The sickness that plagues urban planning in India
It’s been raining. Raining woes. Rural India was always vulnerable to a pendulum of calamitous extremes, swinging between floods and drought conditions. Now the cities have joined in. Already bursting at the seams, Indian cities—both metros and Tier-II—are witnessing flooding with a frequency never seen before. Instead of getting smarter, they are pictures of planless squalor. Swanky high-rises, fancy bungalows or low-lying slums, none get spared by periodic deluge.
The southern part of the country, hitherto considered better administered, too has signed the instrument of accession to this hell. Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, not a single state can claim to be honourable exceptions. Holistic urban planning has never been our strong point, at least since Harappa. So glitzy, post-modern cityscapes come up with no more thought to basic overall management of resources—water, power, traffic, waste generation—than sprawling hovels. Unplanned growth then leads to more clogging of stormwater drains and sewage lines. The catastrophe stretches from the micro to the macro level.
The two national ratings—LEADS (Logistics Ease Across Different States) and Swachh Survekshan—have indeed created some competition among states and cities to improve themselves. A few interesting effects are visible, like states previously at the bottom of the heap jumping places on parameters of logistics and cleanliness. But it’s largely static. Indore remains the cleanest city (it has topped the list for years on end) and Gujarat still scores the best on infrastructure. Not much is improving by way of reforms in local urban bodies, which remain inefficient, corrupt and politics-ridden. No Indian city makes the cut in terms of being world class. Not even Delhi, which remains enveloped in a noxious smog, or Mumbai, where floods are as commonplace as local trains. It’s actually incredible that we pay no heed to the signs of sickness that assail us all around. Make no mistake about what those signs tell us: it’s reform or perish.