Living in the Now | 15.9.23
Un-crowd our Cities
Across the country our cities are bursting in the seams. By 2040, some 270 million more people are forecast to be living in India's megacities, where overcrowding, shoddy infrastructure and severe pollution are rife. Many cities have become urban management nightmares as the infrastructure is not keeping pace with the influx of population. Slums are increasing even as the open spaces are decreasing.
Over a third of the metros are slums or near slums with very high densities of population. Northeast Delhi has a density of over 70000 a square mile. Dharavi in Mumbai has an astounding 733,000 people living in a square mile. Besides the metros, smaller cities like Guahati, Bhubaneswar, Ranchi, Raipur are also expanding far beyond their capacity.
People from rural areas are migrating to towns and cities, mostly to the capital cities. Consider this: Mizoram has a population of about 12 lakhs; out of which 3 lakhs- quarter of the entire population live in its capital city of Aizwal. In Sikkim out of the total population of little over 6 lakhs over 1 Lakh live in its capital city of Gangtok. There are several reasons, mostly logistical, psycho-social and aspirational, for people from rural areas migrating to towns and cities. However, the overcrowding of cities is creating myriad problems.
It is time to consider un-crowding our metros and cities.
As social commentator Mohan Guruswamy writes, “Most capital cities have a concentration of government offices of various tiers and responsibilities crowded in as close as possible to the real and imagined corridors of power.” That could be shifted out of the capital city to less crowded towns. For example, apart from the ministries, departments and agencies, we also have a concentration of PSU corporate offices in New Delhi. Many of these actually need not be here. Why is the Indian Meteorological Department required to be in New Delhi? Why must the Director General of Civil Aviation be in the capital? It goes just as well for the ITBP, CISF, SSB, BSF, ICG, ICAR, ICMR, ICHR, SAIL, BHEL, COPES and so many others.
The same situation is there in almost all capital cities of the states. The more offices are concentrated in one city- it attracts more people and more pressure on infrastructure.
Consider the case of Bengaluru, which is now easily one of the most traffic-congested cities in the world. Its stop and crawl traffic is responsible most for its deteriorating air quality and the millions of man-hours wasted in traffic crawls and jams. The disastrous consequences of not doing anything about the ever-worsening traffic are now well known.
But all the solutions that are proposed is to further modernize it will create even bigger and faster mass transit systems, more civic amenities and efforts entailing more construction. These attempts to make the cities ‘better’ paradoxically only attract more people to it, thereby adding to its problems rather than removing them. Then there are some things that are only possible by flattening the old. How can we ever modernize the overcrowded inner areas of many of our cities without reducing the number of people in them? Our inability to protect our rivers and air are testimony to this.
Dispersing offices across the nation/state will not only decongest Delhi/other big capital-cities, but will also become economic drivers that will modernize smaller towns and result in far more dispersed urbanization.
In fact one can make an argument for moving the state capitals out of hopelessly over crowded cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Patna and Lucknow.
Many countries including China and Malaysia have tried to decongest their capital cities by leaving behind the economic capital and taking out the political capital. Malaysia’s political capital is located at Putrajaya, a brand new city that straddles the highway to the international airport.
The BJP in its 2014 manifesto had spoken of creating a hundred new cities to propel India’s economic and social transformation. Since coming to power it has been scaling down that vision. It is time to think big again and create new cities for and of the future.
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\https://www.odisha.plus/2023/09/un-crowd-our-cities/
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