Journalism of Courage
Indian cities are yet to get the attention they deserve despite their role as the growth engines of the economy, agreed speakers at the launch of Isher Judge Ahluwalia’s book “Transforming our Cities, Postcards of Change” on Monday.
Despite the rise of city-based political parties, the concerns have not become city centric, according to the Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley. He was speaking at a panel discussion that accompanied the book launch. “Town planning often gets derailed because cities are not designed properly to meet the needs of the working class that migrate from villages in search of jobs”, he noted.
In his welcome speech, Shekhar Gupta, Editor in Chief of The Indian Express, said that a big part of the Indian development story was how villages were transforming themselves into towns.
“No one except for those who have a farm house wants to return to villages,” he said. The Dalits and Muslims migrate to cities like Mumbai in large numbers because only there can they rid themselves of the identity tag that follows everyone in a village, he said.
Releasing the book, finance minister P Chidambaram said that with more than 40 per cent of Indians expected to live in cities within a decade improving the living standards in urban areas would be a key to improve the quality of life for all Indians.
Referring to the successful stories of urban transformation that pepper the book, Chidambaram however commented “those were not limited to Gujarat only”. Every state had a successful story to offer and the design for those projects often came from unsung heroes in various departments. “City improvement projects have come from people who are not in the top rungs of the bureaucracy, the IAS,” he said.
Yet, these examples demonstrate the problems the exploding cities face which cannot be solved by simply expanding the size of the service providers like police or municipal departments. Without referring to any party, he said, going forward “must limit the size of our cities. It is important to arrest the decline of our cities and using the ideas in this book, we must rebuild new cities”.
Ahluwalia’s book published by HarperCollins and the Express Book Series is based on a collection of columns written by the applied economist published in The Indian Express and The Financial Express. It was released to a packed gathering of policy makers, regulators and public figures who listened attentively to the panel discussion on ‘The State of our Cities’.
In the discussion Sanjaya Baru of the International Institute for Strategic Studies said cities needed their own political institutions and one way to achieve that was to empower mayors. Disagreeing, minister of state for power Jyotiraditya Scindia said the answer is to create economic opportunity and infrastructure in rural areas itself.
The book as Ahluwalia described it brings together living examples of local initiatives across India, which as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh notes in his foreword to the book, has deep implications for future strategies of urbanisation. Recalling the example of bipartisan support to a publicly funded underground sewerage project in a Tamil Nadu town, she said this is the model to emulate to make a difference in the lives of urban people.
