Planning must precede demand to help India’s floating and suffocating cities

Bangalore was first a garden city built by Hyder Ali, and then a colonial cantonment city in the early 1800s. It later became a fair-weather city to help recover tuberculosis patients, and then a paradise for to pensioners for affordable retirements. A number of Nehru-era public sector enterprises built in the two decades after Independence provided a talented scientific workforce. Computers, software and bandwidth did the rest.

But it should be clear by now that cities are like computers or smartphones. Roads and municipal facilities can only go so far as job seekers and livelihoods crowd a limited amount of infrastructure, such as computing, in which you need new devices, already that software updates only bog down the machines they are assigned to.

Most of the metro areas in India have this time of hardware upgrade. Not everyone has a fundamental truth of urbanization: in the short term, cities need better infrastructure, but in the long run, it is the infrastructure itself that builds better cities.

Take Delhi for example. When New Delhi emerged as the national capital of a newly independent nation, there was a lot of thought behind urbanization. The satellite cities of Faridabad and NOIDA were part of the planned urbanisation, as were office complexes such as Nehru Place meant to decongest a city centered on Connaught Place. Other cities like Chandigarh, built from scratch with avenues and infrastructure planned to match, bear witness to that era.

At the time, planning was strong, but resources were scarce. Ironically, we now have more resources, but the planning is inadequate, except in a firefighting mode or master plans that only seek to expand what is already there. More flyovers and subway trains in choked cities are like bypass surgeries performed on heart patients who may be better advised to lead a healthier lifestyle.