Smart cities will lead to smart urbanisation. This is the threshold where we begin to write a viable urban story for the benefit of our future generations, just as we can write the story of a poor life for them. Are we going to be smart and do the right things, or will we be ‘smart’ by not doing the right thingsIJ The time has come to make the choice
The history of India’s urbanisation has been a mixture of design and circumstance. In fact the truth would be that it has been greatly a matter of circumstance. Very often, what has been conceived is not what actually gets built, and design has been, at best, on the margins of urban policy making around the country.
Worse, the management of cities has been woefully inadequate in anticipating their growth potential and the citizenship increasingly anxious to excel in their chosen endeavours has been left to struggle with the fundamentals of living, forcing itself to seek shelter in hovels and unhygienic settlements just outside city limits where no municipal rule or service operates.
This is the story in every city without exception. We created only one city of any architectural significance in the post-Independence period — Chandigarh, conceived as the Capital of Punjab, which has grown to become an educational and healthcare destination and continues to be the scaled down retirees’ lost paradise as well as a confused Capital of three Governments. It has somehow retained the sanctity of its urban envelopes. Even here, there has been a failure to telescope the surrounding villages into a civilisational imprint with an urban character, although initiatives were taken to urbanise Mani Majra and surrounding areas.
Yes, there was Bhubaneswar and Gandhinagar too, rather poor clones of the urban paradigms of Chandigarh, but nothing else of iconic stature. Gandhinagar has till this day not grown into a bustling city. Bhubaneswar looks like a city badly in need of cultural focus, not to mention civic management.
Nonetheless, Indian cities have grown at a momentum which completely outpaced even planned thinking, let alone planned development, and hence they now have chaos as their chief characteristic.
The reasons for uncontrolled expansion of cities were obviously education and employment, triggered by an aspiring population seeking a better future in urban centres. This induced a huge pressure to create housing as the first necessary feature of our urban growth to the near neglect of civic infrastructure, water and waste management systems as well as energy supply and health and environment. This neglect has now become a giant sized problem in all our cities, bar none, and the country’s central problem is faecal and waste of all kinds.
The other pernicious effect of a skewed priority of emphasising housing at the expense of infrastructure has been the builder-led expansion of urban areas, often detrimental to the environment and only serving the realtors and speculators in the real estate market. It put a huge burden on the end user who got poor quality product at 500 per cent of realistic costs. This ecosystem has come to prevail with a vice-like grip on the urban dream which continues to remain unfulfilled for the ordinary citizen to partake of a safe city life and pursue his or her excellence.
Is the beginning of a change around the cornerIJ Will the Smart Cities initiative augur a concerted thinking in the quest for a well-ordered and planned expansion of the urban centres or the creation of new ones, keeping pace with the needs of a young population in pursuit of economic and social prosperityIJ Will it help build an inclusive, gender and child-sensitive and healthy environmentIJ Do we have the instruments of change and the leadership profiles which can pioneer the dreams of the citizens to realise a vibrant and democratic space for unhindered access and quality livingIJ These are tough questions and in a sense they outline the tough and arduous tasks ahead. We earnestly hope that the answers to all the above questions will turn out to be in the affirmative. At least from here on.
The bold print in the Smart City Mission is impressive. The lead in to the document says that “in the imagination of any city dweller, the picture of a Smart City contains a wish list of infrastructure and services that describes his or her level of aspiration”. It goes on to a promise, “to provide for the aspirations and needs of the citizens, urban planners need to aim at developing the entire urban eco-system, which is represented by the four pillars of comprehensive development-institutional, physical, social and economic infrastructure”. These are tall orders, going by our history of missed opportunities, but the policy makers are smart enough to bench-mark the people-centric ambitions as long term goals to be worked on incrementally, adding on layers of ‘smartness’ through planned and sustainable interventions.
To promote distinctiveness, the definition of the smart city has been left to the participating city to develop for itself. Indeed the right thing to do, as no two cities can be identical and there are local aspirations as well as cultural preferences in every area which have been given the scope to reflect these in the future growth story. For ease of reference, some of the common smart city features have been listed. These are: Citizen participation, identity and culture, economy and employment, education, health, mixed use, compactness, open spaces, housing and inclusiveness, transportation and mobility, walkability, IT connectivity, intelligent Government services, energy supply, energy source, water supply, waste water management, water quality, air quality, energy efficiency, underground electric wiring, sanitation, waste management, safety — 24 features in all, and a city can have one or some and work for all of them henceforth.
The Smart City Mission contemplates developing ‘smart’ areas of the city, and exhorting planners to ‘always put people first’. Into its second round, having listed 98 cities across States through the evaluations of the participating cities, the Government of India has now issued the guidelines for developing the Strategic City Plan (SCP) by each of these selected cities, of which 20 cities will be selected for the Smart City funding. The Government has even gone as far as to assess the credentials of the consultant advisors who can be invited by the city Governments to bid for the engagement. In a sense, the groundwork is all done and the Government of India has created the policy architecture for the States as urban development is in their domain.
How different is this mission from its predecessor in politics and policiesIJ In substance, the approach is open and the States have been given the space to determine their hierarchy of needs on urban development and growth paradigms. The JNNURM essentially compelled the States to lay out the reform process of the municipalities before releasing the funds. There are no conditionalities in the Smart City Mission, but it is almost certain that the local-self Governments would have to chart out a capability process to become competent so as to demonstrate their capacity to sustain the agenda and the goals of the Smart City Mission.
