DHANWATI YADAV
For planned urbanisation on an unprecedented scale and rapid economic development, the Centre has unveiled an urban development strategy for the next 20 years. Housing and Urban poverty alleviation Minister M Venkaiah Naidu released the India Habitat III – National Report ahead of the UN Habitat III Conference in Quito, Ecuador. Describing the strategy for transforming urban India, Naidu said it would be achieved through elimination of barriers to the flow of factors of production like capital, land and labour, development of rural and urban areas in a synergetic manner adopting a ‘regional planning approach’, promoting inclusivity by ensuring urban services to all, sustainable urban planning, empowering municipalities to improve governance and deal with exclusion issues, housing for all urban poor and ensuring social justice and gender equity.
Contrary to the emphasis on a unidimensional growth that has been the priority of former regimes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government has comprehensively addressed the grassroots level development issues, besides the country’s overall growth. So far, numerous discourses have been conducted, covering burning issues of climate change, mitigating polluted air, green environment etc. All of them have been factored in this policy.
We needed such holistic policy for long for a developed India. The way our economy is growing and incomes rising, if the existing lack of infrastructure with inefficient urbanisation policy continues, then for sure, we are going to fall short of the required infrastructure to facilitate a sound standard of living for our citizens. In order to accomplish these long-pending requirements, introducing new policies is undoubtedly a welcome step towards a progressive India.
Apart from this, if we look at the Make in India initiative by Prime Minister Modi, we find that we can’t accomplish that until and unless we have sound infrastructure in the urban areas, because urban India is a priority.
Initially when the Modi regime began talking about transforming a few cities into smart cities, it would have risen multiple queries, such as: Why a few cities only? Will it not create regional imbalance? But we must acknowledge the fact that at present we do face some constraints and are not in a position to make every city, a smart city.
There are enormous challenges we need to work upon. One is global warming, the other is our poor performance on the industrial front. The lack of sufficient infrastructure development is a big challenge in itself. In fact, what we need to focus for our future smart cities is smart utilisation of the limited resources for a sustainable kind of output. Therefore, we need to adopt a way of green living. What has so far happened in India is the construction of most of the cities in a highly unplanned manner, devoid of optimum utilisation of the available space. So, the new initiative is oriented more towards reforming that existing set up.
(The writer is a PhD scholar at the School of International Studies, JNU)