Don’t bangalore Pune

The series carried by this newspaper, ‘Pune in Peril’ was, in an important sense, a tribute — backhanded though it may appear — to the city that sits on the eastern edge of the Western Ghats. Pune has, over the last half decade, evolved into a bustling metropolis, adding a new profile to its traditional strength. Always a centre for higher education, it is today fast developing into an internationally acknowledged software hub, with many major IT-ITes players gaining a foothold there.

Everyone acknowledges Pune’s potential as a magnet of growth — from policymakers to young professionals. But, as our series has just highlighted, the city is witnessing growth without accountability. A city that is bursting at the seams has far outstripped the modest civic developments that have come its way. It may have two municipal corporations — Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad — and the three cantonments of Pune, Khadki and Dehu Road, but none of them have a clue to how to address the serious civic crises staring them in the face. In fact, one of the conclusions of our series is that Pune needs an overarching metropolitan development authority that can exercise some ownership over it.

Pune has an advantage that Bangalore never had. It can learn from the mistakes that Karnataka’s capital made. The fact is that Bangalore thought of shoring up its infrastructure two decades too late. Pune is today exhibiting all the nascent problems that Bangalore once did on its pot-holed road to success — including, of course, the pot-holed roads. These range from a lack of intra-city connectivity with an overdependence on cars and two-wheelers to an absence of international connectivity — Pune still hasn’t got itself an airport worth the name. Haphazard urban development, fuelled by the powerful land mafia, has seen housing sites come up without proper drainage or adequate power, and which are often on illegally acquired land. These are signs of a crying lack of integrated development. A city that accounts for nine per cent of India’s growth and draws its name from ‘Punya Nagari’, or city of virtuous deeds, should surely do much better.