8 Urban Planning

Indian cities today are a prime example of haphazard, unplanned growth. The local planning bodies and councils are hotbeds for corruption. Local governments are weak, and have little say or budgets to play with. We have millions of people living in "illegal" slums and other unauthorized housing developments. One reality of modernizing India is that our cities are amongst the ugliest in the world.

In many cases, large number of "planned" and approved dwellings have cropped up, without adequate provisions for the traffic and connecting roads, schools, parks and other such public spaces. In some cities, there is a strong nexus between the developers and politicians. IAS officers, who have no professional qualifications in Urban Planning, take major decisions in various local bodies. PWD has a very corrupt way of developing public buildings and roads.

1. We basically have one qualified urban planner per 100,000 urbanites, and these people are not in a decision making roles they deserve to be in. Further, the quality of our manpower in this field does not compare very well with the international levels.

2. We need to have a system where only professionally qualified people are given the decision making planning roles in the urban bodies. Further, number of such professionals needs to be increased at least ten-fold, i.e., one planner per 10,000 people.

3. With the RTI act, we need to make the tender process more transparent, and have more involvement from the civic society. Further, we need local residents to have more say in an appraisal process for the technocrats. (e.g. we could have a system so that if >50% of the residents show dissatisfaction with the quality of a recently constructed road, the engineer/contractor in charge of the project automatically get investigated). Similarly, contracts for other civic work could be allocated/renewed based on a direct appraisal by the people.

4. Cities should develop master plans for projected growths in next few decades, and develop zones in accordance with the international standards.

5. For instance, waste collection for cities can be done more enthusiastically, if the people doing it were really interested in getting more waste processed. If, for example, all the rag-pickers of Mumbai were to form a co-operative organization, which had a facility to process waste using some more advanced machinery, and then take all the things such as paper, plastic and metal which could be salvaged to earn money, and leave all the bio-degradable waste to be recycled to create biogas or fertilizer, it is likely to work more effectively than the waste collection services run by the BMC (Greater Mumbai's Municipal Council).

Housing for Urban Poor
Urban Poor constitute about 25% of total urban population, and the absolute numbers are expected to be around 80 million (Source UNDP) , or roughly 20 M households. Poorly planned urbanization has meant that they live in slums. If proper urban planning is done, and land acquired for housing for the poor, then it is the question of achieving the goal of providing a bare minimum level of a dwelling unit with water and electricity supply, and proper sewage to these households at the lowest possible cost. The preparatory investment required to do so, is of course huge, but we immediately see the dividends in terms of better sanitation (less disease), more revenue from regularized electricity supplies etc.

If the government can subsidize and encourage investments in cheaper housing technology, (recycling old shipping containers, bamboo or plastics based prefab materials, or whatever), and we can get cost of a house down to 100,000 rupees, we would need to spend about 2 Trillion Rupees (40 Billion Dollars).

Think about it, its do-able.

A one-off investment that erases the blots from our urban scenery, and some continued investment (with hopefully better urban planning in the future) , for creating such new houses as per the future needs.