Sunday, May 17, 2015

New Smart Cities in India may lead to accelerated growth in its Urbanization



India’s new BJP-led government has correctly shown its desire to create 100 new smart cities in the country as satellite townships around its larger cities.  The first Indian smart city may be Chandigarh and satellite towns around Chandigarh. Gandhi Nagar is another example of a smart city and towns like Noida and New Raipur are attracting foreign investments too. Several countries like Japan, Germany, Sweden, Singapore, Israel, UK, US, Hong Kong and the Netherlands besides MNCs have shown interest in building smart cities in India.

Probably the thought is that smart cities would be built in a way so that they have uninterrupted power, water, proper sanitation, efficient management of solid waste, decongestion of roads, last mile connectivity and effective use of ICT.

In view of this, India is expected to see massive urbanization along the same lines of what we have seen in other countries like China, where urbanization has already crossed 50%. Generally more people live in cities globally than in rural areas. India is nearly one-third urbanized in comparison, but this trend will accelerate as the economy grows, becomes more sophisticated in view of the above interest too and for this it may need more skilled labor. Concomitantly, there is a greater need to improve agricultural productivity by lessening manpower on farms and transferring the remaining to areas of higher productivity in industry, resulting in an overall growth in productivity in the economy.


This massive migration to urban areas will be the defining feature of the Indian economy in the coming decade(s) – very much in line with the urbanization happening all over the globe. Smart cities need multidimensional, integrative thinking, and will not happen organically. They can only result from a central planning authority. Without any state level intervention, existing cities will become unlivable and chaotic, given the scale of the migration expected. Consequently, new cities have to be set up – many around existing urban areas as satellite towns. This has additional advantages of clustering and benefits of scale in creation of all kinds of urban infrastructure needed for a smart city. Creation of such new satellite cities needs to be closely tied to the concepts of sustainability. This requires these new cities to be “smart,” i.e. creating new types of transport systems to avoid congestion, construction using low energy housing materials, newer water harvesting techniques, having new viable sources of power in order to have 24X7 power supply and extensive use of IT systems on cloud in running various urban functions and the provision of e-government services to its citizens. Moreover, such cities should be self-sufficient in being able to create gainful employment for residents.

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