In any event, it really does not matter, whether it has been done before or not, so long as planned and systemic orientation gets into a sharp focus of all the relevant players in building and managing city growth now and hereon. The politics has yet to play itself out so we will wait for the additions of cities to the list. It is, however, useful to remember that in 2012, a Government panel said that the JNNURM I had actually failed to achieve its intended purpose because of the lack of a city planning perspective as well as because of a lack of capacity in the municipal governance systems which could not anchor the city development needs competently. This is an important lesson for the advent of the Smart Cities initiatives.
A transformative idea for urban development of any dimension has to be built on the edifice of urban governance. It is true that our municipalities are in a decrepit state for various reasons. lack of a stable revenue base, lack of human resource, lack of capacity and the political contradictions inherent in local and State politics have rendered this institution useless or dysfunctional. A municipal job carries no public esteem, no career progression and no attraction to a young graduate planner or engineer to make a fulfilling life in the municipal service. Besides, the highest executive position is out of reach as the Commissioner’s job goes to civil service cadre of the State. Most states do not have a municipal service cadre. Unless a politically compatible group is in majority in the elected council, the fund flow from the State Capital to the municipality is irregular, despite the 73rd and 74th amendments of the Constitution empowering the third tier of governance to receive funds from the Centre.
Only eight municipalities have been able to raise public funds from the market through the instrument of bonds. The other, over 4,000 municipalities, have no inherent capacity to access funds other than grants. The municipal political structure is loathe to regulate public spaces with parking fees in residential areas, and the cost of services is high compared to the recoveries made, property tax collection inefficient, hence revenue framework is in shambles.
Over and above everything, the Mayor is a rotational post, changes annually, and vested with only a ceremonial role. There we have it, a total recipe for poor governance of the city. If this structure persists, Smart Cities Mission is destined for certain failure.
Our list of urban problems is huge and challenging. The housing deficit is estimated to be 19 million units across cities. The environmental threats from faecal waste, electronic, bio-medical and C and D waste (construction and demolition) are massive. We are generating, as per a study of 366 cities, 47.3 million tonnes of municipal solid waste and only 30-40 per cent gets treated. We are going to need huge landfill sites of the size of West Bengal to dump the waste in another 10 years.
The state of the rivers, the less said the better. Cities and slum settlements and peripheral growth areas provide a sub-human quality of life and the interweave of industrial usage and residential purpose in our land use patterns has shortened lives in our cities.
The infrastructural deficit is equally daunting. Transport systems, water supply and energy are demanding immediate attention with money and management skills of competent levels. Thus warning bells toll all around us. The rubber must hit the road now or it will be never.
The good thing in the Smart Cities Mission frame is that it is the starting point of an opportunity to set course on the totality of the urban management systems. The SPV (special purpose vehicle) mode of operation and management envisaged will help isolate the deficiencies of the current institutions. If this hurdle is crossed in reality, there is hope for resurrecting the quality of city life, which is abysmal at present.
Then comes the question of money — Rs9,800 crore over four years for 100 cities is a proverbial drop in the ocean. The State finances are in a decrepit shape and its revenue base is small, not to speak of the integrity of the public expenditure. So who will put in the moneyIJ Yes, World Bank and ADB windows can be accessed, but they come with a huge responsibility to deliver projects on time, so that their revenue streams will service the loans. Municipal bonds will have to come only with State-backed guarantees as the municipalities lack the assets to support the Bond issues or their coupon rates will have to be tied to a escrow account.
lastly, land will have to be used as a resource for development and services, which means that the real estate ventures will have to be linked to municipal lands as equity and the private or public sector player brings in the money and technical resource. The revenues can then be apportioned to the operator and the municipality which can deploy for essential services.
These details will need to be worked out as city-specific options and frames. Technology will play the real differentiator. We have the skill, the resource of ICT to create management systems for city administrations. The leadership with imagination and foresight will deploy these resources to install durable systems for growth and sustainability.
What is the starting point of a city strategic planIJ I would argue that unless the State creates an ambience for investment to be safe and profitable, the participating interests will be transient. Yes, crony-led development can flourish, but we will reach a dead end of options. Are we really concerned with giving a healthy and quality life to our citizenshipIJ Then let us work with the best.
let us start with the legal and regulatory environment and simplify it to make it compliance-friendly with no exceptions. Foreign capital and expertise is badly needed as our planners simply do not have the magnificence of scale and thinking on their horizons to make transformative infrastructure. One look at the road engineering layouts will show the way roads should not be planned and the lack of money is no excuse.
Yes, our fellow countrymen are good, but importing talent is not an affront to our national pride or being anti-patriotic. Serious project implementation protocols can put up a 50-storey building in six months, while our great developers have to take six year upwards to complete one. Their trust in greed needs to change to customer satisfaction through a simple device of tying in their equity for 15 years after completion and handing over the last property.
We need a foreign investment regime in this segment, simple and easy to do. local talent must match their competence and punctuality. The city then needs to put in the public domain its growth and land use plan for the next 15 years at least. This has to be sacrosanct and cannot be changed by every political executive that comes into office. This development regime will have to be overseen by a real estate regulator.
This is the threshold where we begin to write a viable urban story for the benefit of our future generations, just as we can write the story of a poor life for them. Are we going to be smart and do the right things, or will we be ‘smart’ by not doing the right things. As a famous urbanist said, “A best run city is a city that co-creates not just with itself but with citizens and other partners.” Choices have to made now.
The writer is former Director, India Habitat Centre, and a finance and law professional