The United Nations has designated October 31 as the World Cities Day. The day is expected to greatly promote the international community’s interest in global urbanisation, push forward cooperation among countries in meeting opportunities and addressing challenges of urbanisation and contribute to sustainable urban development around the world. The day is very much important for India as well as India is the world’s second largest urban systems next to China having more than one-third of its population living in cities and towns. It is projected that with rise in the economy, cities and towns are going to be the home of bubbling population in next two decades.
Similarly, if the urbanisation process leaves business as usual then by next two decades most of the villages around these cities will be transformed into large slum pockets as offspring of neglected urban planning. Understanding these ground realities, in 2005 the Government of India launched independent India’s major urban infrastructure reforms-linked Jawaharlal National Urban Renewal Mission in selected 65 cities across the country. Well, decades after, many cities could not see the light that they were promised; rather the struggle continues to showcase one city of international standard.
There may be hundreds of excuses and reasons supporting why we don’t have a world-class city. Barring a few projects, most of the renewal mission projects didn’t show much visible results. Perhaps, one of the key aspects was too much thrust on consultant-driven actions than people-centric. In some cases, the documents were produced just to access funding from the Government by ignoring the process of public consultation. The result is: in many cities with frequent changes in position of Mayor and officials, the documents become achieves before its due date. Similarly, grounding of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act just remains in paper than in real action. On top of it, instead of bringing professional urban managers in place, bureaucracy-driven municipal bodies were roped in with half-baked consultants with or without qualification, even without urban management skills.
The result: we have a new mission called Smart City visualised by present Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who seems to be more optimistic and ambitious towards urbanisation. We now have 100 cities in the race to become ‘Smart’ to be chosen basing on competition. Perhaps, urbanisation is so powerful that hardly any bilateral discussion took place between the Prime Minister and his counterparts in the world. So far, America, Japan, China, Singapore, Australia, South Korea, the UK, Spain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc., have offered their support with shortlisted Smart Cities.
The bigger question is how to move without repeating past mistakes or how quick our city can jump in to the world’s best city group. It requires a big mindset to understand how the world’s best-governed cities grew. It does not come overnight; rather they struggled over years to reach where they are now. It took some brave steps to correct their past mistakes by reforming the way cities were driven by bureaucrats with half-baked consultants with having competition between each other to emerge as best Smart Cities that we want to have today.
If Amsterdam is a Smart City, it’s due to its citizens who resolved that the city be designed on a bicycle priority. The result: Amsterdam is safe, almost zero-accident, inclusive, child-friendly. Singapore forty years ago was a city of slums and drugs; today it is Smart in a manner that its urban infrastructure reaches first than housing society develops. This makes people closer to Neighbourhood Township with access to all that urban residents would dream and is well-connected by a most efficient affordable public transport system. Seoul forty years ago was a city of hell; it’s now Smart, not just because of technology innovation, rather die to its leadership that demolished flyovers over a polluted canal and transformed the canal into one of the world’s largest city oasis and converted major city roads into public space along with one of the finest public transport system with high-speed internet accessibility. In Stockholm, the garbage is collected directly from the household using a vacuum based network similar to water supply mechanism, which ultimately generates energy for the district heating systems.
In short, these cities demonstrated better utilisation of green infrastructure, public participation in governance and fulfilling their hunger for innovation and better use of technology.
If Bhubaneswar is to become a Smart City then the mindset must work towards transforming all water bodies including rivers as carriers of water, not sewerage. Roads must facilitate bicycling and pedestrian as first priority and cars, garbage should not be visible on the street. It should be ensured that the city is governed by professional hired from the market and not from traditional civil service.
Our rivers and canals like Gangabati river and Daya West Canal must end as carriers of sewerage and be restored into their original forms so that they become the city’s axis of development just like the Thames in london or Cheonggyecheon in Seoul did some twenty or 30 years ago. Second, our city must unlock its grid so that people could easily commute from one place to another without depending much on personalised vehicles, rather on public transport system, bicycling and walking. Third, make sure the city has programmes like thrash for cash so that wastes are not dumped in open, rather have direct links with buyers of garbage for recycling, reusing or land-filling. Fourth, put in place affordable housing for both rich and poor owning a house than encroaching public land. Fifth, invest in rural and urban infrastructure with high speed rail connectivity between major cities within 500 km of its radius so that dependence on housing and economic development would be reduced.
The World Cities Day is a clear indication that the world is moving towards more urbanised population which Indian cities can’t just ignore. In India, a Smart City would be a reality with smart leadership, smart governance, smart technologies and smart people, and the resource challenge can be met with public-private partnership. However, it’s not possible until some bold steps are taken to overcome the ‘un-smart’ bureaucracy-driven governance.
Two hundred-odd years after lord Rippens’ resolution on Municipal Governance, the Indian municipal bodies still struggle to deliver basic services of birth and death certificate, street-lighting and waste management, for which they were formed and regarded as the third tier of Government. Even today despite municipal e-governance, transparency and accountability, getting a birth and death certificate is not possible without paying speed money. Same time, dreaming of a Smart City similar to Seoul, Singapore or Amsterdam certainly is not vague but would be realised only with professional touch, good governance; accountability.
(Dr Rout is an urban planner and founder of the local Governance Network)
