Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Planning the Unplanned
India's cities have a rich architectural and cultural legacy. It ranges from the Mughal tombs
and British-era imperial government buildings of New Delhi to the Rajput palaces and forts
of Rajasthan, and the Hindu temples of the eastern coastline. But the legacy is being lost in
modern India because of a lack of planning controls and corruption. This is partly a result
of the lucrative powers of patronage and a laid-back approach that assumes planning can
be fixed when the need arises.
Huge swathes of India's towns and cities have grown unlawfully without official permis-
sions, especially in the 2000s, to meet the needs of rapid economic growth. They have done
so without the necessary infrastructure of roads, water and power supplies, and sewage and
are few sustained programmes of infrastructure development and maintenance. This has
brought India to the brink of a national crisis. Between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of wa-
ter supplies are lost in transit in most Indian cities, and less than 30 per cent of officially
recorded sewage is treated in adequate facilities.
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Since the days of Mahatma Gandhi, who regarded the 'growth of cities as an evil thing',
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populist political focus has been on rural development and financial support for the rural
poor, not the needs of urban areas. Urban planning was started by Jawaharlal Nehru in the
early days of India's independence, but it provided a restrictive framework that failed to in-
spire orderly urban expansion and has been exploited for decades by well-connected deve-
lopers. Few government officials seem to care about urban decline. Those that are aware of
what is needed can do little to ensure that state governments draw up and implement plans,
though a start was made in 2007 with a government aid scheme, the Jawaharlal Nehru Na-
tional Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), which has yet to have a significant impact.
Nehru envisaged 300 planned cities by the end of the twentieth century. Instead, there
are now only a handful, led by Chandigarh, a grid-based city planned by Le Corbusier, the
French architect who also designed the city's raw concrete government buildings in the in-
ternational brutalist architecture style of the period. Only two major planned cities have
appeared in the past 50 years - a state capital for Gujarat at Gandhinagar in the 1960s, and
a state capital for Chhattisgarh at Naya Raipur, which is under construction. More are now
planned as part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project which envisages nine new
cities.
