter education system creating smarter citizens and smarter communities should not just be a pipe dream.