Smart City: Planning Beyond Mere Slogans





Intelligent planning will be the smartest bit

We welcome the launch of the government's urban initiative. Whether this is a rebranded version of the previous government's urban renewal scheme named after Jawaharlal Nehru or not is a contest for political credit that is less important than the state support for India's urbanisation the schemes promise. As industry and services grow faster than agriculture, people move off the farm and into urban environments where industry and services grow. The process has been witnessed across the world and will be acted out in India as well. The point is to plan well ahead to manage and organise the process in a way that suits our requirements.The biggest challenge is releasing land for new urbanisation. If 25 crore people move from country to town over the next couple of decades, at Delhi's current average population density of over 12,000 people per sq km, India will need additional 20,000-odd sq km of land to be released for urbanisation. This calls for policy that will make stakeholders rather than victims out of those whose land is take up for building new towns or extending existing towns. The kind of town planning that is envisaged for new urbanisation will decide how energy-efficient, how inclusive, how secure, how healthy and how efficient future India would be. Mixed land use, high density , heavy reliance on efficient public transport, efficient connectivity with other towns are de rigueur. Civil servant-led authorities, rather than representative governments, run many new towns. This must change.
For a city to be viable, either in terms of offering the multiple, interdependent talents, skills and institutions that interact to produce new ideas and translate them into new businesses, jobs and incomes or in terms of generating revenue to finance governance and investment maintenance of infrastructure, it needs a minimum size.So does efficient disposalconversion into energy and biofertiliser of solid waste. Smartness lies in taking all these into account, not an overlay of free Wi-Fi and a smattering of e-governance.