India is on a high
growth path and rapidly urbanising. If it mismanages the latter, it
will have difficulty in ensuring the former. But there is currently
little public awareness of the scale of the challenges ahead.
Consequently grossly inadequate systems remain in place to handle the
task.
In the 25-year period (2001-26) India will be adding 220 million to its
urban population, taking it up by 77 per cent. Urban Indians earn much
more than rural folks, the urban-rural income differential being around
2.5. The country’s growth engine is clearly its urban areas. To
accommodate the additional millions India will have to add around 14
Delhis or 18 Mumbais or 30 Bangalores! How do we create this much of
liveable urban space or locate the resources and people needed to
deliver it? In many ways this will be the key challenge facing India
for the next few decades.
The first need is give the tier of urban government an altogether
different degree of importance than what it is getting now. Currently
state governments are mostly paying lip service to the devolution
envisaged in the 74th amendment to the Constitution, even though that
itself is far from enough.
To make this happen, it is necessary for the country’s top political
aspirants — like a young Deora or Pilot — to come forward and take
ownership of the large cities, transform them and build a national
career on that foundation. In the pre-independence days, when higher
levels of government were not open to Indians, the mayor of Calcutta or
Bombay were the big pedestals to aspire to. Hence people like Subhas
Chandra Bose and Khursheed Nariman became mayors. Since the eighties
New York city has been transformed by two powerful politicians — Rudi
Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. They both dream of becoming president
of the United States one day by using their stewardship of the city as
a springboard.
Ambitious politicians do not step into powerless low-profile posts but
that is what the top job in the country’s town halls often is. City
administrations are run by municipal commissioners, who are answerable
only to ministers sitting in the Mantralaya in Mumbai or Vidhana Soudha
in Bangalore. But it is the corporators through the various committees
who control municipal spending. On top of this absurdity sits in most
cases a toothless mayor who heads office for one or two years and whom
hardly anyone knows. This disconnect between political and executive
authority and spending power is what is killing our cities.
The situation is a bit better in Chennai and Kolkata, where there is a
mayor in council whose members are elected for five years and who, in
the case of Kolkata, elect a mayor (the same way MLAs elect a chief
minister). Perhaps the best system of all, among the big cities,
prevails in Chennai, where the mayor is also directly elected by the
people for five years. Unsurprisingly Chennai has arguably the best
civic administration in the country.
So the entire country has to shift to the mayor in council and directly
elected mayor system. But this will not be enough. A former municipal
commissioner who will be a top-class administrator anywhere in the
world says that currently there is no incentive for the bureaucracy to
perform, without which you cannot have a professional administration.
Bureaucrats are currently accountable to politicians at the local as
well as state level. His answer is a directly elected mayor who runs
the town hall like a CEO with the help of a board of directors. The
elected council continues to hold the purse strings but the mayor has
enough powers to run the administration well and create visible cash
flows which can be used to leverage additional finance.
Even this will not be enough. Vivek Kulkarni, who as IT secretary of
Karnataka unsuccessfully tried to craft a crescent of development on
Bangalore’s periphery called the IT corridor, realised that 40 per cent
of the area was already “hard”, built-up via plans sanctioned with the
rigour of a small town municipality. His solution: the land use plan
for a city must cover an additional 15-20 sq km of rural area beyond
current city boundaries and this plan has to be clearly declared (put
on a public website) so that people don’t build wrongly and the city,
in order to grow, does not have to confront structures already in place.
He has another idea. Instead of growing a city concentrically around
its periphery, develop new towns in largely un-built-up areas with a
fast rail or road link that can easily go up to 200 km. Several such
new towns can come up along a single link. Builders say such a town can
be entirely self-financing in terms of its infrastructure so long as it
has a critical mass, stretch over 5,000 acres or more in mixed
development and accommodate half a million people upwards. The best new
developments in the country, Greater Noida and New Town near Kolkata,
meet these criteria.
To have land use plans for areas where a city will grow in the future
or to plan new cities (India needs 200 new one million population
cities in 20 years) you need state government and politicians who are
willing and able. And once you have them you don’t need a central urban
renewal missions which can offer only piecemeal solutions.
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