Good urban planning needs political and bureaucratic will

Get some method in the madness
Good urban planning needs political and bureaucratic will
SL RAO
Financial Express

The chaos in Indian cities is due to lack of planning and common sense about the future, corruption, lack of overriding accountability and good service delivery. No city is free of these ills. Some are worse than others.

Delhi has no dearth of funds and has spent lavishly. It has wide roads getting wider, a flyover boom, a spanking new metro rail built in record time, a circular railway and a deep penetration and high frequency bus service using non-polluting fuel.

Frequent traffic jams caused by absentee policemen, failed traffic lights, VIP movement and the devil-may-care attitudes of noveau riche drivers, many of them underage but with well-connected parents are part of the ‘shining’ urban India, no city more so than Delhi. Flyovers are built without well-constructed diversions. Buildings under construction spread rubble on the pavement and even on the road. Garbage clearance is spasmodic and selective, depending on the area.

In ‘VIP’ Delhi, trucks spray streets with pesticides so that the sensitive people of power can enjoy their spacious open spaces. The water supply is heavily polluted. Those who can afford it extract increasingly saline ground water from deeper and deeper wells. Sanitation is for those in pucca housing, not the rest. There are few public toilets. Public hospitals are unclean, overcrowded. The city is very unsafe, especially for women. There is a huge but little used choice of galleries, museums, craft museums, and free cultural programmes. It is uncomfortable for many but electors are grateful to chief minister Sheila Dikshit who speedily implemented many improvements that her predecessor Madanlal Khurana had initiated, but who thought that speaking about them, not completing them quickly, was enough.

Neither Bangalore nor Chennai, both enjoying the IT and BPO boom, have Delhi’s resources. But Chennai has seen a vigorous improvement programme in the last decade. Successive Karnataka chief ministers have even borrowed heavily from international institutions and the public for urban improvement but have little to show for the money. Shoddy materials sabotaged the improvement of roads and pavements as did poor supervision with work given mainly to incompetent local contractors and transferring conscientious officers because they enforced timeliness and quality. Poor urban governance is common in India. Bangalore probably has the worst despite its much-hyped public-private partnership through the BATF.

• Poor urban governance is common throughout the country
• The theft of most resources by corrupt politicians is a major problem
Chennai has a lot more success to show. It roads are wider and the flyovers have actually helped traffic flow. Garbage is cleared not merely from showplace areas but from the bylanes and backlanes too. The airport road is not only wide, but there are no grand residential and office buildings releasing traffic to clutter it.

Cultural infrastructure too is important for good urban living. Bangalore is poor in culture unlike even smaller towns in Karnataka. Chennai has a plethora of sabhas for music and dance, an active theatre movement, a thriving film industry, excellent museums and a world-class crafts museum. Bangalore is now attempting to start a theatre movement and an annual Bangalore (habba) festival. As in Pakistan, the Bangalore film industry can survive only by closing the door to non-Kannada films. Going by present trends, Bangalore will be left far behind by other cities.

Pune, another IT destination, could go the Bangalore way. But it is still in its early days and might learn from Bangalore’s experience. It does have an excellent cultural infrastructure and may not end up in the hedonism of Bangalore. Hyderabad has excellent physical infrastructure but will not survive for long at the expense of the rest of the state.

It is not the diversion of resources from rural to urban area or lack of ideas that is the problem. Rather, it is the stealing of most resources by corrupt politicians and contractors, and tall promises about new projects and completion of long-pending ones that is the problem. Poor implementation helped finish SM Krishna and Chandrababu Naidu as it could their successors. Good urban planning requires an administration (political and bureaucratic) that is committed to deliver results.

—The author is former D-G, NCAER