Indian cities are a disgrace.The govt can't see India as only Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata and of late Bangaluru. Without infrastructure such as sanitation, drinking water, roads and transport, it is nothing but disaster to permit building especially by demolishing beautiful heritage houses and buildings to break the plots into mini-lots and build mini-flats that are nothing but brick & concrete slums of tomorrow.
We spend crores & crores on urban planning depts with armies of government analysts, engineers, architects & planners on monthly salary doing nothing. Partly because of beaurocracy and money illicitly gained in construction so great that nothing is done, except for personal profit, this & political incompetence, speculation,lack of conscience & integrity by government employees and businessmen has succeeded in spawning enormous extensions to existing cities ruining them The opportunities are many: in any foreign country there are international conferences and events rarely in the capital or large cities, they are decentralised to small towns around the country. So funds enter the coffers of locals and makes organisation less expensive,more effective. That way the facilities like sports stadiums, conference halls etc; can be built in different areas of the country and progress. In India we know only Delhi exists for Commonwealth, Asian, Olympic games, conferences etc; Utterly stupid and shortsighted management.
Ok , for arguement sake ,we have created 500 cities ,who is going to make goods and services available to them including water. Are we going to import all of them. Surely we dont want to become another united states.
These dreams are of typical real estate guy, only benefiting him
Re: Who will supply goods and services for 500 cities
by Globalcrusador on Nov 10, 2009 12:42 PM
The way to grow is to create more smaller self contained cities and de-stress the existing metros like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata etc. Once you create a city, the markets always come to you in search of new client- ele. So that is not a worry. Secondly, we have an excellent rail network and I doubt if any new city would be too far away from the exist ing rail grid. The solution will lie in creating a feeder line to ths grid. But then other things like power, roads, water, we will have to plan for, in advance. If only we had taken the initiative of creating a national water grid by now by linking up all rivers, such plans would have been easier to implement. It is certainly an idea worth pursuing.
Re: Who will supply goods and services for 500 cities
by ashok leyland on Nov 09, 2009 06:25 PM
No, it would be better to have 6 enormous concrete slums without water, sanitition and roads like our cities are now. With people of your thinking we don't need multinationals and foreign infiltration. More anti progressive and pessimistic woul dbe hard to find. Poor chap.
Re: Who will supply goods and services for 500 cities
by varnika mishra on Nov 13, 2009 06:33 PM
On which way Bharat is going it is possible. It may take some more years. In many states like these projects on land.
Prahlad's remarks need deeper study. It makes sense to spread out the population all over India so that the stress on limited resources of a city like Mumbai, Hyderabad or Bangalore is contained. However, these new cities must be created far away from the existing cities. In Mumbai, they created New Mumbai to distress the original Mumbai, but has the experiment really succeeded ? I wonder what the readers have to say about this ?
There is an alarming condition of damaging the environment by taking sand and rock for construction purpose. The development plans is to be regulated by enactment protecting the environment. But unfortunately the North Block does not give much attention for this way of approach. What they want is free flow of FDI to speed up re-colonization of India. No matter what project are taken up. Read also the messages in the discussion board under "Chidambaram argues for faster reforms, inclusive growth" rediff 6.10.09?
The govt should not get involved in building any of these cities by itself. None of our state and central governments have done a good job of CITY PLANNING or CREATING INFRASTRUCTURE in the last 60 years. Therefore, the govt should stay out of execution. It can subtly induce in shaping up the locations (SPREAD THEM EVENLY ACROSS THE COUNTRY and declare plans for ROAD, RAIL, AIRPORT, INDUSTRIAL PLOTS, WASTE MANAGEMENT, WATER MANAGEMENT, SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS etc in these areas and let the private sector DEVELOP and EXECUTE these plans. Go to some western and developed countries, and study how CITY PLANNING is done. In India, it is all haphazard development.
Why not we are concentrating on villages to...why we are spending too much time to talking about how we can develop world cities where India has more villages and known for that! Its better to provide basic amenities in rural areas and create working environment around them, so migration will stop...
Cant we offer basic amenities and proper living standards in villages? Whats great in cities are they only growth models? Cities are full of pollution and population blasts, chaos of traffic and other corrupt infectious systems. villages are far better if provided all the basic amenities.
