India’s growth and urban planning: On different planets

This embarrassing incident symbolizes problems with India’s haphazard urbanization and its official approach to infrastructure build-up. More critically, it highlights laxity in recognizing the effects of climate change.

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What made the incident doubly disconcerting were proclamations by Niti Aayog CEO B.V.R. Subrahmanyam that the Indian economy had become the world’s fourth-largest. The incongruity between that statement and the lived experience of Mumbai commuters and Indians coping with sub-par infrastructure elsewhere was striking.

Yet, there was a common link between that statement and the flooding episode: Subrahmanyam seemed to have jumped the gun (we’ll know if the Indian economy has overtaken Japan’s only once the current year is over), a precipitate action like the metro station being pressed into service before it was made rain-proof. The episode also underscored the death of irony: officials attributed the flood to untimely monsoon downpours despite common knowledge that a coastal city like Mumbai witnesses heavy rainfall for four months every year.

But it is not just Mumbai. The previous day saw Delhi reeling under the season’s first cloudburst, with streets and underpasses flooded. A few days earlier, unseasonal May rainfall flooded large parts of Bengaluru’s extended city, damaging property and causing large-scale economic losses. City after city in India suffers from the same problems every year, and yet the political or administrative classes seem either helpless in solving such well-known problems or incapable of preventing their recurrence.

Also Read: Urban renewal: Indian cities need a governance overhaul

It is also a fact that climate change has altered weather patterns, but authorities do not seem to have taken this into their calculations. Mumbai’s monsoons, for example, are getting increasingly erratic in terms of both timing and precipitation. Yet, infrastructure projects—whether it is roads or metro station walls—routinely fail to take this into account.

This anomaly sits uneasily with India’s growing urbanization: about 40% of the population lives in urban areas, with many experts claiming that the number may be closer to 50% or even higher. 

This data uncertainty has arisen because a large section of the urban population resides in informal shelters, invisible to the formal gaze but most vulnerable to urban failures. Every city depends on this section for the delivery of multiple services, but is typically blind to their income, education, housing or health needs. 

Worse, they are not covered by any labour laws and usually do not have any rights. In the triangulation between various interest groups in an urban settlement—the entrepreneurial class and those employed in the formal sector, the political class, bureaucrats, municipal authorities and real estate developers—this section usually gets the short end of the stick. With little or no access to water, waste collection mechanisms, modern sanitation systems or health facilities, this cohort suffers the harshest impact of climate change and extreme weather events. Yet, the country’s big-budget urban build-up seems to ignore their needs.

Also Read: Urban renewal: Indian cities need a governance overhaul

A Niti Aayog report titled Urban Planning Capacity in India ascribes the continuing urbanization crisis to a lack of urban planning. “For this reason, as the state and city governments continue to solve urban issues in a firefighting mode, urban areas struggle to achieve ‘basic services for all’… India’s urban story may be lauded globally or suffer irreversible damages in the next 10-15 years depending on corrective policy measures and actions taken at the beginning of this decade.” Written in September 2021, the lack of any remedial action since then is already manifesting itself across multiple malfunctions, collapses and avoidable disasters.

The report also points to a lack of qualified urban planners in the state planning machinery: against 12,000 town planners required at all levels then, there were less than 4,000 sanctioned posts, with half of those lying vacant. What the report fails to mention, though, is that state governments have largely outsourced urban planning to real-estate developers and infrastructure contractors. 

Projects are designed, finalized and executed based on interests divergent from user interests. This was amply evident in Mumbai over the past 36 months after the city’s municipal corporation, under guidance from the state government instead of formal urban governance structures, unleashed multiple construction projects that choked city traffic and worsened air quality.

The Smart Cities mission was conceived about 10 years ago, though there is still little clarity about what makes cities ‘smart’ and whether any city has actually become any smarter. Problems of urbanization in India have also been well documented along with solutions. The smart thing would be to implement some of those suggestions immediately, especially those that will make cities not only more empathetic, but also more resilient to economic downturns and extreme weather events.

The author is a senior journalist and author of ‘Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of India’s Financial Sector Reforms’ @rajrishisinghal