Thinking tall

The plans for the Yamuna Expressway show it stretching along the wriggle that is the Yamuna from Noida to Agra. Delhi,like other cities,will slowly stretch itself along highways and railway lines; the Delhi-Jaipur highway,for example,is dotted with factories and new middle-class housing. But the plans for building along the Expressway,according to a report in Fridays Financial Express,are even more ambitious and are being pushed by the Uttar Pradesh government. Looking forward,a state government official said that the floor-area ratio,or FAR,would be weakened,allowing planners to think about a vertical,rather than a horizontal,orientation to the new townships.Land is not abundant in India at least,it isnt easy to find land to build. Planning for townships along the Yamuna Expressway was derailed by this already,but the UP government overcame it by imaginative political engagement. That will have helped make it clear that thinking vertical is,therefore,necessary. But authorities,including in Delhi,have been notoriously reluctant to alter FAR regulations to allow that sort of thinking to take root. But this is also an example of thinking thats all too rare: imagining a community. The scale of urbanisation that India needs does not seem to have been grasped by enough of those who need to literally make place for it. Delhi,suffering a multiplicity of authorities,has been better than most cities; Bangalore and Pune,for example,have squandered chances in the past decade to build infrastructure and manage their expansion.

The original projection for the Yamuna Expressway called for its first stage to be between Noida and a new airport but thats been snarled in bureaucratic red tape,because it needs a decision from Delhi. There is a lesson here,not just in thinking big and tall but also in clearing the decks for city planning,making it easier to transform plans into reality: it isnt just big-G government hampering the private sector,sometimes its one state agency slowing down another. Infrastructure,as the Delhi Metro proved,gets built best when dealt with by a single,trusted authority.